153 replies to this topic

[TSR]

Mike,
The Revell model came with a detailed driver too... And the Revell Halibrand wheels looked a LOT better than the Monogram plain-Jane wheels with chromed plastic Cooper inserts...
Also the shape of the Revell Lola body was a lot more accurate and a lot more pleasant to the eye than Monogram's well finished but rather crudely shaped T70 body with no undercuts, looking like a cheap modern pseudo-vintage vac-formed body, names withhold to protect the guilty.
In this writer's opinion of course...

[mdiv]

FYI, I got my globe SS-91 and I am very happy with it!

- Mike

[mdiv]

Dokk,

How is "The Book" coming along?

- Mikey

Mike,
The Revell model came with a detailed driver too... And the Revell Halibrand wheels looked a LOT better than the Monogram plain-Jane wheels with chromed plastic Cooper inserts...
Also the shape of the Revell Lola body was a lot more accurate and a lot more pleasant to the eye than Monogram's well finished but rather crudely shaped T70 body with no undercuts, looking like a cheap modern pseudo-vintage vac-formed body, names withhold to protect the guilty.
In this writer's opinion of course...

[don.siegel]

To get back to the original subject, here's another motor that fascinated me - and was one of the first I tried to find when I started collecting.

Pretty incredible, actually, in mid-1966 Ram was still trying to sell an open-frame type motor, when these were pretty much totally outdated (and I think they were already selling their own versions of the Mabuchi by then as well, not to mention the Ram-Boochi conversion).



And here's the first motor I found, which I used in the first vintage model I built when I started collecting in the early 90s - excellent running car, but I think their RPM figures are a bit "exaggerated", to say the least.... It's a bit faster than the regular Pittman DC706, etc. models, and kind of competitive with a standard 36D, but that's about all.... Still, I'm already on my second set of brushes with this car, have had to resolder the axle gear (it's got a fair amount of torque), etc.... (sorry about the photo quality).



Don

[mdiv]

Totally cool Don, totally cool!!!

- Mikey

[Prof. Fate]

Hi

I have talked about the plate chassis with 704-6 I used to run before commercial tracks. As a kid in a military family, I couldn't just have cars on shelves like most folk. I was restricted to a footlocker because of the move upcoming. So, cars from the period got disassembled when not run, the chassis stacted tightly in a box or several. Some were taken apart and the parts used in later projects. And the wheels in anothe, and motors in another. All for a very heavy compact storage.

The initial way I got into the collector side of things was finding the parts I needed to restore cars that had "loaned" parts to later projects!

So, a few years ago, Al Schwartz, Ecurie Martini, was chatting with me about the 704/club era that we both played in. And for the convention, we started restoring our cars. I had aquired a new resin body of the Maserati 450 from Resiliant Resins that was close, but not enough, to fit surviving frames. So, I copied my frame out of a surviving car that currently had a Maserati 300s Dubro body.

Long way of getting to the point. I was rushed for time, and opened up the box of 704s, and grabbed a motor. I am NOW convinced that I had aquired an XL500. I THOUGHT it was the cheaper strombeker clone that I remembered buying because it was cheaper. But it is stronger than either on the track. Its speed ONLY shows up on a LONG straight, but it shows.

I don't remember buying it, though.

I sort of feel that this type of motor really does deserve being used under a glas or resin body of a 50s sports car!

Fate

[don.siegel]

Thanks for the souvenir Rocky. In any case, the XL-500 is the only motor of this type with a 3-pole arm, so it can't be confused with the Pittmans or a Strombecker - and it has pretty hefty wire too! Just eyeballing it, I would say 28 or 29...

i'll have to try mine on a long track one of these days...

Don

[Prof. Fate]

Thanks for the souvenir Rocky. In any case, the XL-500 is the only motor of this type with a 3-pole arm, so it can't be confused with the Pittmans or a Strombecker - and it has pretty hefty wire too! Just eyeballing it, I would say 28 or 29...

i'll have to try mine on a long track one of these days...

Don

Hi
Like I said, I don't remember buying one or doing a serious autopsy on one. This one has 5 poles, and looks a wire size better than the 706. One of those cases where I DON'T remember the wind. When the commercial track arrived in North Carolina, I did a series of re-gear, re-winds on the side trying to get the layout to work. And I just don't remember. I should sit down for five minutes and look.

In that period, spring-summer of 64, scratchbuilds so quickly took over, as did rewinds and vac bodies that the track was fond of giving stock like kits and obsolete motors as "additional prizes". I may have aquired it that way and just tossed it in the box!

