131 replies to this topic

[dc-65x]

It's Duffy's fault. He started all this swirling around in my head with his post:

Lost Causes

THANKS DUFFY!

So, I've decided to build up a car inspired by Jerry Grant's 1966 Lotus 19 Chevy. It's a little car with huge fender flares to accommodate equally huge wheels and tires powered by a small block Chevy V8 engine. Here are all the pictures I've found of the car so far:















Key to the project is a body that until now has been very hard to come by. That body is the Select Lotus 19 Special. Here is an original body:



Thanks to Mike Swiss of Chicagoland Raceway we now have beautiful reproductions to build with. Here's the reproduction all trimmed while I was deciding what components to use for the build:



Next up…….what to do with this cool body?

[dc-65x]

Since the real car was mid 1966 I thought I’d build a mid 1966 (or so) slot car with a bit of a Rod & Custom race flare. I was waffling but finally decided to go with a sidewinder Pittman 6001BB motor. I’ve wanted to build up one for my “Shop Car Box” for a long time. This body has a 3” rear track width that I hoped would help me fit 1966 R&C race rule width ½” rear tires. That proved to be harder than I thought with a big sidewinder motor in the way……….

I thought I’d try posting the reference articles I used for this build to show why I did what I did. It’s time consuming to scan and post these old articles but if you guys enjoy them I will start posting more of them.

Here is my R&C race report inspiration. (All the R&C race articles are HERE)

The Lotus 30 Tyco-Pittman sidewinder of Nate Wallack from the first race:



and the Lola GT Tyco-Pittman sidewinder of B. G. Denithorne's from the second race report:



OK, so some Tyco-Pittman sidewinders raced in the R&C series. Nobody raced any Pittman 6001 sidewinders did they . Well, these guys did and for a fun vintage build it doesn't matter to me if they were killer quick race winners or not. It just matters that these sorts of cars were being built back in the day:





Pittman 6001 sidewinder baby





I needed some sidewinder motor brackets. I didn't have any so this magazine article got me to thinking, just make your own. Here is a very talented builder from the period, Robert Trishin, scratch building a sidewinder 26D that I took inspiration from:



Check out the cool design he came up with and drawing he made and followed through his build:











Beautiful car Robert

I'm off to Eddie's Slot Car World tomorrow to finally test EIGHT cars! I don't get out much .

Onward.....

[Joe Mig]

Nice ; are you going to flair the wheel wells ?
Were did you get the repro body ?

[Tex]

Nice ; are you going to flair the wheel wells ?

MMMmmmmm.................. I love the smell of melting PETG in the morning.

[dc-65x]

Nice ; are you going to flair the wheel wells ?
Were did you get the repro body ?

Hi Joe,

The wheel wells are already flared on this body. I have the link to Mike Swiss's bodies posted above.

[Hworth08]

Hi Rick,

Another nice one on the way! I really love and appreciate the time, thought, and research you put into your cars and then do such a great job of sharing them with us!

The Cox Dino...probably didn't survive the first practice! A 26D and single 1/16th tubing, not good.

[don.siegel]

Go for it Rick, another great project.

A couple questions, since this is an interesting looking car and I happen to have a couple extra 1/32 Strombecker Lotus 19 bodies...

- Do the experts think the Strommie could be adapted to this configuration?

- The Select body seems to have a front diaplane/canards, but the pictures don't show any: was this on another version of the car, so just a fanciful addition?

thanks,
Don

[dc-65x]

Thanks guys . I'll be at Eddie's Slotcar World all day but when I get back I'll share my motor bracket saga. Nothing ever seems to go as planned, but there is usually SOME way of making things work.

Don, I'm no expert but Hansen's car started life as a Lotus 19 so with enough putty and sheet plastic a Strombecker conversion would seem possible.

I've found no pictures of Hansen's car with a full front diaplane. It does seem to have a small one on each side though. If I cut the diaplane off the Select body the bottom half of the nose will be gone. So, that's not going to happen. Also, I don't do hand lettering so I won't be able to faithfully copy the lettering on the side of Hansen's car. I probably won't find wheel inserts to match the unique front and rear wheels on the real car either. I'm not capable of building a true scale model of his car....what to do .

