664 replies to this topic

[Isaac S.]

Interesting. You did a great job with the bracing it looks very strong. 

[Bill from NH]

Nice  looking car & chassis Rodney!  AB Slotsports in Great Britain sells a similar looking wide motor bracket. I don't know what motor(s) it fits, but it might be stamped for the FKs. Whoever made the bracket in your car did a nice job constructing it. I like those Versitec SS101s, but I never had one. One of my friends has two. They both ran well on the 180' Engleman that used to be local. One of his chassis was a brass rod inline, maybe by Associated?

[don.siegel]

That is nice Rod - good job. One of my favorite motors too - I had one in 1968, but never entered it in a race. Very smooth and deceptively fast. With the small tires, having to use a 10t pinion on the 1/8" shaft never seemed much of a handicap to me, altho that was one of the big criticisms of this motor and the older SS91. 

 

Versitec made their own bracket, which was very wide, but not quite as much as this one. 

 

And I do have a 4-rail jaildoor frame for the SS101, stapled to an REH card... 

 

Seems the SS101 motor was a favorite in Texas, and a couple guys did very well using this motor - never saw other ones in my neck of the woods. 

 

Don 

[Slot Car Rod]

Thanks everyone.  The SS101 motors are pretty fast.  They were hard to maintain, though, with tricky endbell hardware and small motor brushes. 

 

Here are a couple of 4 1/2" wheelbase Formula 1 cars.

 

The Eagle has a brass tube frame (U-Go motor bracket) made for club track racing.  The Ferrari has a brass rod chassis (Russkit motor bracket) made for commercial tracks.  I should have used bushings instead of just tubing for the rear axle on the Ferrari chassis.

 

The Eagle has a Mura A can motor with a mild armature, and the Ferrari has a Champion 517 motor with a hotter wind.

 

 

[Bill from NH]

Rodney, your Eagle chassis also appears to reuse  a Lancer drop arm.  Was your Ferrari chassis built at a time when rear axle tubing was used, before all the pro cars  had changed over to bushings & bearings? I mean authentic when it was built. Two more fine cars, the way I see them. 

[Slot Car Rod]

Thanks, Bill.  The Ferrari was built a little after bearings were being used.

 

Here is a Ben Jones Matra he raced back in the day.

On a Blue King years ago.

 

Matra  raced in 1969 at famous Playland at the Beach San Francisco.

[Bill from NH]

The Ben Jones Matra is a beautiful car. The chassis is an International,  maybe with a few mods, but I can't tell. That family of International chassis, with & without outriggers for sports cars; shows up on eBay frequently. More often than not, the sellers don't/can't identify what they're selling. All have little washers reinforcing the dropped front axle/main rail connections. I wonder if that Playland ribbon was obtained racing on the Sovereign (Purple Mile) that's now in Ashland, MA.

[Slot Car Rod]

Bill, the race was on the Sovereign track.  In the S.F. Bay Area, the track was referred to as the "Blue Sovereign".  I will have more on this raceway and what happened to the track one day.

 

[Slot Car Rod]

Matra chassis.

 

[Bill from NH]

I don't see many chassis modifications. The locations of  the pin tubes, the drop arm soldered up solid, & a piece of lead weight added to the drop arm. The rest looks stock. I'm wondering if that red can isn't a U-GO motor. Thanks for the topside photo Rodney.

[Isaac S.]

The original owner of my Bay Area slot car box raced at Playland. Here is one thing that was with it but the seller kept.  

 

[Slot Car Rod]

Bill, thanks for identifying the Matra chassis as an International. The Matra has a silver-wind 32 triple armature.

 

Isaac, here is Ben's time log book.

 

 

[Slot Car Rod]

I cleaned up a Lee Gilbert-style four rail chassis and made a 1970 pro car-style slot car with it.

 

To replicate the performance of an old open motor, a Mura C-can motor was used along with a modern Proslot Group 20 armature and magnets are RJR quads

The RJR magnets were glued into the motor can, and the magnets were honed.  The lead wires are Marklin.

 

The wheels are vintage Associated.  New orange tires are used.

 

A Lancer McLaren body was painted, and N.C.C. air control was installed.  Tamiya paint was used.  A Brian Russo painted driver figure was installed.