Being a pack rat is a terrible thing.

Fate

[endbelldrive]

I've fantasized about owning a Pittman motor...any Pittman motor for the last 45 years! I recently manage to score a couple of them and matching bevel crown and pinion gear sets along with a load of Weldun 64 pitch spurs and 1/8" bore pinions for the larger DC65s and 85s.

The first real motors I owned were can drive Mabuchi 16Ds that were rebuilt as endbell drives. My daily driver in the late 60s was a two hole Lenz A can with the black endbell. That thing had the snot rebuilt out of it and was raced for over a year.

[mcseitz]

The track where I raced as a kid held a dim view on rewinding. Stock Champion 601s and later 603s (?) were the motor of choice. But they also allowed 16ds. My hottest stock motor ever was a 16d Cox Super Nascar that SCREAMED! Must have been a production fluke where everthing balanced and timed perfectly. Put it in a Cuc that left everthing in the dust on our long strait. Too bad it handled like a Cuc in the turns. Also a shame the bearings were so weak.
mcseitz

[TSR]

Marcus,
To repeat myself, there were never any "603"s. Champion had the "601" stock motor, a plain-Jane "selected" Mabuchi FT16. From there it went straight to the rewound, balanced and ARCO'ed "607".

[Hworth08]

As I remember the out-of-the-box 26D motors, The Champion was the fastest at first, most likely because Champion selected the best ones and reworked the others.

Later the Mabuchi boxed, double-shafted was the best as Mabuchi probably sold only the best "sounding" motors under their own name.

[mcseitz]

I certainly concede that what I know about the history of slot racing and Champion motors wouldn't fit into the tip of your pinkie. I have read with relish your history of Champion motors. But the track I was racing built their program around obsolete NOS Champion products well into the early 70s. The track owner claimed to have purchased Champion's entire inventory of inline jailhouse chassis after anglewinders took over and that's what we raced along with nos Cox iso kits. We were mostly restricted to stock 601s. When the supply ran out of those we switched to a nearly identical Champion motor that cost about $.50 more @ $3.75, and a sticker that was printed "603." We never had the hotter 607s and I frankly never knew about them until reading your piece a few years back. I don't think any of my old motors or clear plastic cases have any confirming stickers left on them at all but I will check. Please consider the possibility we were getting inventory that was never really released back in the 60s and 603s may, just may, have been part of Champion's obscure unsold leftover stock that we were using up.


mcseitz - If I were making this up I would inject a lot more drama....

[don.siegel]

Interesting story Marcus; I do have a vague memory of a 603, but I may be confusing that with the 503 and 703, Champion's first generation 16D and 36D rewinds; I'll try to remember to look through my documents tonight to see if there's any trace of this model number...

Do you realize that you guys were racing thousands of dollars worth of NOS cars at the time?

Don

[TSR]

Marcus, your memory is failing you. There never was a "603".
There were "503"s and "703"s. Never a "603". The FT26 Champion numbering went straight from the "601" (to match the "501" and "701" Mabuchi-made FT16D and FT36D stock motors) to "607" to match the "507" and "707" in production at the time. You see, there is a logic to this: while the 501 was rewound to 502 and 503 versions, then directly to the 507, the earlier 701 went through all the numbers until the 707. But when the FT26 was issued by Mabuchi, ALL previous versions of the 500 and 700 series except for the STOCK 501 and 701 and their ultimate versions, the 507 and 707, were obsolete and out of production. Hence Champion simply MATCHED the 500 and 700 then current numbers by calling the stock FT26 a "601" and the ONLY Champion-rewound version of the Mabuchi-made FT26 motors the "607".

There never were a "602", "603" or any other versions between the "601" and "607"
Of course shortly after the "607" came out, Champion made their own non-Mabuchi cans for the 500 and 600 series and called them "517" and "617". Another story altogether.

The track owner claimed to have purchased Champion's entire inventory of inline jailhouse chassis after anglewinders took over

Your track owner was full of it. Champion still had plenty of the inline chassis available as late as 1972 and was selling them in cheap "Econo-Kit" with clear bodies, with tires and no motor, until that eventually sold out in the mid-1970's. The inline chassis remained in the Champion catalogs for a long time after the angle-winder chassis came out as production items. REH then received ALL the remaining inventories and sold them over many years.

