by SuperSlab » Tue May 09, 2017 10:25 am
OK, I will admit: the subject line was a bit of a play on the previous line of DP cars brought out by Fly (their "Flyers" line).
But other than the fact that it flies this car has little.... make that "Nothing"... in common with the Fly cars. With a bit of work it is a rocket ship! OK, make that quite a bit of work. My efforts with this was:
* Glued & trued some PGT's on the rears
* Braced the rear of the chassis. And now I will admit: I never even ran the car straight out of the box so my motivation for bracing it was that I took it in hand and "thought" that there was too much movement in the critical motor to rear axle area. So I epoxied in some brass square tubing.
* Sanded away some chassis material as I found there was still a fair bit of body/chassis interference that inhibited body float.
* Smooth shank SCC body SCCrews
* Added about 7g of thin lead sheet under the chassis
And off to the races.
And wow: what a lovely surprise! The track we mainly race on (Luf's Targa) has individual power supplies on each lane so motor power (or lack of same) is not an issue: you can just adjust the voltage to suit the needs (and abilities!) of each car. The Scaley DP could comfortably handle 12V. Once on the track it was immediately apparent that this is A Nice Car. VERY nice actually! Smooth and rock, rock solid on the track. And it helps that it looks good as well. I must admit that I am a bit of a sucker for lights: obviously a personal preference kind of thing but I think it just adds that little bit to the look of the car going around the track.
Initially there was a bit of gear noise: not bad but just enough to be noticeable. But as the laps mounted it got more and more quiet (or is that quieter and quieter?). At the end of the evening it was very quiet and very smooth and incredibly easy to drive fast.
How fast? I find the best yardstick that I have is to compare the lap times I get with a car to the times achieved by recent proxy cars: these are generally a somewhat known quantity to people and can give people at least a rough indication of how good/quick a car is. With the DP I ended up with a best lap of 6.980 seconds. This is similar to my Slot.it McLaren M8D and a couple of Slot.it Ford GT's and not far off my NSR Ford GT Mk IV and one of my NSR Porsche 917's. So when I say it is quick, I mean it is Quick with a capital Q!
As for my proxy yardstick: not one of the cars in the recent Ford-Ferrari proxy was able to achieve a better Q time than this! Best Q for this group of cars was a 7.103 second lap. And only one car (Chris Walker's fantastic Slot.it GT40) managed a better time during racing! I was able to get a 6.888 out of that. ONE other car (Smokeio's GT40) was able to do a lap under 7.2 seconds (7.117) in the race, so this gives you an idea of how very good the Scaley's lap time is. For those of you that have not had the good fortune to drive a car prepared by Chris W or Smokeio: these guys are magicians! So any car that gets lap times in the same general vicinity as one of their cars is a good car. A VERY good car! I think the dimensions of the DP car (wide, low, bit longer) gave it an advantage to most of the cars int he proxy. But still.
Would the average person do the bracing of the chassis? Likely not. Is it really critical to do that? Unfortunately I do not know as I did not run it "unbraced". Does the average person take the trouble to properly glue and true tyres? Unlikely as well. So the work I did on the car is likely at least somewhat beyond what most people would do. But I think it amply demonstrates the potential of the car with not a huge amount of work.
Colour me impressed!
Alwyn