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Chassis ( To Light ? )


Peter Gunn

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Noticed a thread about flattening NSR chassis , and it gave me pause for a couple of thoughts.

I have always thought in slot car racing you need your weight as low as possible and one of the biggest masses is the chassis, now i have found that plastic chassis have got lighter and much more flexible, and over the last couple of years i have started buying a hard chassis for my later cars and it has improved them no end on both plastic track and wood.

I like many others end up weighing the chassis to improve performance which in my book means the original chassis could have been made heavier to start with cutting out much of the flexing , ok i still use added weight in certain parts of the chassis , but i have a stiffer base to start with.

Now spacifics i bought a Sideways Hurecan and loved the look and the gulf livery but oh dear that chassis was in my opinion way to thin , and on my Carrera track and on a wood track the car was lacking a lot in the handling dept which affected the overall performance.

I purchased a heavy chassis for the car think around £8-30p transferred all the gear from the original chassis and put the same amount of weight into the chassis as i had the original trying to improve it, and gave the car set up the same to a friend to test on his wood track .

The answer i got back from him was , and i quote what a differance nearly a second a lap quicker and so stable when being pushed through corners, thought great will it work on my plastic Carrera track and yep it certainly did , so predictable started giving my modified Thunderslots a hard time on the track.

My personal conclusion is that we need a harder chassis as standard to be fitted in the higher end of the market cars , it,s ok making them as a spare part but it is another cost on top of the initial outlay on the car.

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Keith I think the Manufacrurers are making the chassis more flexible to suit the fast Euro tracks.

Like you I have found that many of the chassis’s are too flexible for the smaller tight handling tracks.

But on larger more open style tracks these flexible chassis seem to work.

 

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Strange you say that. On my very tight technical wood track the Thunderbolt Lola with a 14k jack rabbit in the standard flexible chassis (soft) is absolutely the fastest car in my collection.

I’ve raced metal chassis (wire/brass and steel) since the 1970’s on fast commercial tracks where the float is controlled and the chassis are longitudinally stiff are faster than the soft plastic.

 

I think the move to more flexible chassis with tuneable motor pods is a good one for fast running, and note that flex really helps with grip on tight undulating tracks.

 

Perhaps there are other factors I’ve missed in the difference between the two, but I’m moving to much softer and flexible chassis to stay competitive nowadays...

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Keith I think the Manufacrurers are making the chassis more flexible to suit the fast Euro tracks.

Like you I have found that many of the chassis’s are too flexible for the smaller tight handling tracks.

But on larger more open style tracks these flexible chassis seem to work.

 

They do make the chassis as most suited to continental tracks, where the bulk of the slot car world lives, but the answer lies less in the size, more in the construction. It is more about the giving nature of the plastic tracks, and hence a lot of cars come with soft chassis and medium pods.

For wood racing, perversely when there is no give in the track, we remove the "give" in the chassis and pod and that works.

 

I raced a teams event with an unweighted Slot.it LMP on a very large Ninco track, It had a medium pod in an angle winder setup, that had as much sideways slop as possible - which we would expect to stuff the mesh, but the builder said it was to stop it binding when everything was hot - (at least I think that is what he said, his english was a bit limited) AND unglued tyres just popped on the rims, then replaced every 6- 8 hours as they wore out, it seemed EVERYTHING was the opposite of what we consider good setup.

 

But we were lapping 17 seconds for around 270 feet running length including some nasty, nasty let me repeat, NASTY R1 curves 50 feet from the driver station, and the thing handled brilliantly.

So "Marco from Gubbio" obviously knows a lot of things I don't .... We finished 6th of 16 teams despite two stoppages to fix our only controller.

 

That said, I do like a bit of weight, especially on sidewinder and angle winder cars, plant the nose, and some in the pod.

 

Strangely, on my wood track, I have just set up a Huracan using the stock chassis, pod and tyres (glued and trued), with only about 5 grams weight in the nose, and it is planted like a gum tree.

I don;'t think I even put softer braids into it.

Recovering Lapsed Slot Addict :ph34r:  *  Custodian of many used screws (mostly loose :rolleyes:)  *  Total kidder  *  Companion of other delusional slot addicts :lol:  

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