I ran the following article about these cars in the April 2004 issue of the NSCC Journal - may be of interest.
Norman Griffiths oversaw Scalextric production from 1964-1971. Now in his 80s, he gives us an intriguing insight into the problems he encountered when he first arrived at Havant.
Paul Strange reports
Part 3 - the Formula Junior pile-up
Until February 1964, Norman Griffiths had mainly worked on Rovex train production, but all this was about to change dramatically. He'd already had some dealings with Scalextric, including setting up the Calais factory around 1962, but nothing hinted at what was to come on the Scalextric front and the vast problems he would be asked to solve.
An unexpected phone call from one of Lines Brothers' top brass was to send him scurrying down to a hotel in Emsworth just outside Havant near Portsmouth and a meeting the following day with the managing director of Minimodels. Much to his amazement, Norman had been appointed the new general manager of Scalextric, but there was little time to celebrate. One of the reasons for his sudden appointment became crystal-clear as soon as he entered the Scalextric factory. The Formula Juniors (the C66 Cooper and C67 Lotus) were high-volume lines and the cornerstone of Scalextric's early-60s success. Much to Norman's astonishment, he discovered a mountain of returned Formula Junior sets, piled high in the repair department, and it was his job to sort it out.
"There were 30,000 returns on the Formula Juniors alone!", he says, as we chat at his home in Broadstairs, Kent. "Can you imagine - 30,000 returns! It was dreadful! In fact, I reckon for nearly every Formula Junior set they sent out, one came back! I arrived in February and the rejects from Christmas were still being stacked high in the repair department. There was no organisation whatsoever - it was diabolical. They had a big moulding shop, all the things were there that you needed, but there was poor organisation."
Norman discovered the returned sets had common faults. "The Formula Junior motor was going very badly when I arrived... it was diabolical. There was also a problem with the crown wheel being sheared from over- enthusiastic acceleration. And the original hand controller burned out repeatedly and was very, very finicky."
Norman realised that much of the motor's weakness originated in its manufacture, in particular its slim shaft. "Like the larger RX motor, the Junior motor was made in-house. The shaft was only 1/16th inch diameter, compared with 3/30th inch for the RX motor. When the motor was made, the shaft was fed into a press tool and the armature was stamped out around it and stacked up until it was completed. A tenth of a thou difference meant that the armature didn't fit, or if it was 1/10,000th inch smaller, then the shaft sheared and it was loose. I experimented with the windings on the armature. As far as I was concerned, it was just trial and error. Lots of improvements were made to the motor in this way.
"The old hand throttles were eventually ditched because they used to burn out very easily. And, initially, the new ones weren't too brilliant either! I was only involved in the original hand throttles for a short time; the original design was on the way out as I came into Scalextric. They evolved into the trigger type which was easier to manufacture."
Gradually improvements to the motor, the crown wheel and the hand throttle began to pay dividends. "It took three months to clear the initial backlog of repairs, but the proof of the pudding was that after my first year the returns of Formula Juniors began to go down."
The Formula Junior went on to become one of Scalextric's biggest sellers, and blossomed into an increased range of vehicles, such as the C72/C85 BRM, the C73/C86 Porsche 804, the C81 Cooper and the C82 Lotus. To meet the high production demand, some of the Formula Junior components were made by outside firms. "The braided pick-ups were always a problem," says Norman. "The tension on the pick-up was very important and it depended upon the manufacture of the braid. Some of them were very firm, but occasionally you'd get a batch in made of a softer braid and they'd fray more easily, and consequently you got shorting. It was very easily overcome, but when you're volume manufacturing, it was easy for slightly sub-standard braid to go through and then you've got problems on your hands with 300-400 cars going through before you know it."
They had few problems with the bodies, though. "The people we used a lot to mould the Junior body - and many other Scalextric bodies during this period - were Riverhead Tools, based at Riverhead in Kent. They'd made lot of railway bodies for us in the past and we were impressed with the detail and quality and their price, which was very good."
Apart from the braids, the body and the sintered magnet (made from steel that had been heated, powdered, compressed and had no grain in it), the bulk of the Formula Junior - including the guide assembly, gearbox and windscreen - was made in-house. Once manufactured, the drivers' heads were sent outside for painting.
"We had herds of people from the local estate and they'd come in with their shopping bags and whatnot to pick up the heads. It was too much bother to paint them in-house. Someone would take away say a thousand heads and they'd paint the helmets, goggles and all that sort of thing - the minute detail - and then they'd come back."
With many of the Formula Junior sets being sold mail-order, robust packaging was also vital to the operation. Minimodels used a local firm, Drings of Portsmouth, to design and supply this packaging. It was Drings that came up with the classic boxtop artwork, yellow cardboard interiors and chequered-flag inlay cards that are a distinctive hallmark of the early 60s sets, such as the glorious V3 Vintage Car set, the highly sought-after GK-1 Go-Kart set, and later on, the humble set 45, with the battling front-wheel drive C76 Mini Coopers. The boxes were built as tough as possible to survive the rigours of the postal service.
To test a prototype for a new set, Scalextric staff would fill the box with track, cars, hand controllers and so on, seal it up, hurl it high up in the air and allow it to crash to the ground. This extraordinary behaviour was repeated several times, then the contents of the box were inspected for damage to see what might happen to a boxed set in transit. "We were impressed with the quality of Drings' work," says Norman. "Every time we had a new set, a new design was ordered and was tested in this manner. Our own packing people tested them and I certainly had a go - gleefully! And development were always there to see what was going on. I don't recall many returns due to the boxes collapsing."
To produce a high volume model like the Formula Junior and to keep costs to a minimum, speed of manufacture was paramount. "Once all the component parts were ready, you're talking literally minutes to build a Formula Junior. We operated a flow-line - similar to the ones used in regular car factories. We would have maybe 20 girls sitting either side of a moving belt, one to put in the motor, another to put on the wheels, the body caps, and so on. At the end of the line there was a quality inspector, checking the finished products. A whole car could be completed in two to three minutes. The assembly was all done on a bonus system. It was all piecework that wouldn't be allowed today."
Having solved its teething problems, reduced the repair pile to a minimum and meeting the large production targets that his bosses required, Norman became very fond of the Formula Junior.
"I always liked the big volume cars. The other cars seemed a bit pedantic when they were going round, whereas with the Formula Junior you could smack it round the track and they were always a great deal of fun. With the steering you could manage to slew it round a corner and get quite a good skid with it. And of course when we had a competition in the family or elsewhere, I would try to make myself a motor which gave a little bit more speed - never with any certainty, may I add! Just a ten-thousandth of an inch was the difference between a good and a bad motor.
"Scalextric made a lot of money on the Formula Juniors. It was nice to be associated with that, because the car was such a pig when I first got there."
Brian
