25 replies to this topic

[Duffy]

Is there anything I can't overdo?

 

But there's a reason. - Well, in my mind there's a reason. With simple tube-type systems I'd often have bodies tear out at their mounts, tape & body armor & all, or at the least they'd develop nasty bumps & dents around the tubes. I went to a grommeted (actually flanged tube) at one point, and worked the making of 'em around to where it's quick & easy for me. Here's how.

 

 

Now, way early in my learnings I bought some "finished" tubes from somewhere - cut to length, deburred, real nice. First thing I did, I soldered the bore tight shut. Went through nine pins before I got four functioning on the chassis.

Trouble was, solder would turn the corner & wick along the inside, if given half a chance.

So I remove the chance, by starting with an over-long tube. I'll cut that extra off after all the soldering's done.

 

 

Knowing I'm gonna make another chassis some time before I kick it, I'll solder & cut a buncha these things at once; a grommet on each end of a 1/16" tube, or two tubes or whatever, just solder five minutes then cut off for five minutes...I made me a chopsaw fixture for these multiple jobs, because I'm Duffy Dammit, but it's a bit of fuffery that isn't needed anywhere.

 

 

Way back then, I made myself a fixture to index & line up my pins on a chassis. It was pretty cool, and R-Geo copied the "Duffy Pinners" (sounds all entomological, huh?) to work on his jigs; a variant showed up later on the Precision jigs too, & they work real well.

The idea became a kinda non-issue with me after a time. My methods morphed into putting the pins on existing structure (and a little higher than normal too, to help in that durability thing; I may be giving away some body motion by doing so, though).

Here's the little tool I use to hold the pins real securely as I solder 'em. Just a wire shoved into one end of my soldering stick, with any sort of endstop - that's the pigtail you see here, but the stick itself would be fine - to provide a little more push in the initial placing on the chassis.

 

 

Then cut off the excess flush with the flange of the grommet, and hey!Presto there's your fussy little pintube. A quick root-around with the point of your #11 blade is all the deburring you need there.

For a while I'd take my tiny ball-end Dremel bur and make this neet little receiver countersink in these, inside the curve of the flange. Makes a great "point-finder" for the pins. Trouble is, then I'd push the pins in with the body, and the heads would obligingly nestle down into the neet little receiver countersinks and it'd take a knife to tease them back out...just a straight flat face is fine.

 

So that's what I do there. They're convenient for me, and pre-making a few sets at a sitting (took about half an hour to make six cars' worth the other day) makes it convenient to reach for 'em.

 

 

[Rick]

In reply to your question: Nope.............................

[Bob Emott]

Hi Duff,,, 

Another great idea from the duffster...

[Duffy]

In reply to your question: Nope.............................

 

Dammit, Rikky, you make me work too hard.

[Old pink can guy]

Duff you need the Robot from Space Family Robinson. Problem sloved! LOL. We all do. As Paul Newman said growing  old for sissys anit easy! 

[macman]

Wish I had as much time on my hands  (pun?)  to think up all the neat things you keep originating. Love that chop-saw fixture; looks EXTREMELY useful!!!

[Duffy]

Wish I had as much time on my hands  (pun?)  to think up all the neat things you keep originating. Love that chop-saw fixture; looks EXTREMELY useful!!!

 

Ben, as you've rightly observed elsewhere, my hobby lacks a certain - focus.

 

I had to make up a half-dozen Jaildoor chassis. I got to thinking about how to cut a bazillion little bits neatly & alla same, and ended up spending about four hours one night at my shop making this thing up. In Life Bucks, that means I got about a $350 tool to cut pintubes to length.

Other hand, now that it's made I can jus' pull it down and use it.

Thigpen & I talked a lot a couple years ago about the issues around investing in the nice stuff. Read about it in "Toys For Retirement."

[Duffy]

Here's MORE useless gewgaw.

 

I should explain: a lot of the time, I'm building something at an hour when normal people would be sleeping or otherwise engaged (some will claim that any hour I spend in slot cars is something normal folk could use better), and it's often after coming up with some perversion of Right Thinking that leads me to build something I hadn't prepped for - something I don't have hardware on the shelf to grab.

