115 replies to this topic

[Jairus]

By golly George, I think you are right! I had the impression that it was a cross section of a winged Choti but it didn't match any shown here... but now that you mention it. And... since there is no parameter frame shown, that it must be the "Swift".
Good call.

[dc-65x]

This is another body of Dave Lenz:





Oakland Speedway running gear:



Mystery motor with early use of black wrinkle paint, a personal favorite motor color of mine:






The last Dave Lenz car is this Lancer Bat Ray that I need to restore:







An early Lenz motor:



A few more motors and chassis to come........

[TSR]

Mystery motor with early use of black wrinkle paint, a personal favorite motor color of mine...

Rick, the motor is an SVP, built in Norcal by an admirer of Ron Mura. Several FT16 and 26 came up on E-Pay from the actual original builder about a year ago.

[dc-65x]

Thanks Philippe. I bought a couple of the SVP armatures but didn't get a complete motor. Now I know what to make a motor look like when I use an SVP arm.

[TSR]

Let me know if you need clear pics of the ones with the stickers. I can also make you a scan of the motor sticker if you need one.
Kind regards,

[68Caddy]

Great cars but I want to know where the Thingies originate and I heard some of them had wings and maybe Dave Lenz can tell us the story about the Bay Area
Thingies because their seems to be a great deal of Grey area about this subject.

Nesta

[68Caddy]

I guess there is no straight answer to this one? I guess most of you just like to make Thingies but never really raced them back then?

Nesta

[dc-65x]

Hi Nesta,

I was an So Cal boy back in the day and the magazine race series were the ultimate for us. I didn't come to appreciate all forms of vintage slot cars until I became much older and hopefully wiser .

I can tell you that Dave Lenz told me his older brother Bob was a Senior Mechanical Technologist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory back in the 60's. A really good "Mech Tech" at the Lab is usual quite proficient in the fields of design, fabrication (welding, machining, and sheet metal), vacuum, pneumatics, hydraulics, and well you get the idea. Bob was quite handy just like his brother Dave still is today .

Anyway, Bob saw slot cars running at the local track and decided he could make the first 36D's run faster........more power. Yep, he rewired it or rewound it as we call it. When he started kicking butt with his motors others wanted them too and his business was born.

Here are a couple of 36D's from Dave's slot box. First a rewound Revell SP600 with some really cool markings on the laminations:





I'm looking for a new SP600 to swap the arm with so this old beauty will look new again. The paint is quite chipped . This later 36D is a new old stock (NOS) beauty:





Also in Dave's box was this neato (NOS) 16D:





The last things in the Museum's Thingie Box are a neat NOS Mura Hemi motor:



An MRC controller modified to hot motor use:



And a couple more thingie chassis:





And check this one's motor out. It's a 16D with a 26D armature :



Okie Dokie, time to start build a Dave Lenz inspired Thingie

Onward

[Jairus]

Wow, all that hot iron and no melted endbells?

So get to building, I need inspiration!

[Edo]

Hi Captain
one after the other, stupendous posts, breathtaking stuff! Thanks again for sharing!
I was also extremely pleased to read that a super light inline car with (just) a reworked Mabuchi motor is (almost) as fast as an heavy panned anglewinder (ooops, did I say that? Quick pass me some sulphuric acid, gotta wash my mouth) with a C-can motor!
If you have time could you give us your personal impressions about the differences in driving the two cars you felt while testing them, please?

This is another body of Dave Lenz:

...

Would it be possible to know more about that particular body? Did Dave Lenz designed-made it? Was it ever commercialized?
We need to know.
Thanks
Regards
Edo

BTW those SVP motors&arms are really great, I have them on a couple of Ts and they are smoking!

[don.siegel]

Maybe you can help me out, I have a black c can motor with a sticker on the side that reads " Chong" any idea what it is ...

That would be Bruce Chong from the Pacific Northwest, in Portland, Oregon I believe. He was a hot local racer who's referred to a few times in the period Car Model Racing Coast to Coast columns.

We talked about this a few years ago when I showed some pictures of a few of the Chong label motors I had found. It seems that he was a bit of a local motor wiz and must have issued his own line of rewound motors - I originally had four of them, all 16D and all slightly different: silver or normal wire, balanced or unbalanced, etc. Excellent performers! I put one of these in the Gene Adams chassis that won the Thingie Proxy last year...

Are you sure yours is a c-can, and not an earlier 16D?

By the way Rick, this is a fabulous thread - thank you! It's great to see all these period pictures, and the contemporary motor state of the art...

Don

[Jairus]

BTW those SVP motors&arms are really great, I have them on a couple of Ts and they are smoking!

... not always a good thing sire.

[One27ray]

Really cool pic's.

To bad one can't down load pic's

But if he can see them, he can make them

gee whizz Mr. Bill, the snowball is coming down the mountain right towards you..

Really like the red one Will be doing a whole series of spin-off soon

i-noda

[dc-65x]

Thanks everyone . We of the SHPBAPSCR Museum are delighted that all the restoration and posting efforts are being enjoyed. We can do more of this sort of post of the Museum's treasures in the future.

Would it be possible to know more about that particular body? Did Dave Lenz designed-made it? Was it ever commercialized?

Edo, I'll ask our Master Historian Eric if he can identify the body in question.

Really cool pic's.

To bad one can't down load pic's

But if he can see them, he can make them

gee whizz Mr. Bill, the snowball is coming down the mountain right towards you..

