Vintage AE Ad -- 1979 RC12E "Go Racing With The Team"

[SteveK]

Kent, Can you tell us something about the evolution of gear pitch from 32 to 64? It was about the same time that the 12L and Losi 64P gear appeared in the WC. It was not easy to accept those tiny teeth by the parking lot racers. Though fine pitch gear was not "invented", it did post a benchmark in electric car design and tuning. How did the fine pitch idea come out at that time?

I'm a little fuzzy on the exact sequence that led to 64 pitch gears. The old 32 pitch extruded pinions were always rough and out of round back then. We spent a lot of time cleaning up the flashing.

The first step should have probably been 48 pitch, especially for outdoor and off-road racing. But for some reason the gear manufacturers jumped on 64 pitch.

When the first 64 pitch gears became available they were not as good as the ones today. The plastic the spur gears was made of was kind of soft and the pinions were a little too rounded. And the motor mount for our AE cars was nylon so you didn't really have a square mesh between the spur/pinion most of the time. The result was stripped gears until they got the spur material dialed in. I think Du-Mor and Kimbrough got it right fairly early. I still have bags full of Du-Mor gears

Don't forget the wonderful 'BK Pitch' gears in the mid 90s. These were 56 pitch gears sold by Trinity or Losi or somebody with Brian Kinwald's name on them. A sound concept, a fine pitch that would mesh smoothly, but would be more durable than 56 pitch gears. Just bad timing, to try and introduce something when there have been standards in place for nearly 20 years, and when there were so many other gears the 56 pitch gears couldn't match with.

[polarbear]

Hummm.
Here is another issue to explore.---- Traction compound.

On the AE newsletter, it was published that oil of wintergreen or WD40 was used. This is not surprising for putting additive on tyres as many were trying to soften the tires , however, who was the first one to put Coppertone on top of the additives
Is it just incidental when someone was racing outdoor in a hot summer?

[Charlie don't surf]

That's funny, I thought I was the only one to buy oil of wintergreen at the drug store--goes to show, anything that can be thought of, has been done by someone else first

[WC1982]

Hummm.
Here is another issue to explore.---- Traction compound.

On the AE newsletter, it was published that oil of wintergreen or WD40 was used. This is not surprising for putting additive on tyres as many were trying to soften the tires , however, who was the first one to put Coppertone on top of the additives
Is it just incidental when someone was racing outdoor in a hot summer?

Ah, traction compound was a fun one.

For 1979 Nor-Cal series I experimented with a bottle of "Beautox" slot car glue that I found in my local hobby shop. Originally everyone thought it would pick up too much dirt, but that wasn't a problem and it definitely added a lot of grip for the critical first half of the race. Back then we ran 10 cars on one starting line, so the extra grip really gave you an advantage.

Fast forward a year or two later and everyone was using slot car glue. I remember a race at The Ranch where some guys were using so much that they would leave 20 foot glue patches on the asphalt and throw spider webs of glue off the tires. It was pretty messy and I think the organizers were worried we'd get kicked out of some of the temporary parking lot tracks because of the glue marks. So they developed the "cottonball test". If a cottonball stuck to the tires you were out, effectively banning the use of slot car glue.

I used to chat with Mike Reedy on the phone every month and in one of our conversations he told me he found a secret tire compound that gave you at least a half lap faster times and still passed the cottonball test. He wouldn't tell me what it was, only that he would give me some for the next race.

The curiosity was killing me so I started testing everything I could find. Water, gojo hand soap, WD40, and every liquid in the (hazardous) chemicals cabinet in our race shop. Amazingly, almost everything seemed to improve the tires. As a joke I told my buddy Al "Chuckman" Chuck that I could find something that wouldn't work, so I grabbed a bottle of Coppertone 4 that happened to be sitting on my workbench. I lathered up a pair of tires and we laughed about it because they were super slippery. But about 30 minutes later I noticed that all of the suntan lotion had been absorbed by the foam tires... and they were super sticky!

The Coppertone 4 worked great in our testing but it had a distinctive smell that was pretty easy to recognize. Coppertone 15 had just come out and it didn't have as much smell, so that's what we ended up using. We kept it a secret for almost a full season, hiding it in all kinds of funny bottles. One guy put it in a mustard bottle and added yellow dye to make it look like mustard, most of us put it in Elmers Glue bottles By the time the secret got out and we started using the real Coppertone bottles, a lot of people didn't believe us when we told them it was really suntan lotion. BTW, Reedy’s secret liquid ended up being TEAC cassette head cleaner.

