[RichD]

Here is the latest revision of my article on the history of Life-Like cars: Lifelike History Rev 4.pdf
For that article I got information directly from Philippe de Lespinay.
I will have to look more closely at the previous posts to see if there is any new information that might be added to my article.

 

[RichD]

That Leisure Dynamics illustration is interesting because it shows a slide-in guide as opposed to the regular round snap in guides used by all of the cars in my article. The Cox car and the AMRAC KM-2 cars both use the regular guide, why would the KM-1 be different? If you examine the front of the Cox chassis there is a rectangular hole right behind the guide pin holder, with the KM-2 chassis the hole is absent, but there is a slight depression in that place. It appears that the tooling for the chassis had been modified.

 

[RichD]

Maybe there was never a KM-1. In my article I said that Philippe de Lespinay was asked by Cox to do a clone of the Aurora Super G-Plus and all he did was add larger flux condensers. The KM-2 has even larger flux condensers than the Cox. I don't know if Philippe did any work for Leisure Concepts after the KM-2. I just found Philippe's e-mail address, maybe I could contact him.

 

[RichD]

I did send an e-mail to Philippe, hopefully he will reply. I included a link to this thread.

 

[RichD]

Philippe, thanks for your reply, I will make the appropriate corrections to my article.

 

[RichD]

I think that I will let this thread run a little longer before I update my Life-Like article. I would like to include the pictures in posts # 7 and # 18, if that would be OK.
It would be great to have good shots of the KM-1 chassis. I have not seen shots of the chassis that uses a slide-in guide.

 

[RichD]

Question, were the cars that Leisure Dynamics sold still marked with the Cox logo?

 

[RichD]

I did locate a picture of a chassis with a slide-in guide pin. I presume that is the chassis that Philippe designed for Leisure Dynamics, it has the Cox logo. The Cox/Leisure Dynamics sets were only sold in Canada, the cars are likely to be rare today. I have several pictures of Cox Leisure Dynamics sets. Jim Russell seems to have bought the rest of the Cox slot racing business, that did not include the Cox trademark. Since both the Leisure Dynamics and early AMRAC cars both used Cox bodies there must have been some sort of interaction between the two makes. I have not seen a picture of an AMRAC set.

 

[RichD]

Jim Russell would have been the one to ask about AMRAC history.

 

[RichD]

Here is the chassis that I mentioned earlier. It is incomplete, the magnets and flux collectors are missing and the armature is suspect because it appears to be epoxy coated.

The chassis plainly lacks the regular guide pin holder, it is marked Made in Hong Kong and has the Cox trademark that would not have been found on the AMRAC cars.

 

[RichD]

What confused me when I did the first version of my article was that the Leisure Dynamics cars were a dead end in that they did not lead to the AMRAC cars. Leisure Dynamics only bought the Cox trademark, not the tooling. Philippe de Lespiney did new tooling for the Leisure Dynamics cars, when Leisure Dynamics went out of business the tooling was not passed on to anyone else as far as I know. Jim Russell bought the original Cox tooling and that was used for the AMRAC and early Rokar cars. Philippe moved on to other things after his work for Leisure Dynamics, Jim Russell would have been the one to ask about the details of the AMRAC story. Possibly someone that works for Racemasters has more information.
I have updated my article, I will hold off making it available for a while in the hope that more information will turn up, especially with respect to the KM-1 and KM-2 cars. As it stands, I felt obliged to qualify the part of the article referring to those cars.

 

[RichD]

Having pictures of a complete KM-1 chassis should clear things up. I have sent an e-mail to Steve Russell to see if he knows anything about the early history of the AMRAC cars.

 

[RichD]

If you look at the picture of an original Cox car that I included in my Life-Like History article you will see that the stacks have a green coating and the wire is red. Leisure Dynamics may have used the same armatures in their Cox branded cars. Even today most armatures are made by the same company, probably that was the case back in 1981 with both Leisure Dynamics and AMRAC using the same armatures.

 

[RichD]

I can't wait to see what the bottom of a genuine AMRAC KM-1 car looks like. I believe that the KM-2 chassis is marked Made in Hong Kong and AMRAC. The KM-1s may have had Hong Kong blanked out and have had no markings where AMRAC would be. We shall hopefully see.
I suspect that anyone that could tell us what KM stood for can only be contacted using a Ouija board.