For the track testing the car has an Anchor front end, CNC wheels with slip-on Super Tires, a CNC machined crown gear, Slottech shoes, Oogan shoe springs and a resin Toyota Supra Fray type body. The gears have been lapped. To start out the car had a Dash 2 lamination 16 ohm armature. It is still 77°C (25°C) down in the basement , the track is in the oval configuration and I used the red lane which is 35 feet long. The track voltage was set at 18.5 volts. All of the new arms were polished a bit before they were installed. I gave the ones that I put in the car a spin on my magnetic balancer, those were all very good, one of them was perfectly balanced, it spun for over a minute before it finally stopped. Here are the results:
Except for #5 the 16-3 arms were a tenth faster than the 16-2 arm that was in the car at the start. With the 16-2 arms I had to add a thin spacer on top to keep the winds from rubbing on the bottom of the comm plate, that is also the case with most of the 16-3 arms. I ran a facing tool with 1500 grit paper over the #1 arm, that wears out quickly without removing much material, so the com is probably not quite perfect, but the lap times dropped from 3.091 to 2.869 seconds. In the past when I faced off a few 16-2 arms the lap times also dropped a little.
I only have one spare Tornado arm on hand, or I would have seen what that would do for a comparison. I did run an ASRL Camaro around and that did a 2.783, I was running out of gas by then or I might have done better. That car had $120 worth of parts not including the body. Tornado arms were $28 while you could still get them.
The Dash 16-3 arms seem to be a bit faster than the older 16-2 arms, they are a bargain at $6.99 each or 10 for $49.99. A fully worked up Dash 16-3 might be as fast as a really good worked up Aurora arm.
