95 replies to this topic

[Pablo]

He looks well-fed

[Ken Harris]

Cool Mini Pablo! I built one of those a few years ago, sans the nice chassis. Mine had the old faithful Parma International 32 under it, with a Mura G12. It was a speed demon, to say the least, yet handled well. I still have the chassis somewhere, the car itself no longer exists.

[Duffy]

There may be hope for me yet.

[68Caddy]

Love the warning sign!


Nesta

[Prof. Fate]

Hi

there was a huge dust up about 10/12 years ago in the Amish community over the warning sign. They don't allow ostentatious displays in their society and thought that the law requiring them to have warning signs on their rigs was forcing them to violate the tenets of their religion.

The government insisted saying that the public roads needed permission to be there!

But in Amish country, they still hold a grudge over that one.

Fate

[Duffy]

Since Nesta's been posting locked-down chasses and looking to shave grams: a bump up.

Now, I do not agree with what Nesta's trying to do, building a minimum-mass car to go fast...I believe a good-handling car, one I can
drive and stay within my comfort zone, is better than a hare-lap hottie that I can't keep on the track for a whole heat. That's my goal, to
find a ride I can turn a good heat with and have some attention left over to watch the road ahead. So:


For more details on OXCART, see post #47 in this thread.



I finally got to give this one some quality time, and she delivered big-time.

A Vanity Shot with motor & wheels & stuf would really be extraneous; I mean, you've seen all that, right? but Oxcart with PD and a beater
T-160 bod tipped at 101.2 gr, and I couldn't get it to misbehave no matter how I tried (and believe me, cars misbehave for me!). Obedient
and smooth, rear end slides out nicely and I can lose it rear-first if I'm indiscreet, so I'm pretty happy with it. A 30-lap average (5.6 at SAL's
King) was .4 sec quicker than my not-so-good best, and a local Hot Shoe was turning .3 off the top laps for this track when I handed this
to him. Pretty good without extensive rubber-picking and related fussiness.

Currently I'm running 8/29 on this car, and being light enough I still have plenty of brakes (actually I dialed back my brakes a little to keep up
momentum in the corners)--once I get a little better in my driving I can go to a 7 pinion like normal Yumens and dive deeper into the corners;
but I'm not that good yet.

Comin' along, though. Pretty darn happy right now.

Duffy

[Jairus]

Hey Duff, that's pretty neat!

[Pablo]

You are starting to scare me, Duffy

[68Caddy]

Duffy that is way sweet and I might copy it if you don't mind!


Nesta

[Duffy]

You are starting to scare me, Duffy

Hm. What d'you mean, Pablo? You always struck me as a not-easily-scared kinda guy. Well, you never actually struck me, I'm kinda big & provisionally-imposing-like, but still.

Nesta, as I said in the earlier post about this build and pretty much through this whole thread, what I've been doing is trying to build frames that (1) will withstand the punishment I inflict on 'em by being stone-dumb, and (2) specifically study certain types of movement and dynamics. Oxcart was a first try at what we've misnamed "Torsion" but haven't come up with a better term for--allowing my outer pans to flex with some amount of rear limit, not quite locked-down but not real loose ether. Like we've heard works well on fast tracks. So.

And, just for now, all I can say for sure is that I've lucked out.

It's not the fastest car in my quiver--that's a Rick Moore 1220-C wire frame, which has been pushed .1 sec quicker by some abler guy--but it is the one I can drive the fastest! And that's the whole difference, that's what I'm looking for at this point.

But I don't know why that's true, yet. Trying to isolate the factors that go into the motion dynamics--substituting a midpoint bite bar for the rear stops, for example, and comparing--will tell me more about what's going on here, and how far I might take the idea.

Dunno yet.

[Pablo]

Scared as in, it's WAY out of the box thinking......
but it just might work........

[Duffy]

Scared as in, it's WAY out of the box thinking......but it just might work........

Oh, I don't know. Simple torsion frame damped at the back, nothing real fancy but some overfussy wirebending just for fun. How out of box is that?

In a hobby with no real science and a lot of ideas bouncing around, we might argue that there is NO box.


Duf

[Pablo]

I agree.
You da man, Duffmaster

[tonyp]

Pablo, Duffy just plain scares me. Glad I move to the south before I had to meet him in person. Lol....

[Marty Stanley]

Pablo, Duffy just plain scares me. Glad I move to the south before I had to meet him in person. Lol....

I have heard Duffy is coming south just to meet you!

[tonyp]

Now I won't be able to sleep.

[Tex]

Really nice chassis, Mikie!

[68Caddy]

Run it Duffy it looks great, I would run it for ya!



Nesta

[Duffy]

Now I won't be able to sleep.

Y'r darn right it's comin'--9/24 at the Viper Pit. Wearing my Game Face, Produce Midriff, Fish Codpiece, Lederhosen and Rubbershirtsen just to be PC. You don't know Fear 'til you've seen a Duffy in full Aspect. Don't make me any faster, really, just more entertaining.

I'll get back on-topic tomorrow morning: tired now. But, there're things to talk about with the Oxcart, based on an extended shakedown last night at Speedzone, and the story should be educational to some.

Duffy

[Pablo]

I wish I could be there to meet you and see your works, Duffmaster.
Unfortunately, I will be fishing in Mexico that weekend.

They don't have Cod in Mexico, but please advise what is a "Fish Codpiece" ?
Will it work on Tuna as well ?
I want to be prepared

[Duffy]

They don't have Cod in Mexico, but please advise what is a "Fish Codpiece" ? Will it work on Tuna as well ?

Whatever fits in there, I guess. In my misspent youth I did a stint with a Commedia dell'Arte theatre troupe, playing traditional comic plays with a set ensemble--I was the Harlequin character, and he typically has an enormous codpiece packing the front of his pantalones, to sorta balance out the profile of my overtubby belly padding (back then I didn't bring my own padding to the gig like I do now). The girls in the troupe quickly dubbed my rig Il Grande Provolone d'Amore. I chose to take it as a compliment.

What's this got to do with slot racing?

For those still reading as I publicly stumble through my painful learning curve: I got a few more opinions the other day about how this car works when in competent hands, and I notice differing ideas coming from guys with different preferences in cars. And keep in mind, all of this still boils down to your car, one track, on one day.

One guy didn't like the looseness of the rear end at all and wanted some weight near the rear tyres. I'll try it out.

Another thought the behavior could be from too much wiggle off the pans back there, from all the silly bends in the backstop wire, and suggested I try stiffening it with a bit of wire bracing. I'll try that out too. One change at a time, test, compare.

By the way, those silly bends kinda had a porpoise: I needed to snake around the rear tyres (gettin' pretty zoological here, huh?) in order to get into that hole in the bracket--the one R-Geo said he made for this kind of thing, and which I see he no longer uses!



The next build in this line will have a more conventional wire-in-tube treatment affording the same motion with way less fussiness. --& while I'm being brutally honest (no, really I am!), now that I've plotted out the elements I wanted in this chassis, I can make more with simpler construction all-round. All those multi-bend wires may look elegant, sure, but anybody who's done this stuff knows I've got a big bin under my desk just chock-full of mistakes.

Duffy