Really like the red one Will be doing a whole series of spin-off soon

i-noda

Which "red one"? I hope it's the winged "Wild one" . I could take more pictures if that would help? I could email .jpg picture files or I could snail mail 8 1/2 X 11 pictures. PM me if I can help.

Captain Rick........out for now

[rdmac]

...To bad one can't down load pic's

Ray
Do you want to save a copy of the pictures to your computer?
Use the right button of your computers mouse to click on the picture.
A small window will open, left click "Save picture As..."
A window will open to let you select the folder to save the picture in.
Select the folder you want, at the top of the window.
You can also re-name the file, bottom of window.
Click "Save", and it's done.

[Phil Irvin]

LEARNED SOMETHING NEW.....

OL'PHAT
PHIL I.

[Jairus]

Interesting note: See the bump on the side of the body?


And then compare it to this body I painted a few days ago....


Painted three like Choti #5 "Ultra" bodies this past week. Two were from my Friend Nostalgic (super smooth and no bumps). The third was from Platto's and that's the one I am referring to. Note the bump in the body behind the front wheel? Interesting that it appears in both the original version and the Platto's huh? If I had noticed this little detail earlier I would have kept the body for myself...

The wing "shoulders" seem more rounded on the Platto's body compared to the original Choti.... The details make me wonder if Platto's is using an original mold rather than a backpour afterall!

[dc-65x]

Hi Jairus,

Your Choti looks spectacular . Mine won't compare but it will have a little something interesting from the memories of the Museum’s staff that lived the Bay Area Thingie Revolution.

Anyway, the yellow Choti is a Patto's body. This is an original Choti body:





The original body is bulging out in that area but that is also where the front axle is contacting the body. So I don't know if the "bump" is real or Memorex?

Build on my friend and I will get started on mine ..............NOW

[dc-65x]

I gathered up parts to start building my Dave Lenz inspired Thingie:



First order of business is to make a shortened UGO/Tradeship rear axle bracket. Dave cut his into 3 pieces and soldered it back together:



Dave's bracket just has a butt joint which isn't very strong. I decided to go with a lap joint so I had to cut up 2 brackets. One bracket was cut for the motor mount leaving an 1/8" or so of axle bracket. On the other one I cut out the motor bracket and left all the axle bracket. In this picture we have a virgin bracket, the parts to make up my new bracket on the bottom and the left overs on the top:



I used some 1/4" and 9/32" brass tube and a 1/16" aluminum rod in my small vise to line things up:



With the bracket soldered together it went into my new style Rick's jig. Here are the 2 L-shaped main rails lined up against the precision pins in the jig with some 1/4" brass strip spacers and a machinist adjustable parallel:





With the 2 rails soldered to the bracket I added a 3/8" wide brass strip cross piece. Oh joy everything was going great. Then I added the UGO guide tongue upside down in the jig. The full length T-slot in the jig is really handy for this . I wanted to bend the main rails to a matching angle with the tongue........WRONG Bozo . I couldn't match the angle by bending the wire right up against the cross piece with the angle of the tongue . So the rails were ruined :



Back to square one I made new main rails, soldered them to the axle bracket......again.........and this time I just pulled them under the guide and held it down in the jig. The result is a gentle bend all the way from the axle bracket up to the guide tongue. I think it looks pretty cool:



Here it is out of the jig and spruced up a bit:





A comparison between the stock bracket and the shortened one:







Next up is the front axle.

Onward

[Jairus]

Very good!

[nostalgic]

That Jig sure looks good, and your work Rick, man you seem to have taken this to a different level altogether..
What I would like to know is what the second hole on the Ugo motor bracket is for, or is it just there to make it lighter I wonder,
Oh, and I wish someone would do a re run of those front wheels...

[Mike K]

What I would like to know is what the second hole on the Ugo motor bracket is for, or is it just there to make it lighter I wonder,

Are the UGO guide tongues and motor brackets still available???

[dc-65x]

Thanks guys .

George, these are really cool wheels for a San Francisco Bay Area Thingie:



We could get them reproduced next summer and cheaply too. The problem is the minimum order of 200 pieces . I have just one pair I took of a junk chassis. They are magnesium and needed cleaning. So like I have done with Cox wheels into the lemon juice they went. I walked away for a few minutes and when I came back they looked like the wheel on the left..... :



I had to recut every surface with my Sherline lathe to bring them back like the wheel on the right. I was lucky to bring them back.



Mike, the UGO brackets and tongue are out of production and not being reproduced to my knowledge. Keep your eyes peeled for junk cars and chassis on Ebay using them and they can be recycled.

There are at least 2 different versions of the UGO guide tongue. The one on the left will work with Cox and similar guides. The one on the right works with the Dynamic Low Profile Guide:



With the Cox unit you end up with at least 1/16" track clearance plus braid thickness:



With the Dynamic unit you can slam the front end:



I used the Dynamic piece

Onward

[nostalgic]

Well that is amazing, I would never have picked those wheels as magnesium, sure glad I didnt put mine in lemon juice...

Your lemon tree must be on Steroids Rick! I never saw anything like that befor, great recovery!

Id of died..

[One27ray]

dc-65x

Great build on the U-go frame/Choti body's to bad the little kit is not available anymore, except on e-bay.
Maybe one of the big manufacturers will someday...interest seems to be there ?

i-noda