Rather than just give up and not build a car I said this in my opening statement:

......I've decided to build up a car inspired by Jerry Grant's 1966 Lotus 19 Chevy

"Inspired" is the key word and my "out" if you will . I very much admire and respect the scale modelers and marvel at their masterpieces but it ain't me . Freed from the shackles of scale modeldom I can proceed with ignorant bliss and hopefully create a neat looking and driving slotcar and have some fun doing it .

Onward to Eddie's!

[MSwiss]

MMMmmmmm.................. I love the smell of melting PETG in the morning.

The ones I sell are Lexan and as Rick has mentioned a bunch of times,
they already accept a 3" wide rear track.

This is from Rick's original assessment of the body:

This is not a D3 handling body. I consider it a more or less a "scale" body in that it seems to be proportioned after the real car. If its size is to scale I'm not bothering to find out. It is what it is.....which is:

Wheelbase 3 3/4

Width at the rear fender flare 3 1/16

Width at the front fender flare 2 15/16

Width at the bottom of the curved in body sides is about 2 1/2. If you straighten out the curved body sides you might get 2 5/8.....but you shouldn't IMHO.

Distance from the front axle to the end of the nose spoiler is about 1 1/8

Also, Jim Hansen is working on a project with this body that he's real excited about.

[Larry LS]

I Also got Lotus 19 body courtesy of Jim Hanson for a little project I am doing for him on some 706 motor changes.

I like this body and will have fun building a chassis for it.

I must also thank Mike Swiss for the quick shipment of it to me. A very nice body Mike.

[Prof. Fate]

Hi

Don, in the day, I did this car AND the pacesetter 19 using the strombecker body. I didn't see the select body in the day or I would have had it. Anyway, I think there is footage on YouTube of the Glory Days episode of the Gerry Grant car racing the chappys at Laguna Seca in '65. Initally it was white.

Those bodies didnt survive, however. With Al Penrose's help, I have aquired several stromie bodies for doing new ones, just haven't gotten around to it.

To ME, this car is easy. When Mike Heinrich and I were talking "Lost Causes", I had started with cars I have that had some problem that would NOT make them competitive. Lotus 11? A normal 19 would be under 2.5 inchs and in the day was not competiive, as was the Cooper Monaco when I could get 3 inches out of Lotus 40 and Lola T70.

Jerry Grant's mods were addressing this...and I bought the selct and Dilworth bodies and intend on doing period repros...but 3" makes it EASY!

Fate

[dc-65x]

Hey Larry and Rocky,

Glad you're building up cars with this body too. I fell in love with the Select Lotus 19 Special when I first saw the line drawing of it in the 1967 Auto World Catalog. I think it will be a great project. Please post pictures here or in your own threads of your builds. We'd love to see them .

Thanks again Mike Swiss!

I just got back from a day at Eddie's Slot Car World. Good fun, good people. I ran 10 different project cars that I've built here on Slotblog. I made notes of how each car ran and iif I could improve them. Most do need some tweeking but they are suprisingly small things. I'd rather be lucky than good .

I'll pull up each thread and report on how the cars worked........

Ron Hershman,

Those S24 arms KICK A$$

[mdiv]

I'm building up a car with this body, too

It will go on an F1 jaildoor chassis with pin tubes to hold the body on. I hope it works!

Mikey

[Darkron9]

Many months ago, I posted a couple of pics of a Butyrate body Bob Steffin had given me.

Well, here is the car I built for it a couple of months ago. It runs very smooth and is a fun car to drive around the tracks at Buena Park.

I tried installing a Slick 7 mini-brute motor into it the other day. Surprisingly, I discovered that the motor I got had zero timing like a TSRF homeset motor. It also seemed to have similar performance. I don't know if this is the norm for these motors or not.

[dc-65x]

Cool car Ron. Thanks for sharing it .

We'd love to see your project too Mikey .

Next up, the motor brackets....oh what a tangled web we can weave . Follow my trail of cut and burnt fingers as I force the issue to make these darn things work! I hate to scrap something I made from scratch. It's like being defeated so I had to try and fix things .

First I made these up from K&S brass sheet. They fit Howard's Hobby House bearing cups. The cup on the left has been modified for motor clearance:



I wanted the motor and brackets centered in the chassis so I could attach the main rails to them. Even a 3" rear track width wasn't enough for Russkit wide rear wheels and the Weldun spur gear . An offset bend like a drop arm has for the guide would have been nice in the gear side bracket........but that's not the path I went down.

