The D3 car is one I bought from Phillipe and Bob Scott for the 2005 Convention held here on Bob's bumpy blue King.


The one and only 1/24 TSRF race in AZ... ever!

This car qualified second (by .001 sec!) but finished badly in the race. My lack of experience and not knowing then that I had to drill and bolt the chassis pieces together caught me out.
In that race we used ProTrack #238 drag racing rear tires and I had only the plastic front wheels. Since then I decided to update to the TSR rears and the alloy fronts and set the T2417 inserts back in the wheels like JohnK does. I had done this before on my Tamiya-Brun 962 hardbody and added the idea of retaining the insert with the E-clip rather than glueing them in. It makes wheel removal much simpler.

This worked well on the fronts but required a longer 3" axle for the rear which I grooved myself. Unfortunatley axles that long are hard to get and a 3/32 drill blank is not much easier to get in small quantities. My solution to that was to put the alloy rears on the lathe and cut the inner hub down by .040". (See added dimension E on schematic pilfered from Professor Motor)

That allows me to use the grooved T2408 front axle on the rear with a few spacers to get the correct track and also use the clips. Here's the lathe set up:

My next problem was setting up my 962 for my routed/Magnetech-braided track where we race with silicones only and no glue is allowed. Obviously The Indy Grip IG3101 tires are the way to go but they are made for the plastic rims with the raised rib in the center. So... after many hours of staring through brown glass I got the idea to coat the wheels with J.B. Weld, the epoxy that can be machined, then cut that on the lathe to match the plastic wheels dimension.
I have four discarded pairs of plastic wheels and started measuring the OD (dimension D) which seemed to range from .841 to .846. I tried the Indy Grips on the biggest and they were cupping in the center and only making contact with the track at the outer edges. Knowing from my 1/32 experience that this means the tire is not supported in the middle I decided to cut that O.D. to .850 and that works fine.

I don't recommend doing this with the epoxy and I'm looking for a different material to use for the next two sets because I used a NIOSH resperator and a shop vac with a HEPA filter (as used for asbestos abatement) to deal with the toxic dust. Any suggestions are appreciated.
Here's the car with the sillies and the inserts, fully-weighted chassis with two magnets, all the legal mods, a full Tamiya interior and Overdrive permanent (read: with capacitor) light kit. It is nearly as fast as our modified 1/32 Slot.its on my twisty 1/32 roadcourse.


I've had a lot of fun building these and I have another LC-2 with Tamiya decals to build and another with a Tamiya-Toyota 88C-V yet to build. And one of these days I might even get over there to see how well they work!
