by Florida_Slotter » Wed Mar 19, 2014 4:22 am
I'm very happy to hear that someone has taken up where Revell-Monogram has stopped.
I must say their McLaren M6A, Lola T70 Spyder and Chaparral 2A are cars that I am very interested in, well at least the bodies.
Interestingly, all 3 of these cars have completely different styles of chassis under them. Chaparral uses the Sebring chassis with an inline FF80 motor, the Lola uses a sidewinder FC 130 motor and the McLaren uses an anglewinder configuration with an FC130 motor.
Thus far my biggest challenge to make run properly was the Chaparral. I wanted to upgrade the car, put real bushings (SCC) in the rear, Slot.It gears, axles and wheels and make it run as smooth as possible. Well I was not thinking about the disparity in the motor centerline to the rear axle centerline. I simply assumed that I could use a Slot.It offset gear and no issues. Wrong. A trick I used to use in retro racing made it all work.
I assembled the rear end components and then hooked up the bench power supply with a supplied voltage of 4.0 volts. The gears were very noisy and the motor was drawing .38 amps. I got out my handy dandy Radio Shack Micro Torch and fired it up. Then I started to apply heat to the crown gear, all the time listening to the gear mesh and watching the current draw. As the crown gear warmed up, it got nice and quiet and the current draw went down to .08 amps. After removing the heat source, I let the assembly run for about 20 seconds and then shut it down. When I put the chassis on the track, it was very quiet and smooth running. I might be wrong, but I do believe it was a bit quicker on my test track, but I will wait until an official test session running against other cars.
Both my McLaren and Lola have received chassis upgrades. The McLaren now has a Slot.It M8 chassis under it and the Lola an HRS2 chassis. Both are sidewinders and run very well and very smooth.
Looking forward to seeing what PM will do. I have to concur with Harry on this. I do believe that PM will continue the product line as is. Development costs are quite high and I really do not see a good return on investment. But at least we will still have the products available to the hobby.
Thanks Professor Motor.