First look: Scaleauto Honda HSV-010

[SuperSlab]

With no intent of stealing Cosmic Rob’s thunder on his promised upcoming review… but I did have mine at the track last night and it impressed me enough to want to at least give a “sneak peek” of my impressions.

Note that I received the car last week and took it to the track on New Year’s day (the principal reason for going to the track was to have my grandson try out his Carrera 512BB!). At that time I had only done some basic (but critically important!) preparation to the car. This included:

 Glue & true tyres (urethanes)
 Adjusted front axle height.
 Basic blueprinting and lubrication.
 Some pod and body float.

I must say the first outing on Tuesday was a bit disappointing: the car felt a bit rough and noisy and was rather slidey. The result was a best lap of around 8.2 seconds: nowhere near what I was hoping for.

So back to the workbench: I had done a few tweaks to the earlier Scaleauto Mercedes very successfully so I intended repeating some of them and adding a bit:

 The new Scaleauto cars have “tabs” on the body that line up with some screw holes in the chassis. They also provide some grub screws to allow adjustment of body height/movement. On the Mercedes I corrupted their design and glued small pieces of foam on the tabs: this allows dampened movement with the added advantage of quieting things down. This worked out extremely well on the Mercedes... so I did the same with the Honda.
 Weight: the Honda is very light: I felt this probably contributed to the sliding. I added a 7g wheel balancing weight to the car: cut in half, each half glued to the body basically on the inside of the doors (if that makes sense!).
 Fine-tuned front ride height.
 Taped the pod to dampen movement.

So off to the track on Friday…. And what an improvement!!!! The car was stable, quiet and very, very quick. Best lap: 7.746 seconds! This is a very, very quick lap and puts it in my top ten. The top ten looks as follows:

7.531 Audi R8 NSR
7.552 Mosler KRM NSR
7.592 Porsche Spyder AvantSlot
7.619 Porsche 917 Gunston NSR
7.635 Lola T70 Spyder Blue Proxy Revell-Monogram with HRSII chassis
7.745 Ford GT Mk IV NSR
7.746 Honda HSV 10 ScaleAuto
7.77 Mercedes SLS GT3 ScaleAuto
7.782 McLaren F1 GTR FINA Slot.it (New anglewinder release)
7.807 Ford P68 NSR

Some pretty exalted company! Two issues did surface:

i) The eyelet pulled out of the guide. This without any undue incidents or anything. I will have to take a look at that: perhaps just too loose?
ii) Body screws kept falling out! They are too loose a fit in the body post. I will do my old trick of dribbling some Superglue in the post and swizzling it around with a paper clip and allow it to set. This typicaly “grips” the screw very nicely indeed (if you get the amount of glue right!).

All in all: a great car from Scaleauto!

[HomeRacingWorld]

More info the better. Good stuff. Thanks for taking the time to share it.

[Cosmic Bilby]

Yeah,

Just finished it, its a very nice model.

Its got a nice balance to it (no mag/no weight), the stock motor in it is a hooter, if I were going to try running it on our small Scaley Sport layout for club racing, serious face racing I'd put a milder motor in it....

...Since I'm not and most guys won't the stock motor will be lovely on a larger sized club track.

And doesn't the chassis get the power down well!

Pity about the limited magnet option though with the standard pod :(

[Dangermouse]

I have to wait until Wednesday for mine. Looking forward to it checking it out.

I will try your tuning tips on the Honda and my Merc

cheers
David

[Cosmic Bilby]

Its a very nice thing, and the prototype is a HONDA :)





A very aggressive thing....

[Cosmic Bilby]

OK Guys,

Bit of a change of plans with this review, wont have a chance to complete due to unforeseen factors....

....In a nutshell its a great car if you are prepared to run non-magnet with it out of the box. With magnet it pretty much sucks (2.3 second lap after tuning), thats well off the pace for a good magnet set-up.

Without mag its a totally different ballgame, best lap of 2.7 seconds after tuning!

This is with PGT's and a little messing with pod tension.

I found it a hoot, really good quality and wouldn't hesitate to recommend Scaleauto to anyone interested in a "race" quality offering.

Perhaps not as schmick as NSR or Slot.it, but certainly very very nice.

[Dangermouse]

Received mine today

Beautiful