Stoner, I can't take
all any of the credit for the hot glue fix, one of our club guys discovered it by acccident one night a few years back when we had only just set up our club, when he accidentally ran some over a front axle.... was about to clean it off and found it wasn't stuck to the axle itself and ... "shoot, thats a more stable front end" the rest as they say ... is history.
Dave -
Here's a short video I shot, showing a few of these on my non-magnet braided wood track. Just to give you some better idea of what I am talking about. It is 4.8 metres long, 19.2 metres running length on most lanes.
It uses a gloss surface - very resilient water-based clear "floor clear" designed for wooden floors - over acrylic paint, woollen roller finish, and works with soft rubber tyres or silicon equally well. - We run our tracks "clean" locally, not rubbered up, so we have no issues switching between rubber and silicon tyres. Only provisio on such surfaces is, if you are in a dusty environment, they need regular cleaning.
You could run your track with non-mag cars like this, or have an amount of magnet with your magna-braid track to make the lane changing in particular less disruptive on the cars. - What does Dave of BLST for track rails and magnets?
I plan to run a pack of these as house cars on the new oXigen track. I can mess with the supply voltage to the rails a fair bit to tame them for lesser skilled drivers, or pump it up to as high as 15V for experienced guys. - oXigen components are pretty robust and can live with a range of voltages.
We have a bunch of guys in Auckland running an oXigen system at 15V permanantly, on Slot.it cars with red-bell motors and race magnets.
So they are pulling around 1.5 amps at peak per car, 22 watts at 15V.
If you look at the pictures I posted earlier, you'll see an unbraced one with standard NC-1 motor - that's fine at that power, but by the time they get to NC-5, the twisting forces of the motor induces chassis twist, and they judder a bit, even with the slop in the rear axle to bush fixed. With a higher powered motor like the NSR 25K King, pretty much undrivable at pace unless the chassis is longitudinally braced, not to mention that if you fix the grip with any combination of loose body for tipping load in corners, decent glued and trued tyres and removing the slop present in the standard 2.48mm mechanics axle, they
a) Hop like a hare in the gunner's sights
Will eventually start throwing the motor clean out of the mounts if not glued or screwed in place.
c) I have popped more than one axle bush out because it was the only thing left to give when the torque/twisting forces on an unbraced chassis, so they need glueing in too.
d) when that lot is fixed, the dark blue one you saw was outrunning Slot.it and NSR cars on one of our local track last year, and they were all shod with the same 2 ranges of tyres - Slot.it S2s, lathe trued, or NSR Ultlra-grips similarly prepared. Best times on that 52 foot track with 5 corners were around 3.65 seconds ie, a bit over 14 feet [3.7 metres] a second, which isn't sleepy for non mag racing.
They aren't a sophisticated design, but they can be made to go very well. That blue one needs work right now, hasn't had any maintenance in recent months, and I notice it has started shedding tyre rubber when I picked it up to video it tonight, just ripping it off the outside edges.
[ the problem of having 200 runners in my stable, and loaning cars to newer club members every week, plus "proxy" cars to build for race series here and overseas. Never enough time.....
The boxer motors like NC-5 being centre mounted, I don't feel they unduely affect front/rear balance.
Unless the track surface and conditions are known, weight addition or subtraction cannot be ascertained, but the motor doesn't cause the car to slide - lack of trueness, poor front/rear balance, poor vertical weight, and general lack of tyre adhesion cause a car to slide.
I think the front axle slop you are concerned about is not lateral movement, it is the ability of the axle to move up and down vertically, which is not a good, stable platform. So any of the suggestions in the earlier post could be used. - I confess I use hot-glue a lot, not because it is the best method, but because it is "cheap, quick and dirty"
I forgot to include some things
1) Make sure you use soft braids, set as low as practical for any track, I don't have any problem with spring guides, I think guys on plastic track suffer more as the bumps between sections set up a bit of bounce on those guide springs. You can try the car with the spring in, and without the spring, it's a good learning exercise.
2) Run your body screws "quite" loose - up to 2 turns backed off of tight - you may need to go to longer screws if your cars have the short 4mm ones.
3) Screwneck's post reminded me, I have sometimes added a couple of grams weight right forward - "Blu-tac" is useful for this, as it can be moulded, and amounts added and removed quickly to help stabilise the nose if you feel it is still "flighty" at all.
