How to make a car run ~30% faster and/or reduce clearance.

[jhrico]

This may be pretty obvious for most here but still I wanted to see how much faster this would make a Carrera Mustang and what it would look like, too.



The lowered car was 30% faster -with tires and wheels closer to scale. (This was in a fig 8 track.)
So, the trick is to use smaller wheels (Artin in this case) and to further lower the body by shaving the mounting posts.

Next is the unloved "off-road" ALMS Porsche RS Spyder. I like this car's livery very much and think it only takes a bit off effort to fix its main defects: the big tires and wheels giving it the off-road clearance, and the high nose (to allow for running through loops.)




The trick on this one is even simpler: true the tires with a dremel and 40 grit sandpaper, which most self-respecting hobbyists have, then lightly warm up the nose and use flat plyers and straighten it.
The Peugeot 908 is a 1/43 scale diecast. By using this trick we can see that the front wheels and tires are very close to scale; for the rear tires and wheels, the wheels are a bit too big but by truing the tires a bit further they almost look the same circumference as the diecast (of course using wheels the same size as the front fixes the problem.) The nose could have been straightened a millimetre further to lower it to the same level as the diecast. The wheel wells are still somewhat of an issue, but one that can be improved by painting the interior flat black. Now I only wish I had done this to my entry into Dan's proxy... Oh, well, there's always next year...our one can only hope. :angry-soapbox: Well, I also wish that Carrera had done this for me in the first place! And it is also ironic that even with all this lowering if the car had a well-placed slide guide, it could still do the loops! :angry-tappingfoot: :doh: :roll:

[BARC 1]

Yes it is too bad lops are associated with 1:43. I really wish the would drop that. Nice tweaks.

Cheers


Dan

[MikeySlotCars]

I don't want to dismiss the work you did on the mustang but...
I never ever liked to see the old muscle cars with a body that low & with some stupid big wheels that some people do to the real car...

To me it always looks like the car went down because of the suspension broke or looks like a f*in dragsters , if any tire/rubber goes under the wheel well it just look stupidly not right to me even on modern cars

Classic/muscle cars should stay the way it was made , they just look right original IMO
You can always get the car down but when you get too far & the wheel/tire goes under the wheel well then , that is when it looks ugly I really don't like this type of look at all...

Anyhow on your Mustang smaller wheels in the back & an height between the original height & what you did might have been the perfect look ?

I never bought the Go Mustangs because the wheels are too big & the bottom body behind the door is not right compare to the original car it should be straight & not going larger (all the back of the car)...

Mikey

[jhrico]

Yeah, Mikey, I hear you, my wife was the first to say she hated that look and I prefer the original big wheel in the back outside the body. I think it's a matter of tastes but here I wasn't really looking for that low rider look, which would have in fact needed the original wheels, I guess. I was just following the original carrera which has the wheels inside the body but with smaller wheels. It was more of a one to one experiment, just as I was trying to do the same with the Porsche and the Peugeot in terms of clearance and wheel size. If I had done the same with the Mustangs then believe me that I would have achieved the lowrider look because the original mustang already has the big wheels under the body.
All said I think that look is challenging and actually I have wanted to do one just for fun, just not with a muscle car.

[walker]

[pfuetze]

the problem i see on stang are the wheel arches that carrera did for their big wheels.
i will not comment anymore on the offroad porsche, but it is a nice try to make something out of it.
did not we do these things to artin cars years ago?
trueing the wheels down to 14/16 and cutting the body posts?


but adding a SlideGuide or similar should be quite easy, as you still got enough clearance ....

[jhrico]

[pfuetze]

forgive an old man sitting bored on the airport for his strange comments on your nice work ;)

btw i did not comment on the offroader (oh no i did it again, give me a good slap for that;) ) especially, i did comment on the ground clearance in general (general as in general, not even especially on go!cars ;) )

the bent nose works quite well, you are right and please do not get me wrong, but sometimes i am a little like Roland, nitpicky till the end, counting rivets ;). what i can not stand is the shape of the wheel wells that is the result of the bent nose.
i have thrown away started scratchbuilt chassis for not getting the wheel base right and have the wheel wells looking out of shape as a result of that. the dremel is my friend in that way.
i know that that is not doing justice to some efforts made, as i know how hard it is to get the shape right when trying to bend a body into shape. i had that on my DSlot Corvette, which nose was raised only on one side by 2mm. And also on SCX compact Corvette, which body was twisting the chassis in a way the left front wheel was raisey by 1.5mm.
So, hot water, patience and guts to twist to body so far that it will stay in the right shape after twisting it so far that you fear breaking it...

but i got OT again, sorry ...

and yes, lowering the body (and the CoG) will give you a great benefit in car handling, both for magnet and no magnet cars.

have fun,
Peter

[jhrico]

Thanks, Peter, nah, you are advancing 1/43 with your designs and comments. I will send you the gears for the side winder chassis. Oh just one thing, the wheel well not being centered is an optical illusion of the camera and not a result of the bending. But, yes, the wheel well is too large given that the tire size has been reduced to the bare minimum.
Cheers!

[Cjent]

Fun comments!
I used to be picky but any more I make run quicker and I'm happy. Age I guess :0

[walker]

The allowed tyre diameter of an LMP race car is max. 28"
This is 16,54 mm in 1/43.
What diameter are the original tyres of the yellow GO! Porsche LMP ?

Roland

[BARC 1]

I think you have done a good job making the Porsche look better. I am Ok with a compromise on scale if the proportions are the same. I.e the Porsche with scale size tires might look funny with the resulting wheel well gap, so as a compromise once you get the ride height correct maybe it it might be best if we just call it a 1/40 scale car. The human eye can easily pickout proportional inaccuracies between components, but not so good at over all scale if the model presents well, if you know what I mean. My Lotus 40 is actually a 1/40 scale car, but looking at it in pictures you would never notice this, or the scale difference is so small that when parked beside a scale diecast it is pretty hard to pick out it is not 143. So for me I can live with a slight variations in scale vs the alternative of not having any example of the car.

[jhrico]

[jhrico]

[jhrico]