[don.siegel]

Actually, there was a "603", but it was a special. In one of his columns in about 1967, Floyd "Thingie Man" Manly talked about a local adaptation, cutting down Arco 16D magnets and putting a 26D arm in a 16D can -- all by Champion I assume since he dubbed this a "603" - but I'll check this story later tonight, unless somebody can already look through the old MC&T mags in the meantime...

And didn't Mura later come out with a commercial version of this setup?

Don

[Prof. Fate]

Hi

I thought they were called "big" something. I only read about them from Floyd. He and I were scrapping a bit in letters. I was arguing that the way he sliced and diced his bodies for performance and super low tires would kill slot racing in the long run.

I didn't see the 26d sized arm in a 16d until after they were obsolete. Someone offered me the motors, standard A can, at the can price and they came with the thinner magnets and 26d arm. I haven't looked at them much but what I remember is that the mura arms were not a standard mabuchi arm, they were 014 lams, but it was a 29 single wind, perhaps 45 turns.

I suppose I could use the bits to fabricate a 26d "frankenmotor".

Fate

[TSR]

all by Champion I assume since he dubbed this a "603"

Don.
I KNOW that you do not believe in the tooth fairy.
I will pay $1000.00 to anyone bringing me a "603" sealed on its original blue card...

[don.siegel]

No, don't cannibalize those motors Rocky - send me one! I don't have one of those...

Don

[don.siegel]

Don.
I KNOW that you do not believe in the tooth fairy.
I will pay $1000.00 to anyone bringing me a "603" sealed on its original blue card...

No, that was his own designation Philippe (if I remember right), but I assume he was using Champion components, maybe a 503 can and a 26D arm, which gave him the 603... But in these days of Photoshop experts I wouldn't make that offer too lightly...

That's one heck of a tooth fairy you came up with - I don't remember anything like that around MY pillow...



Don

[mcseitz]

Don,
Nope, I don't think it dawned on anyone at the time.

There are several memories that I do cherish from that era, early 70s. One is selecting and buying a new Cuc out of a display cabinent that offered a nice selection of Cox ISO options. The other is a memory of several Cox 2Es jockeying around the track together, being pushed as hard as they would go, wings flapping in time. We were so far in the boonies that we didn't really know these cars were wholly obsolete in the rest of the slot car universe. We were sort of living an early 60s slot car experience in the early 70s.

The owner (now deceased) was actually pretty astute. He was probably paying a nickel on the dollar for the obsolete stock and selling at full retail, the Cox stuff for $15.95 per RTR. Speaking with him years later, he lamented not holding on to a couple cases of the hundreds of cars he said he'd sold.

mcseitz

[TSR]

Don,
Mine still look like that but it is now illegal in 50 states for me to think about her...

I don't remember that particular article but stuffing a FT26 arm into a FT16 can is actually possible. Using thin magnets from a Pittman 6001 that would have to be ground on top and bottom to fit might make the thing possible since the stock mags are too thick, and so are the common ARCO 33'. But the early thinner "broken magnets" MIGHT work.
Either way it would have had nothing to do with Champion.
A bit like those Porsche plastic parts to convert a stock beater 911 into a "935" with an extra coat of glow-in-the-dark paint. All what is missing is the extra handling, brakes, a thousand pounds of shed weight and 400HP...

[Hworth08]

Forget the motors. I'm on my way to the dentist to have a tooth pulled! Didn't know the tooth fairy looked like that.

[mcseitz]

P:
My memory fails in many respects but I'm still standing by this one. Don't know why, I've got nothing to gain but being known as slightly batty. And yes, your #s logic trumps my story easily. The motors I remember were standard FT26s and I remember when we asked what was different about them the answer was something like, "They cost more." They were not on a card but in a clear case with foam packing and a Champion sticker outside. Should I happen upon evidence it will cost you nothing, I'd be thrilled to offer some artifact to the temple.

And yes, the track owner likely stretched his account of buying out the whole inventory. But to his credit he did buy a ton of inlines over those years, he likely thought it was the whole inventory. When I left for college in 1975 they were just running out of 4 1/2 inch Champion inlines and continued on with scratch-built copies.

mcseitz

[TSR]

Should I happen upon evidence it will cost you nothing, I'd be thrilled to offer some artifact to the temple.

Marcus, what I like most in my research is when someone proves me wrong in my conclusions. So I REALLY hope that someone can come up with even a "602" that would comfort your recollections. I would also take a 504, 505 and 506 at anytime.
OK out there, fake stickers manufacturers, please keep your socks down, I can tell a computer-generated job rather quickly! .