Looking for info

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Looking for info

Postby BARC 1 » Thu Dec 29, 2016 10:20 am

I am thinking about doing some scratch building in HO scale,but needed some info on what scale "HO" really is . 1/87 is what I think HO means in trains, but I have a feeling HO slot cars are more like 1/64 in general.

Can someone shed some light on this for me

Cheers

Dan
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Re: Looking for info

Postby chrisguyw » Thu Dec 29, 2016 12:16 pm

Hi Dan,....You are correct!!. True HO scale is 1/87, and, this is the scale used by all the HO train folks. HO cars however, are actually 1/64 scale. At the time, 1/87 was just a bit too small for the car manufacturers of the time (Faller/Aurora etc.) to fit all the running gear under such a tiny body shell. The 1/64 size/scale has continued on to this day for the HO "autos".

Cheers
Chris Walker
Last edited by chrisguyw on Thu Dec 29, 2016 1:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Looking for info

Postby BARC 1 » Thu Dec 29, 2016 1:40 pm

OK thanks Chris

I may build a 1/64 scale car for the HRW scratch build challenge, and before I got started I wanted to make sure I had the right scale to build to before I start.

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Re: Looking for info

Postby RichD » Fri Dec 30, 2016 8:21 am

Few "HO" cars are 1/64th scale, if the were they would be too wide to fit on standard set type track. HO cars average in the 1/70s for the most part. If you want to take a shot at scratch building bodies they will have to fit existing chassis, unless you are going to build those as well. If you were racing the maximum width of the car would have to be 1.3125 inches. Usually you would start with the wheelbase of the chassis that you are using and make the body fit that. Most of the time you would have to shrink or stretch some of the dimentions, so the body would not be a consistant scale, no matter what scale you were shooting for. There is also a sort of perspective problem when you shrink a body, often if the body is kept perfectly to scale it will not look right, so modelers sometime make adjustments to compensate for that effect.
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Re: Looking for info

Postby BARC 1 » Fri Dec 30, 2016 1:16 pm

I bought some M2 Diecast 1/64 scale cars, They are all smaller then the one HO car I still have, so from what I see I think HO cars are more like 1/60 when compared to the M2 diecasts, However I never got out the calipers and checked out the wheel base against the prototypes, so it could be the M2 cars are smaller then 1/64

So I think my first HO scratch build will be a 55 chev modifed stocker that will allow me to open the wheel wells up a bit.

Cheers

Dan
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Re: Looking for info

Postby RichD » Sat Dec 31, 2016 8:28 am

You should compare the wheelbase to that of the 1:1 car. It is possible that the diecast maker puts different bodies on the same chassis. That would be more likely to happen with the smaller scales I believe. I have a few resin bodies that are pops of diecast bodies and for the most part they do not fit HO chassis very well.
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