Bill’s Nostalgia Corner

Part 1

My car racing began in the early 1960’s (gee that really makes me sound old) with slot cars. By the early 1970’s the slot car tracks began to disappear quickly. As I packed them up over the years they occasionally would come back out when some friends suggested there was a track still around. I mention slot cars because of something later in the early R/C days (the Resistor).

After graduating from college, moving, and buying my first Datsun 240Z, I met my roommate of 6 years. He got me interested in motorcycles (dirt bikes).  My front tooth is still cracked from one of my many afternoon rides in the sand dunes behind the apartments. Again what does this have to do with R/C cars, you’ll see. Actually as a member of FTR (Florida Trail Riders) I’ve gone to many places very near to where I’ve also raced R/C cars. Almost every trip to an R/C race reminds me of my FTR days. Also, one of the guys that became the FTR president or maybe he was on the board of directors also became our region director and later the ROAR president Eric Grudger.

Anyway, back to my R/C parts of this article. I got my second Datsun, a 280ZX, and became friends with my brother’s twin roommates at his house. They were into the R/C cars. Every time I’d talk with them they would try to get me to go to the indoor basketball court they raced on every month. I wasn’t too interested, as I was still pretty heavy into motorcycle racing. It was also at this time I met my ex-wife, the motorcycle racing was a little too dangerous for her. Besides, most of my friends had been hurt worse than I ever had. My only injuries were a concussion on Thanksgiving Day, a broken toe, and a broken collarbone. It also helped that the last bike I got was a joke- Bultaco Frontier 350. It wasn’t any fun racing an enduro and having to carry extra gas to make the gas stop. Besides it was really dangerous. It was either running out of gas or the motor would seize up. It was during this time I took a trip to the hobby shop where one of the twins worked.

I got a Focke Wolfe 190 plane. The following week I got a call about the Leisure Car and Associated, mentioned in my other articles. That Airplane box sat underneath my table for many years. I almost started to build it several times. I ended up selling it back to the same hobby shop years later. Anyway, I choose a 1/12th  Leisure car with an electronic speed controller. It also had the best charger available, it was digital with a timer. This was in late July, 1979. I took the car to my bothers house, so he could install something that did not come with the car, a dif. That was an option part (can you imagine driving a 1/12th car with a straight axle) and it was invented by Schumacher. So it was time to try it out. My friend drove it out in the street and gave me the controls after warning me about the water puddle. Within a minute I found the water puddle in the street and pop went the speed controller. Now I had a choice to make as my friend was going into the Army the next month. I had no clue of how to fix the car. Now remember earlier I mentioned slot cars, here is the connection. While I sent the speed controller back to Leisure to fix it, he installed the other way to get the power to the motor. It was a servo with a wiper arm resistor. The tricks to the wiper arm were just like slot cars with the different ohm resisters and they were big. Later Parma came out with the lightweight resisters which was the thing to have. They also had different ohms for quicker response. Got to go lighter- sound familiar?

Now when we got a radio hit it was either one of two bad things; the arm would go to wide open, or if you were lucky it would stop quickly. After your car had stopped (hopefully off the resistor- otherwise it was wide open) then you had to try to touch the hot resister and get the wiper arm back on the resister. Boy what fun! Radio wise there was the Futaba Brown box. Just trying to get the wiper throw correct along with the steering servo was a chore. Delta came out with this little knob thing resistor, that if you looked at it hard it would move. But it was the thing that everyone had to have.  There was also something on the side of the radio for a throttle stop. At a state race you could always hear someone complaining about someone messing with the knob on their radio all the time. That is a story for a later time.

How about motors in the beginning. You know those Mabuchi 540 sealed things that comes in a Tamiya kit. That was it, no changing brushes. They were sealed cans and it was against the rules to open them up. If you did it was not to be used again in a race. Now the modified motors did have a removable endbell, but you still could not do anything about brushes. There were no varieties of compounds to use. Some of the tricks of the trade with those motors were known by some. You could advance the timing of the motor (it was illegal). After it was done you would probably dump before the end of the 8 minutes or break the windings. The other trick was to water dip the motors to break in the brushes. This was done by dipping the motors in ice cold water while running it for 5-10 seconds one way and then 5 second the other. Pull the motor out get all the water out spray with motor cleaner and oil. Now the other trick was if you were friends with the right guys they had a magnet zapper. The guys in Tampa and Miami had one. They were all homemade.

Now, as a side bar, one of the funniest tricks played on everyone at a big race (not at the time). It was the 1983 Bolink Spring Championships in Atlanta. Bolink water dipped every one of the motors and did not tell anyone until the end of the race on Sunday. So everyone messed up their motors by water dipping them again – including me. All during that weekend everyone was complaining about their motors.   Heck after everyone removed most of the brush compound and there was no adjustment for the brush tension– Oh well that’s racing.

So this is a general idea of what we did in the beginning. I’ll go into more specifics about charging- gears a motor ahead of it’s time and batteries on the next segment.