Now, I try to lay in a stock of everything I might need - pounds of piano wire, store-boughten bits&bobs, motors brass wottevers - but it's folly. Liver-Eating Johnson once observed, "The day will come when you're facing your Maker while scraping the bottom of your Possibles Bag for that one thing you didn't pack..."

Anyway. This time, it was axle collars.

Okay, I had enough to put on the inside; a pair comes in every little JK Fronts jar. Used 'em. Now what? I had some brass grommets that might serve, but they were larger than the axle and I wasn't sure I'd get the face square enough. (Now, NO face will truly be square enough; I'm telling a "Magic Feather" story here, just telling the way it reeled out. It may entertain, or you may find something better on SPEED TV today. Your call.)

(Willya stick to the damn story, Idiot?...)

(Oh, sorry. So - )

 

- Now what?

Okay: grabbed some 1/8tube and squared the tube face in my Squaring Jig (I hear Macman snorting coffee out his nose from way over here!) -

 

 

By the way, normally you'd see a firm finger pressing the tube down in the vee groove, but that hand was busy taking the pic. We Slot Dweebs, we're a lonesome bunch.

THEN I grabbed my handy-dandy little RIDGID Teeny Pipe Cutter (like $6 at Home Despot, I swear they must sell these as a joke but for this, it's GREAT) and parted off several short sections, re-filing the long tube after each cut -

 

 

And the pipe cutter pushes stock into the inner diameter making a real convenient "cap" that limits how far this thing goes onto an axle:

 

 

Pretty cool, huh? and then you just pop the tyre on, place the cap over the bitter end, and drop a drop of Loctite ExtraNasty SuperGrab on the little hole.

- One more step: I put two or three tiny grooves on the very end of my axle with a Dremel cutoff disc, to provide a little more tooth for the Loctite to grab to.

 

 

That's it. LocTite loosens up with heat, and loosens with less heat than solder would, so swapping is quick and requires less clean-up worries than fluxy stuff does. I've been using the red 277 with no complaints for a while (Noose will recommend 271).

 

Duf

[Duffy]

Hi Duff,,, 

Another great idea from the duffster...

 

I've been sidebarring with Marty Stanley about this: a couple years ago he posted a neet idea involving soldering flanges like this to pintubes over on OWH, & that's what I spun off of.

[Half Fast]

Duf-

 

What is the red goo on the tubes in the first pix?

 

Cheers

[Gator Bob]

Here's MORE useless gewgaw.
 
 

HeeHaw!!!
More to gnaw on .... only a fool's d'scepter would consider this just a bunch of bauble.
 
Now where is my coffee?

[Duffy]

Tex Hofer's another guy who does this grommet-on-pintube thing, and he also does a neet outside number on the pins themselves: cuts a bunch of round paddy things from clear plastic with a hole punch & pokes his pins thru them. Now, there's something I could get my fingernails under.

 

[Samiam]

Why..........

 

 do many people apparently feel Home Depot is a despot?   Whaaaaa.......booo-hoooo.......hooooo

 

Sorry Duff,couldn't resist.

 

BTW..could you make a v-block for me? I want to make a squaring jig where the block moves and the file is fixed.

[Duffy]

Seems like any V-block would do for that. Check at Home Despot.

 

But, what I think I know of ergonomics says to keep the big heavy part stationary and move the light part. Not seeing how this would work. Move the vee block over the file? you need to relieve for the file & provide runners of some sort, then secure the file, then the block has to be sized so you can hold it secure & it don't tip all over, THEN you need a method for clamping stock sooo...

 

Nope, not getting it. Ask a smarter machinist, dude.

[Samiam]

"I see" said the blind man.

 

So the file is held in some sort of slide and moves across the step in the block.

 

I'll see if I can find a v-block @ the Despot

[Duffy]

Duf-What is the red goo on the tubes in the first pix?

 

Missed this, sorry - it's a trick of the lighting and discolorization from the heat & flux, where zinc is leached out of the surface & leaves a coppery color.