 

The car does drive like an old pro car, and is extremely fast.  You power out of the turns, fly down the straights, and clutch for the bank turn.  With low tire glue conditions found on most tracks, modern tires are used.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Bill from NH]

Nice overall car Rodney! Good job on cleaning up the Gilbert chassis. It appears it might have .047 & .055 main rails. That might indicate it was originally but for "no-glue" racing that was popular on the West coast for a time. Your use of contemporary motor parts does not deter from it being a fine vintage slot car. 

[TSR]

Bill,
Gilbert used the .055/.047 combination on all his chassis from 1969 through 1970. There was no such thing as "no glue racing" in So Cal where he was residing then. No "spray glue" either. There were some races with "limited glue" only for Group-20 lumps, because their motors could not pull through the Camen "Stick It" we used.


By early 1971, Gilbert was experimenting with .063/.055 rails, but this was before he moved back to his native Washington State. We took two of these cars to the Nutley Nats in February of that year and cleaned house.

When he returned to So Cal in 1973, he came back with cars that were effectively, clones of my own "Diamond" design, where the .063 rails were soldered solid with the drop arm which no longer, well, dropped. Here is one of his chassis from the 1973 era:





Here is one of my original Diamonds from mid-1972:



 

[Slot Car Rod]

Bill, the main rail sizes of  .047 & .055 were the magic combination for quite a while.  The McLaren M8 was a very popular body, and is one of the last 1/24th scale slot car bodies that still resembled the real car.  When the aero bodies came out, many quit running 1/24th scale. 

 

I started to run in a Northern California HO race series.  Our local raceway's inventory was at least 1/2 HO by then.  

 

Les and Tom, owners of Oakland Speedway, with a couple of showcases and a wall full of HO cars and parts.

 

HO track at Oakland Speedway.

 

Keiji Kanegawa-built Shadow and my Porsche.

 

 

 

[TSR]

Rodney, even those Dynamic, Lancer or Champion McLaren M8 bodies were far out of scale... like someone channeled 40% of their height in their middle section! 
But they sure were cool.
This one fished from the book "Slot Car Dreams":

[Slot Car Rod]

"still resembled the real car", no kick up rear tails and big fins.  Even MESAC cars were not scale, and were cut down versions of the real cars.   The cars were cool.

 

I was one of the first to order your book.  Love it.

 

Many slot car racers in our area favored cars up through the 7/8" rear and 3/4" front tire era.

[Bill from NH]

Thanks for the history lessons, We ran twin  .063 main rails in the glue back East during the 70s.  I got a pre-bent Gilbert chassis kit from a Seattle shop.  It may have been .055/.063, but don't recall. Had it been .047/.055, I probably would have changed it, but that wasn't one of the changes I made to it. The overall chassis looked similar to that in the Car Model Gilbert build series of '72/'73 with Miss Dona. I have no idea what happened to that chassis. I have several friends who went from open class wing cars to racing HO. I tried to get interested in them a couple times, but I just couldn't. Now my eyesight wouldn't allow me to work on them. In the past, there has been a print article posted online regarding "no-glue" racing & the cars. It might have been on here, it could have been on OWH. I don't know if it still exists online.. 

[Slot Car Rod]

Some close to scale cars.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Slot Car Rod]

One more close to scale car.  Truescale body with Champion flexi-car frame.

[Slot Car Rod]

The chassis for this car was made with leftover Cox stock car chassis parts.  The additional brass chassis parts were coated with lead-free silver solder to replicate the nickel plating of the original parts.  The chassis main rails were filled with brass rod for additional weight down low.  The wheelbase for the 1960 Chevrolet Impala NASCAR body is about 4.7".  A stock Cox NASCAR motor and Ulrich stock car wheels are used.  Tires are Paul's urethane.

 

This car drives better and is faster than a Cox Ford Galaxie stock car due to the heavy main rails .  The car is very neutral and has no signs of body roll when pushed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Isaac S.]

Very cool! Just finished putting the PCH Dubro '68 Charger body on my Champion jaildoor and these cars are huge! Much larger than a sports car. It dwarfs even my can-am cars. I'm still deciding on whether to add decals or not. 

 

[Slot Car Rod]

Good choice Isaac.

[Bill from NH]

Good job on the Rex White Chevy.  Cox should have hired you to design & build chassis rather than make do with what they used. That Chevy body used is a '59 rather than a '60. I thought Rex White also drove Pontiacs too, maybe not.