33 replies to this topic

[Phil Cline]

Greetings John,

I too have nothing against you. As a matter of fact I am quite pleased to see that somebody is actually building good stuff.

I have been around slot racers a while and no matter what one says or how one says it, it WILL be misconstrued somewhere along the line! That is rule one. Often it is not intentional. Sometimes I am sure it is though just to tweak people.

I never should have mentioned anything about the copying of the probe design. We did it first a long time ago. As a matter of fact I was speaking with Les Wright one time I believe at a raceway somewhere or at Hershman's shop while at work and I saw he had a power supply that used a TO-3 pass transistor. I asked him what the part was because he had removed the number. He assumed I was going to replicate his supply so he basically got a bit nasty and so I explained that all I was trying to do was source the device for him because at that time I had about 1,000 various TO-3 transistors and have sources for lots more at way cheaper pricing than the, at that time, ECG replacements I was pretty sure he was using. I was going to sell him some for a buck that would likely have dropped in and worked well.

But after that I decided to not offer help to people that built stuff for slot cars because they seemed paranoid about stealing some trade secret. If I was building supplies I could understand that. But I didn't build them then or ever. At least not for slot cars. Power supplies to break in a slot motor are very straightforward. At least linear ones. If I was racing again I would find a decent small switch mode 5 volt 10 or so amp unit for around $25 and it would never fail!! But people like to wing up the motors for some reason. I remember at RJR Robert Root winged up a motor as I was going into the winding room and the laminations came apart where he had drilled down too deep and weakened the laminations and broke loose the Hysol and epoxy. Fortunately they only stuck into his cheek. He could have hit an eyball.

As for the inductance meter it was off and I think it was due to a test inductor with a terrible tolerance and we opted to not re do it for accuracie's sake as well. There were several out there and as you said everyone compared numbers. As a matter of fact I did testing with RJR and with the Fast Ones (worked at both places) motors at races and never found a direct correlation to improved performance. Permeability of the lam material and lots of stuff cause inductance readings to be the way they are.

A three-pole DC permanent magnet motor is a system and a fairly complex one. You are absolutely correct saying the arm is just part of the puzzle. In the system what is the inductance inside the can where it operates? The air gap and can material and thickness and all sorts of stuff cause inductance changes. I even saw some bogus arms with a few aluminum lams in there to lower the inductance. It also lowered the amount of the field being conducted to the magnets. I always wanted to wind an arm with good Litz wire but I am unsure what a higher Q would do. But I am pretty sure what Litz wire would do at 150K RPM. The epoxy had better be really good.

The resistance meter in its various permutations ended up being a four wire deal with four actual contacts that contacted the arm. That was not fun from a building standpoint. But it mostly was four wire along the way without the contacts. It just ended the wires on a contact with two wires per.

I have seen lots of good and lots of bad stuff being pawned off as good and when a friend wanted a milliohm meter back in the late '80s or early '90s my brother started playing around and came up with a decent design and then we expanded from there.

I still find it funny that people will work and work to get the best horsepower and then proceed to stick their cars in the fence and be a hazard on the track because they can't drive or they have a race car that won't work. I too can't drive too well now. Not that I was ever really good. I did it for fun. I was fortunate enough to learn to race at a track that ran crash and burn. Each segment was 25 laps with 8 segments. If you fell off during a segment they pulled you until the next segment. That made people learn to drive or go home very disappointed. The goal was to win and win with 200 laps. The competition for a while was such that sometimes two people would end up with 200 laps as the power was shut off. There were no incessant "Track!" calls. Just racers racing.

I have no problem with you at all, John. As I said before, the more the merrier if you are selling good stuff. I figure I would say that twice so it won't be missed by any readers. I too would actually enjoy meeting you sometime just to discuss slots in general and how to make things even better.

A good thing that has come from posting on this site is I see there is a track in Evansville now. I hope it lasts! Being in Indy that is a pretty good drive but next visit to my sister and brother-in-law in Newburgh I will try and visit it. I have been to that mall several times.

Phil Cline

[Guillermo Suar]

... A good thing that has come from posting on this site is I see there is a track in Evansville now. I hope it lasts! Being in Indy that is a pretty good drive but next visit to my sister and brother-in-law in Newburgh I will try and visit it. I have been to that mall several times.

I hope to see you in Evansville, Phil. That's were I'm actually racing. Let me know when you are coming and we can arrange something. I have extra cars for every class we race there. You can borrow one to practice and even get into a race if you want. You won't be disappointed neither with the car nor with the fellows racers there.

[CaptnAndy]

I would also like to welcome you to my Evansville raceway.

This is our WEB SITE and it shows our race schedules.

[John Acello]

Thanks for the reply, Phil. Yeah, likewise would be fun to chat and swap some ideas out, as I am always interested in learning something new. Been in industry for 36 years and still have a lot to learn.

It's true that the motors are a complex system and when you think that a couple of tenths difference in air gap of asymmetry in the motor can will completely change the motor environment...

I'm not so paranoid about sharing ideas and actually enjoy problem solving with others. Still, getting your ideas ripped off without the benefit of the two-way can leave a bad taste. Most of the stuff I build started out just trying to solve a problem because the geek in me hasn't died yet. There is demand and it keeps me connected with people in the hobby. Just building stuff does get a little old sometimes. If I was looking for the most effective way to make mad money, flipping burgers would be bring in a lot more per hour.

Give me a call sometime or email me. We can trade "war" stories.

See ya,

John

[Phil Cline]

Phil, if it isn't too much of a hassle, maybe you could post a picture of the zapper?...

Switchblade,

Sorry for the delay in responding. Send me a PM with your email address and I will forward a PDF of the manual for the zapper.

For what it is worth these units come with a lockable switch to prevent unauthorized use of the units if a raceway were to buy one. The raceway could then charge a minimal fee to zap a set-up and make a little money and save a racer from waving "Bye Bye" to his stuff while it is in transit to and from a place that does re-magnetizing.

If anyone is interested I can email a PDF of the manual which shows the unit and tells you just about everything there is to know about the zapper. You of course will need Adobe Reader to view the file. But I suspect you know that already.

Thanks,

Phil Cline

[Phil Cline]

I would also like to welcome you to my Evansville raceway.

This is our WEB SITE and it shows our race schedules.

I am not 100% sure but I think I will be in Evansville on Monday. We have a job mounting a security mirror at a pharmacy down there and we will be very close!!

I will bring a zapper with me to show whoever is interested. I suspect it will be well received. I may not be but the zapper will.



Thanks,

Phil Cline

[Phil Cline]

Well, I was right! It was almost 100% that I would be in Evansville on Monday. It will likely be no earlier than Tuesday. I will make it to the track though whenever we do make it down there.

Phil Cline

[CaptnAndy]

Sorry, but Monday is the one day of the week we are not open. We will open at 3:00 PM Tuesday if you are still in town. We will be drag racing Tuesday night starting at 6:30 PM.

Regards,

[Phil Cline]

Can someone PM me if they have Dave Larsen's(The Vitter) phone number? I forgot to get it last night and I need to contact him. Thanks, Phil Cline

John and Phil, welcome to Slotblog.

Thanks to all the posters in this thread for keeping in mind Slotblog's requirement of civil discourse. This thread seemed to have the potential to get ugly but thankfully it has remained civil.

Phil, your original post would have been more properly placed in the Swap Shop forum, as you are offering products for sale. That forum would have been a better location for your advertisment, but now that we've had some fairly interesting discussion, we'll leave it here in General.

I would suggest that you should make a post in Swap Shop as well.