 

 

So the file is held in some sort of slide and moves across the step in the block.

 

Yah, barring a lot of machining, your simplest version would be anything of a convenient mass, with a step in it square to the edge to hold your workpiece. Then just fold a little shim stock around that edge of the file below the working area, to bear on your block & not file it away.

[old & gray]

... he also does a neet outside number on the pins themselves: cuts a bunch of round paddy things from clear plastic with a hole punch & pokes his pins thru them.

Push the pin thru the plastic, then center the pinhole in the punch, the result is much easier to hold central and they don't slide off the bench onto the floor when your trying to make the pin hole. Trust me.

[Tex]

6 of 1, half a dozen of the other. After cutting a bunch of the round doohickeys with the hole punch, I center the round things over a 1/16" hole I drilled in an old tech block and then push the pin through the center... not terribly difficult.

[Rick]

Not sure this is worthy of being in Duffy Fussy or not, but he is free to delete it, if not.

 

Something made a while ago to use along with my Zona Saw for making equal length brass tubes. Holes are 7/32" down to 1/16"

 

[Duffy]

No delete, it's a METHOD!

 

I don't Get it, though. Please 'splain how it works?

[Rick]

You stick out the length you want thru the hole, hold down the tube with a fanger and saw off, using the block as your guide, nice straight cut with no boogering of the shape..........................

[Duffy]

Here's Fussy-Ness from another guy, whom I've forgot: if the fellow who suggested these reads this, please chime in so I can give you credit.

 

 

These little tabs are dimensioned as the radius of a particular tyre, minus the radius of the axle the wheel will run on. Then they're marked for the correspondent tyre diameter.

 

 

So then the specific tab is wiggled in like you see here, setting the finish diameter of your tyre.

 

Pretty cool, Whatzizname.

 

Duf

[Duffy]

WARNING: another Fussy Bender coming.

(I just put that at the top so I could be a "Warner FussBender.")

The story goes:

TonyP and I were discussing the "Tripod" concept and how to streamline it. He kinda wanted to see if we could make the "spread" rail (trying to get away from Tripod nomenclature, since the term is getting challenged in the Literature) with just one bend, possibly strengthening the joint at the nosepiece with the resultant angle instead of bending back to parallel or adding another bit.
Something like this:



To make this happen, I laid out the angles we'd need for the chassis, and drew up the nosepiece with its front edges at 90 degrees to that line; so I could set that front edge square in my vise jaw & bend my axle tab up & right in line with the spread rail.
(A little elaboration...the "spread rails" derive naturally from the fact that they diverge forward of the Exclusive Custom Duffy FireCrotch Bracket. Well, of course. And it logically follows that the resultant chassis line will be referred to as Project War Beaver. So now you know.)

Okay, well, anyway that worked fine. Now I had to make ten more of 'em, and prolly tool up for production. Soooo...



...Now the stuf just got real. This bending brake allows for lining up the nosepiece stock flat with either face, & then bending the thing just the same each time. It has an end stop hidden down in there that makes the bend at exactly the same spot from the end of the stock - which meant I had to make the nosepiece blanks all ex-freekin'-zackly the same. Gotta be a better way. I'll think on it next time around.

& at the end of the day, Evil Bucks Racer got his exclusive War Beaver chassis, the first lot going to the RetroEast Enduro next month. And more to follow.

Fussy enough?

[SlotStox#53]

Very sweet production with that bending brake Duffy

Love the new nose piece & the whole "War Beaver" chassis , will they be available to order in kit form?

Are the Fire crotch brackets available to Sir?

[Gator Bob]

Tex Hofer's another guy who does this grommet-on-pintube thing, and he also does a neet outside number on the pins themselves: cuts a bunch of round paddy things from clear plastic with a hole punch & pokes his pins thru them. Now, there's something I could get my fingernails under.

 

TEX029_RTR_2.JPG

 

Old school, been doing it for ..... time.

 

 

So Duffy, I like all the Fussy Stuffy but don't know what's 'in stock' and 'whatzitcost'?

How do We find such a level of detail?