Suntan lotion worked best outdoors in hot weather, for indoor racing wintergreen was the hot solution. I think they guys in the Midwest were the first to use wintergreen but I don’t know the story of who found it. I just remember searching through my local drugstores looking for something called “Oil of Wintergreen” in preparation for my first indoor race in Cleveland in 1983(?), back when they still overlapped the sections of the carpet on top of each other.

[WC1982]

Check the Beautox sticker on my old faithful pit box. "Beautox - The Glue for Geezers" was the slogan.

[littleVETTE]

Ah, traction compound was a fun one.

For 1979 Nor-Cal series I experimented with a bottle of "Beautox" slot car glue that I found in my local hobby shop. Originally everyone thought it would pick up too much dirt, but that wasn't a problem and it definitely added a lot of grip for the critical first half of the race. Back then we ran 10 cars on one starting line, so the extra grip really gave you an advantage.

Fast forward a year or two later and everyone was using slot car glue. I remember a race at The Ranch where some guys were using so much that they would leave 20 foot glue patches on the asphalt and throw spider webs of glue off the tires. It was pretty messy and I think the organizers were worried we'd get kicked out of some of the temporary parking lot tracks because of the glue marks. So they developed the "cottonball test". If a cottonball stuck to the tires you were out, effectively banning the use of slot car glue.

I used to chat with Mike Reedy on the phone every month and in one of our conversations he told me he found a secret tire compound that gave you at least a half lap faster times and still passed the cottonball test. He wouldn't tell me what it was, only that he would give me some for the next race.

The curiosity was killing me so I started testing everything I could find. Water, gojo hand soap, WD40, and every liquid in the (hazardous) chemicals cabinet in our race shop. Amazingly, almost everything seemed to improve the tires. As a joke I told my buddy Al "Chuckman" Chuck that I could find something that wouldn't work, so I grabbed a bottle of Coppertone 4 that happened to be sitting on my workbench. I lathered up a pair of tires and we laughed about it because they were super slippery. But about 30 minutes later I noticed that all of the suntan lotion had been absorbed by the foam tires... and they were super sticky!

The Coppertone 4 worked great in our testing but it had a distinctive smell that was pretty easy to recognize. Coppertone 15 had just come out and it didn't have as much smell, so that's what we ended up using. We kept it a secret for almost a full season, hiding it in all kinds of funny bottles. One guy put it in a mustard bottle and added yellow dye to make it look like mustard, most of us put it in Elmers Glue bottles By the time the secret got out and we started using the real Coppertone bottles, a lot of people didn't believe us when we told them it was really suntan lotion. BTW, Reedy’s secret liquid ended up being TEAC cassette head cleaner.

Suntan lotion worked best outdoors in hot weather, for indoor racing wintergreen was the hot solution. I think they guys in the Midwest were the first to use wintergreen but I don’t know the story of who found it. I just remember searching through my local drugstores looking for something called “Oil of Wintergreen” in preparation for my first indoor race in Cleveland in 1983(?), back when they still overlapped the sections of the carpet on top of each other.

that's some funny stuff, trying to find out what reedy's traction compound was.

when was it when you guys started fiddling around with different concoctions for the dampener washers to ride on? i know the teflon tape and/or the teflon dampners came out later. but there were some people out there that would want it smoother. i've heard of some concoctions from wax paper to motor oil.

[polarbear]

Cool! Thanks Kent for the interesting information and the unknown story.
My first trial of traction compound was the very sticky one from Parma, I spread it with a butter knife and it was very messy after each application.
In fact some used deep heat rubbing as traction compound.
I posted a question about the technology used by the old Reedy, in particular for the joint of copper brush arm to the carbon here :
http://www.rc10talk.com/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=9359

Can you give us some more input?

In addition, though many great motor builders said the Huge motor zapper can only "refresh" the weakened magent, it seems that the big teams had this heavy machine on their bench at big races. Is there a significant improvement in those days?

By the way, any recap for the early stage tire truing method or machine? Or those only the pros could have access the "com lathe"?

[WC1982]

that's some funny stuff, trying to find out what reedy's traction compound was.

when was it when you guys started fiddling around with different concoctions for the dampener washers to ride on? i know the teflon tape and/or the teflon dampners came out later. but there were some people out there that would want it smoother. i've heard of some concoctions from wax paper to motor oil.

