For smooth Wooden tracks I prefer front wheels touching with no vertical movement.
For plastic front wheels touching with some vertical movent.

Touching is just that, barely making contact. I'm sure you will get many different answers to your question........

Regards

Alan

 

Depends on the car from my experiens

Cars like NINCO I find need to be touching the track and benifit from a stabilized front axle (using bearings). They become more stable and do not tend to fish tail under acceleration.

We engineered slot cars like NSR are fine with the front axle bearly touching the track with some vertical float

At our club it is a rule that all cars must have atleaset 90% of the front tyres touching the track but most try and reduce the grip by using nail pollish or super glue.

Following best practice at our club I tend to build up the super glue on the front wheels then ture them again and finish with a wet/dry sand paper to give the fronts a hars pollished finish.

Ray

 

I used to be of the opinion that it was better to not have the front wheels touching but my fastest cars had the wheels touching the ground. So I had to reassess my ideas. I have the front wheels slightly sloppy in the front. About 0.5-0.75mm slop. I have them set up so that they are barely touching the track and have some upward movement. They only come into play when the car starts to tip and the front wheels finally load up.

There is an upside and a down side to this setup. With this set up imagine a triangle being made from the rear wheels to the flag pivot. As you corner the CofG of the car moves laterally outward until it goes beyond the boundary of the triangle. At this point the car starts to tip and as it does the front wheels bite. We no longer have a triangle. It is now a rectangle from each corner of the outer wheelsl. As soon as this happens the CofG will once again be inside the limits of the now rectangle. The car will stop tipping. As soon as it stops tippping we are back to a triangle etc etc.

The up side is that you have a very good mechanism that tells you when you are right on the limit. The down side is that the car is very bouncy right on the limit as it oscillates between triangle and rectangle. I drive so that the car is just inside this limit. As soon as it starts to bounce I know Ive gone past the limit, however it is very forgiving and deslots are uncommon for me as the onset of bounce indicates that the car is not going to go any faster, so I back off a tiny amount.

This is my personal preference. A lot of drivers cant cope with or do not like bounce at the limit.

cheers
rick1776

 

Peter r
Again it would be nice to know were you are, and what type of cars you race.
Are you a club racer, or just home, the responce is different as to what you are allowed to do, at home anything goes, if club racer then the rules of the club apply.
there are zero grip front tyres on sale in the UK, from fly, (I would imagine they are available were ever you are), most scalex clubs will allow these and some will allow the super glue trick, (but certainly not all), and the choice of front wheels is normally free. You are not normally allowed to adapt the amount of movement on the front axle, but you can change the guide flag for the spring loaded ones, and the car should sit flat on the track, with the braids laid flat, the softer the braid the better, as this can provide lift, the car will tip slightly on the guide and the front wheels should move upwards to the full hight of their travel, the trick is not to get that far, because the car will deslot.

Regards

Zen

 

Ok now, I am currently working on the NSR Mosler and it seems that the car, out of the box, is very low in the front. The tail is very very happy and the nose is scraping the bumpy SCX track. I recently converted the car to anglewinder, but the stance of the car is the same. So what I did (in both A/W and S/W configurations), was to use a few shims under the guide to raise the chassis a bit in the front. Now the front wheels are too far from the track, plus the vertical play is very little. I filed the holes of the front axle on the S/W chassis, but I am unwilling to do the same on the A/W. Is this a correct way to short the front end, or should I simply use higher profile front tires ?

 

this is a question that comes up quite often on sf and uptill the beginning of this year I would have recomended all cars to be set with the wheels clear of the deck by about 5-10 thou but Ive revised my thoughts a little with the rules that are apearing for some events .In particular the 1.5 litre proxy which requires 3mm clearance under the chassis ,for this I have the wheels touching but I make sure the wheels are independantly rotating ,for the other events such as the lemans classic where i can run lower Irevert to my normal practice of 5-10 thou but again with independant wheels .I think the clearance is more critical when running a solid axle due to the drag in the corners which slows the car down even when usng zero grip fronts

 

The universal answer to this question is that there is no universal answer.
Different cars and conditions work best with different set ups. Try different set ups and use whatever works best on your cars in your track conditions.

 

I have had success with the front two tires firmly planted on the track with virtually no vertical movement.
This set up keeps the back tires in a turn to maintain full contact with the track. If the front tires are off the track the car is running like a tricycle and the inside rear tire will lift up off the track in turns. I use the
axle blocks available at SlotCarCorner to set up my Scaley Sharpie Nascar this way. These blocks have set
screws at the top and bottom of a slot to set the best axle height. This a link to some pics and reviews of
the blocks: http://p071.ezboard.com/fnortheastslotcars...topicID=4.topic

Brian

 

QUOTE (timkoul @ 11 May 2007, 08:29) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>Ok now, I am currently working on the NSR Mosler and it seems that the car, out of the box, is very low in the front. The tail is very very happy and the nose is scraping the bumpy SCX track. I recently converted the car to anglewinder, but the stance of the car is the same. So what I did (in both A/W and S/W configurations), was to use a few shims under the guide to raise the chassis a bit in the front. Now the front wheels are too far from the track, plus the vertical play is very little. I filed the holes of the front axle on the S/W chassis, but I am unwilling to do the same on the A/W. Is this a correct way to short the front end, or should I simply use higher profile front tires ?

I had the same proble on Ninco track. I fitted a couple of shims, then the front wheels didn't touch the track.
Rather than file the chassis, I fitted a pair of 19mm zero grip tyres. Works very well. I had to trim the rear of the headlight mouldings slightly.