So, I bent an angle in the gear side bracket until I could center up the motor in my Rick's jig like so:



Well, that's wonderful but now the set screw hub on the gear hits the bracket . Now I have to turn down the hub for clearance:



The bearing cup is so far inboard only half of it is attached to the bracket . I had to make up a pin tube piece to reinforce it:



Here the piece is installed. See how the axle bearing and gear hub will fit inside the bracket for extra room for my 1/2" wide tires:



The finished brass sheet motor box:







Speaking of 1/2" wide by 1 1/8" diameter tires I'm using Alpha Huge Supernatural Donuts. Here's a link:

Huge Supernatural Donuts

I got 2 tires out of one donut by wrapping it in masking tape and marking the center..........



..........sliding the donut on an old wheel........



........spinning it to mark all the way around............



.........and cutting it in half on my Micro Mark band saw:



Onward

[Hworth08]

Rick,

All that bending, cutting, and fitting is nice but wouldn't it have been easier to just ANGLE the motor a few degrees?

Just joking!

[dc-65x]

It sure would have Don . It will be worth it to have a big full sidewinder fishtailing around the track .

Anyone heard how Dokk is doing?

[Prof. Fate]

Hi

Sidewinders! I have been looking through the boxes at old wrecks and deciding what to restore!

although last night I was rebuilding an old frankenmotor based on an SP510x can. I realized why it survived! I had screwed up a little and I don't think I ever ran it; giving up in disgust!

Every few years, I buy a sheet of MX donuts for my oldies and, like you, I cut them in half. I did this because the FEEL of the MX blanks is very like the associated blacks I used in the day. I had kept for a long while a bunch of blanks from the day in sealed containers and could match. The MX aren't the best rubber, but on my restorations are so like the stuff I used that the cars don't start acting weird, rolling and the like.

Fate

[dc-65x]

Hi Rocky,

I'd like to use a firmer, less sticky on the older style cars. Will the Parma MX donuts fit a Russkit wheel or do you have to open up the hole? How big a diameter can you get out of them?

Thanks

[Hworth08]

I think the Alpha SBR is the same as the Parma MX.

SBR tires are good. A step more "grippy" than medium wonder tires. The SBR tires seem to be the best for cars that aren't used very often as they seem to have a long shelf life.

[dc-65x]

Hi Don,

I used the Alpha Blue SBR's on my Swift-Mura thingie. They worked really well last weekend at Eddie's. The bad thing is they are so small in both ID and OD.

On with the project:

I wanted to set the wheelbase up dead nuts. I'm going to use big scale diameter tires that just fit inside the wheel wells. If the wheelbase is off I'd have to trim to fit and start cutting away the fender flares .

I have another use for my most excellent Rick's Jig. I set up the front and rear axles to the Korrect tread width and centered them in the jig with pins. In the rear I used a 1/16" pin on the inside of the 3 1/8" axle pins to center the 3" track width:



Can you tell that I left the "skin" on the outside of the donuts? I've never done this before and I'm sure there is some reason why this is a horrible thing to do . Maybe the tires will wear funny? I was hoping it would firm the tires up a bit???

Anywho, for the front I found a handy 1/16" pin hole (a jig can't have to many pin holes ) to center the front tires. Then I just kept adding bigger and bigger tubes over the nearest axle hole to set the odd ball wheelbase.





Once the body would drop on over the tires the wheelbase is Korrect:



With the jig holding everything square I did some light trimming to even the fender to tire gaps at all four corners:



NEATO

[Jairus]

Yup, that's how I set up odd wheel bases too! Looking good master.

[Prof. Fate]

Hi

I started buying the MXs by the sheet about 20 years ago. Back then they had 1/2 wide "drag smoothies" up to 1 1/8th and I got tired(?). that is, some of my oldies only get run every so often and the rubber dies. For some I can just silicone coat the tires. But I bought the donuts to save money(and oddly I enjoy the building). On the vintage rims that are bigger than the hole, If you wet everything, you can stretch the rubber over the rim and can end up with 1 1/8th. If it doesn't want to streatch, I couple light cuts will make it work. But they are, stock, 1 1/16th in diameter in the sheets.

Fate

[dc-65x]

Thanks

Here is a Mike Morrissey article I'll be using for my chassis design ideas:

[endbelldrive]

OK, OK....I'll stop lurking for a second, Rick! All of these builds get my creative juices flowing again but there's one thing I just gots ta know...how do you keep your jig so clean?