664 replies to this topic

[Slot Car Rod]

Bill, the paint is still rubbery and tape was used as a barrier to prevent the lead wires from sticking to the body after the body was cleaned. 

I do not know how the chassis pieces were cut.  No two of his chassis were alike though.

[Isaac S.]

Very cool period car. Love these cut-up D/A-cans. Weid but interesting chassis like you talked about. Crazy that someone put all that effort into it when they could just buy a Champion Grp. 22 chassis with plumber that would fly if set up properly with some lead on the rear pans. 

[Slot Car Rod]

Isaac, very true about the Group 22 chassis.

[Bill from NH]

The only thing better than a Grp. 22 chassis would be a Grp. 22 chassis & a Grp. 22 arm in the motor. I sometimes ran Bill Steube Grp, 22 arms in Grp 7 races against open class arms. I have more than one win using them & a chassis I built. But that was over 45 yrs. ago.

[Isaac S.]

Dang a 27 wire vs something like a S24? That is amazing. Lot more reliable though. 

[Slot Car Rod]

Here is a Steube NCC20 armature.  They were hand wound.  Regular NCC20 armatures were machine wound.

 

 

[Bill from NH]

Rodney, I have a new Steube Grp. 20, I've never run, in addition to the Grp. 22s. All are hand wound. I wonder if the 22s have more timing? I'll have to check sometime. My 22s are still loaded in motors from 1981 when I last ran that class. I never had a slow Steube arm, but my 1st 24S had a bad comm & that arm lot caused Bill Steube to change the color of his wrapping cord from black to white. 

 

 

Isaac, this was was a track about 175' long, not a AMCR layout, & powered by a power supply. Some guys ran 24S on it, but I ran Camen 27/28 on it before trying the Grp. 22s.. 

[Slot Car Rod]

Bill, I found one Steube Grp22 armature in the Ben Jones collection.  

 

 

[Bill from NH]

Rodney, your Grp 22 arm looks like a Camen to me, The script on the tag, is like a typewriter that Camen used for producing their catalog sheets & other literature. It was similar to italics type & very unusual for a typewriter. Also, the purple paint on the comm end of the stack indicates that arm was balanced by Camen. I used Camen balancing after Thorp went heavily into RC.  Are there any paint (for strobe lights) markings on the tail end of the stack that would indicate that arm had also been rebalanced? I had a Camen Grp. 22 arm but burned it up during a glue race on a king track. The dead arm became my zapping slug for years until I bout a .530". All these old vintage arms are great.

[Slot Car Rod]

Bill, I was told by racers back then that group 20 and 22 Steube armatures later had the fancy script.  I have group 20 armatures with the script and no purple.  The armature shown does have deep balancing holes,  All explanations are possible.

[Isaac S.]

Very cool arms Rod. 

 

Bill, that makes sense. With less power available and on a shorter track I could see that. 

[TSR]

As far as I can remember, Bill Steube only used red dye on his arms, and they were all engraved "Steube" but were never marked with winding specs otherwise. So if these are "Steube" arms, they were made well after Bill sold "Checkpoint" to the next owner and retired.

[Slot Car Rod]

Thanks everyone.  Signature on the NCC20

[Isaac S.]

I do think the yellow died arm is a Steube. While all the Steube arms I have seen have been died red this one could have just been repolished and died a different color. The thread wrapping, engraving, balancing and blank look correct. 

[TSR]

Isaac, yes, that is possible and the signature's graphic looks correct.

[TSR]

 

Here is a Steube NCC20 armature.  They were hand wound.  Regular NCC20 armatures were machine wound.

You would be shocked to learn that every single Mura armature including of course these "NCC20" were all hand wound using the most agricultural devices to do so. There never was a "machine" there to wind up armatures, and the same goes for the Dyna Rewind arms, all wound by hand by Ted Leech on one of their own hand cranked device featuring a turn counter.
I am pretty sure that Champion never had a "machine" either.
Bob Green at Mura wound thousands of armatures using a La Ganke crank setup. Bob recently donated all his tools to the LASCM, and nothing fancy there.

[Bill from NH]

A reason for a change to yellow arm dye could have been because it's a good indicator of if your motor is running too hot, before the arm actually burns up. The yellow dye will turn a golden brown first. If you try that with red, blue, green, purple. or black, it doesn't work.      All BOW (Best of West) arms were dyed yellow. by Monty Ohren.

[TSR]

 

All BOW (Best of West) arms were dyed yellow. by Monty Ohren.

 

Well, maybe not all, I have a few he made that were never reconditioned, and they are dyed red...

[Bill from NH]

Are these Monty's hand-wound arms on his own blanks,  Proslots he bought in the raw for finishing himself, or both? I guess he lied to me..   

[TSR]

These were made for the NASCAR races we had over 10 years ago in California, set inside Champion 707 cans with Arco mags.  Red they were and still are because they were never used.

[Bill from NH]

I recall the BPR race coverage of these 36D races on OWH. I believe they ran two classes, a stock motor class & another for modified motors. Monty rewound a few  Mabuchi  arms for the modified class. He often posted requests for additional arms he could rewind, Foamy ran in that series, I don't recall who else did I would say that series was either during late '90s or early 2000s. It was before Slotblog started. Certainly more than 10 years ago.

[Slot Car Rod]

Here is another Matra.  Nice  early anglewinder chassis.  B-can motor with home wound armature. 

 

 

 

[Isaac S.]

Beautiful car. 

[Bill from NH]

Pretty good reproduction of the real car Rodney. I like the use of a square tube front axle holder, unfortunately, they weren't used for long. I like a squeezed oval tube there too. Nice 3-rail chassis. It's brass parts look like Phaze III. My wife would like the color. It's a neat looking slot car.

[Slot Car Rod]

Thanks Isaac and Bill.  Added some wheel inserts.