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Have you ever wondered why manufactureers never change the design of their chassis?Always the 60 year old 90 degree pinion/crown gear arrangement or if you are really lucky,a sixties style sidewinder gear arrangement.They never seem to have independent front axles either.i guess it all boils down to cost p-er unit ,and if you want something better ,you have to build it yourself.R/C design are very advanced!Surely they can design a planetary gearbox like Tamiya and Traxxas does!Ball bearings are common in the R/C world but good luck finding one in a slotter!

slotcar $40, R/C $400

Yep!All comes down to the mighty dollar!

All of the parts you mention are readily available.

As far as manufacturers' use of these parts... what for? The gearing is perfectly adequate as it is (fit and tuning notwithstanding). If you want commercial track insane speeds, you need a different kind of car anyway.

True differentials have been around from slot car makers for decades, but they seldom are tough enough to last. The last one I saw that worked was also a 4 wheel independent suspension, fully steered unit in 1966, made by Ulrich. It was all brass and steel.

Well i guess you cannot deny that the traditional designs work well so i guess the other advanced features are simply not needed.

I think it comes down to fitness for purpose as much as cost. If it works well in the confined environment that it has to work in there's not a lot that needs to change.

Look at bicycles. There have bee some high end developments over the last few years, but a bicycle is still a very recognizable object. The basics are the same. Materials may have changed and shapes have been tweaked, but someone from 70 years ago would still recognize it as a bicycle.

I have never seen an angled motor before?i assume it offers a mechanical advantage/weight distribution bonus?

philo426,

In the beginning - we're talking the early 1960's - you basically had the inline motor configuration. Why? Well they were easy to build and most people that were slot racers back then built the majority of their cars. Then a company by the name of Cox brought out their line of magnesium framed, 36D powered sidewinders. For a few years the commercial slot car scene vacillated between inline and sidewinder drive configurations for their cars.

Some companies, like Russkit came out with their dual inline motor cars and there were a few experiments with front engine, rear wheel drive, all wheel drive and such. But mostly you had either inline or sidewinder.

Towards the end of the 1960's, I do believe it was 1968, a racer from California brought something to his local raceway that changed commercial slot racing forever. Gene Husting built the first anglewinder - a motor set on about a 16 degree offset to the rear axle. This allowed a smaller spur gear to be used, thus smaller rear tires. The manufactures jumped all over this and even today, the majority of slot cars sold in commercial raceways all employ the anglewinder drive configuration.

It took longer than I figured it would for the anglewinder to find it's way to the smaller scale of car, but it has arrived and many people are seeing the benefit of this design. The only thing I wish is that we had an anglewinder that used the same motor as the inline and sidewinder configurations so we could do some real comparisons. But for unknown reasons, that just does not seem to have happened.

So the angled motor has been around for quite some time - at least in the commercial slot car raceway arena.

Why it has not been around home racing types of cars, I have no answer for.

On another note: What about the work that the fine folks at Devis3Designs is doing? They are coming out with some very interesting bits and pieces. At present they have a product line that allows you to build the equivalent of an HRS2 chassis for much less money using their parts.

I see new things (innovations) coming out each day. Don't you agree?

For 1/32nd cars there is little advantage to the anglewinder setup beyond the fact that long can motors can be used. With anglewinder setups it is more likely that you will get hop and chatter, Ninco cars are famous for that. Running with traction magnets does tend to minimize or even eliminate that problem, but my club runs strictly on wood tracks where traction magnets are just extra weights. Long can motors tend to have more torque than you can use without traction magnets and most of them do not have linear power delivery.
The hobby needs fairly inexpensive cars that run well without having to fiddle with them. Expensive aftermarket parts do not necessarily make a car a lot faster, most of the time the improvement will be incremental. If you only do casual running a reduction in lap times of a few tenths of a second is not very important, if you enter your cars in formal races even a few hundredths of a second improvement might be a cause for celebration.

Wow!can you imagine having a modern track like that nearby?

I had not one but 2 of them nearby. Not quite as big...but close.

About as much fun as watching paint dry for me. But it was a hoot to watch folks try it.