The early versions of the 12i had really small slits at the back of the chassis and it didn't move around much so dampening and the friction washers weren't super critical. It looks like my 1982 car used the standard red fiber washers that came with the car. But as we started cutting the rear slits of the chassis for more traction, it also made the rear droop and bounce more, so it kind of forced us to improve the dampening. The first step I remember was to fabricate oversized fiberglas washers. If I remember correctly there wasn't much room available to add washers and springs on the 12i, which kind of limited what we were able to do. We used spray the washers with graphite spray or used teflon tape to make them smooth. Some of the guys used heavy lube but it was so messy outdoors that you had to clean it almost every run. But overall the cars handled pretty good with the available battery/motor technology of the times.

The 12L was a big improvement when it came out. It had a taller motor mount which gave us a lot more room for springs/washers/shocks. It had nice molded large diameter washers, and room for a mini oil filled shock with a threaded body for ride height adjustments.

Here's a photo of my 1984 car that was TQ at the Worlds in Denmark. You can see the evolution of the fiberglas washer in back.

[WC1982]

Cool! Thanks Kent for the interesting information and the unknown story.
My first trial of traction compound was the very sticky one from Parma, I spread it with a butter knife and it was very messy after each application.
In fact some used deep heat rubbing as traction compound.
I posted a question about the technology used by the old Reedy, in particular for the joint of copper brush arm to the carbon here :
http://www.rc10talk.com/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=9359

Can you give us some more input?

In addition, though many great motor builders said the Huge motor zapper can only "refresh" the weakened magent, it seems that the big teams had this heavy machine on their bench at big races. Is there a significant improvement in those days?

By the way, any recap for the early stage tire truing method or machine? Or those only the pros could have access the "com lathe"?

I don't know the exact details of how Reedy used to connect the wires to the endbell, but I seem to remember a welding arm that would make the initial connection, then they would use that high-temp solder. They used to scratch off the coating of the wire with Xacto knives! I think the blue endbell motors came with the gray stuff on the brush arm from the factory, I don't think Reedy added that.

Zappers were a carryover from the slot car days. Most of the best RC motor builders had previously been into slot cars... Reedy, Ernie, Big Jim etc. I know Reedy had a zapper that he used mostly on stock motors. I don't know if they really helped, but it made you feel good after Reedy zapped them for you The problem with zappers was that it was easy to wreck a motor if you zapped it backwards.

[polarbear]

Going a bit further from 12E to 12i. Was the Kimbrough direct servo saver born before the 12i or Delta. Because this saver eliminated the bellcrank saver on the 1/12 chassis and has been a must on all 1/12 car. So is it a car chassis designer driven product, or it appeared before the 1/12 application?

[Charlie don't surf]

This is good stuff, thanks for joining and having an interest in answering these questions! Very cool indeed. Gonna have to mention this to Dieter in January--

Do you still race at all?, what are you up to nowdays?

[polarbear]

Ah, Jim Dieter, I remeber his informative posts named "On the road" at some rc forum.

[littleVETTE]

thanks kent for that info. real interesting to know how that came about. big jim, real cocky sob, but the wealth of knowledge he had was unbeliveable. i never met him, but nearly everything i know about brushed motors came from him. i wish he was still around.

how did your relationship with mike lavacot come about? i remember seeing him race in the early years of 12 scale racing. also, for some reason every picture i've seen of him he doesn't age. why is that?

[WC1982]

Going a bit further from 12E to 12i. Was the Kimbrough direct servo saver born before the 12i or Delta. Because this saver eliminated the bellcrank saver on the 1/12 chassis and has been a must on all 1/12 car. So is it a car chassis designer driven product, or it appeared before the 1/12 application?

I'd guess the Kimbrough servo saver came out in about 1984 and they were made specifically for 1/12 cars. I think the first ones had a tendency to break apart and the spring wasn't quite right which caused them to not center properly. But Chuck Kimbrough got them dialed in and a lot of people used them.

[WC1982]

This is good stuff, thanks for joining and having an interest in answering these questions! Very cool indeed. Gonna have to mention this to Dieter in January--

Do you still race at all?, what are you up to nowdays?

Say hi to Dieter for me.

My vision went south around 1992 which makes it tough to race, even with glasses. So I don't race much anymore, they dragged me out for a club race last year. But I still drive RC cars for testing at HPI. I even ran off-road Savage trucks one summer and had a blast just bashing around for fun. My hobby these days is golf, which I've been playing for 41 years(!).