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It is no secret I like vintage slot cars, and especially replicating vintage pro racers from the mid-'60s to the early '70s.
Building these cars as period correct replicas however depends heavily on the ability to acquire actual period correct parts. While some period correct parts are always going to be easier to find (and afford) than others, lately even the once more plentiful parts have become harder to find, and their prices have risen considerably.
Add to this the reality that some parts just cannot be had at any price because they no longer exist (or never did exist as a product with a part number), and I find there are some vintage replica project cars I’m simply never going to be able to finish. It’s frustrating.
But this topic, and indeed this entire subforum is not a complaint about the availability or the prices of actual period correct parts; it’s about having fun building slot cars – and not being frustrated. If I cannot finish my period correct vintage replica car projects, then maybe I should be building period accurate vintage-style cars instead.
For those of us who are old enough to remember consider this: In the late '60s, at my local raceway we would build our cars out of what was available; there was no such thing as “period correct vintage parts.” The only reason I could not get a specific part I wanted was because the raceway owner had not received it yet, and all I had to do was wait a week and there it would be.
Come Friday or Saturday night, we would race whatever we had, provided it was no more than three inches wide and cleared the track by at least one-sixteenth of an inch. Obviously, the cars had to be of the same type (sports, coupe or open wheel), but there were no other official rules; didn’t need them.
For everyone it was “build-what-you-will” and “run-what-you-brung”, and no one worried about whether they were using period correct parts. Honestly I don’t remember any other time when I had more plain-old fun on a regular basis.
We cannot actually go back to that earlier, more innocent time (and personally I would not want to try), but I think it possible to have fun building cars that way. The “catch” (if you choose to call it that) would be that "Vintage-style" cannot be a “free-for-all;” there would have to be some discipline to give the effort a sense of purpose.
So, my “Vintage-style” idea involves building cars with:
A. Disciplined major technical features that are accurate for the time period being represented and specifically intended to give the car overall vintage appearance and performance. Innovative design solutions are encouraged.
B. Other technical features that, out of simple necessity, conform to current practice.
C. Construction consisting entirely of commercially-available parts.
Then again, I think slotters in general share that kind of attitude. Also, being of a certain (ahem) "vintage" myself, it's understandable why the earlier periods of slot car racing appeal to me so much. As Steve put it so well, building/rebuilding (in my case...motors) things from that period is fast becoming cost-prohibitive, and sometimes just impossible. Even something as ordinary as an FT16D end bell in clean/NOS condition has become "unobtainium"...partly because they melted if you just looked at them sideways, but also because they haven't been manufactured for close to 50 years (or something like that).
in solid nose.
