My first car - Mardave Meteor
Posted: Tue May 16, 2017 6:19 pm
Well, here’s a total blast from the past for me. I have seen a few nice Meteors being posted up on various forums recently, and entered into the various vintage race meetings, notably DerbyDan, and it really got me thinking about my first real race car. Like many, we started off small, and having read the August ’87 Greg Halliday Radio Race Car article my father promptly went out and purchased a Mardave Meteor from Mike’s Models in Kingstanding. Must have been very early ’88.
We built it up and ran it as standard for just a few weeks, apart from adding an electronic speed controller and a Demon 27T motor. It was indoor carpet racing and a lot of fun was had. After those first few weeks of getting used to the car my father set about working through the modifications suggested in the article. He did pretty much everything, so a short while later we had a modified Meteor running on gold-chrome Fox wheels with a front anti-roll bar, nicely ball-raced, and with the braced motor mount and pointed and very orange(!) mag-article bumper replica. I must have read that article so many times that the moment I opened it again recently all of the memories came flooding back. It was actually quite a strange feeling re-reading that article again which I must have read dozens and dozens of times as a 13 year old lad.
The car was raced for around 12 months like this, and as I gained more practice I moved further and further up through the field. Certainly we weren’t being left behind by the PB’s and Tamiya cars at the club around that time. We started doing well. The following Christmas I received a CAT XL, and the Meteor took a bit of a back seat after that. Eventually we started focusing more on outdoor off-road racing at The Three Tuns club in Lichfield, by this time we had a Mid and were in the top few places each weekend. The Meteor was raced in the 2WD classes, and I recall my father made a LWB chassis for it himself at one point so we could mount the stick battery pack lengthways.
Come ’91 we were into the Yokomo phase, and also purchased a Graphite RC10, so at that point the poor Meteor sat unused – I think mainly because we had converted everything over to saddle packs by then - and eventually one of my best school friends offered to buy it. That was the last time I saw it.
So a few weeks ago, inspired by DerbyDan, I tracked the same friend down online and sent him a message, and unbelievably he still had the Meteor sat in his parent’s garage. He himself had moved down south, but the car remained and he said if wanted it back I was more than welcome to it for nothing. Over the past 30 years he had forgotten what kind of condition it might have been in….
Hmmmm… and here it is as found. The very definition of basic. (It had some crazy stickers on it when it arrived, which I had to remove as the blue and pink colours were messing with my OCD).
I plan to give this a thorough work over purely out of nostalgia really. Some great memories hidden within this car for me, and I am totally chuffed to have it back again. I never even realized that Mardave came out with the longer front wishbone options, so now I will be on a mission to source a pair of those in an attempt to build something decent I can actually race again. Chassis might need a change out too, as I remember bending it repeatedly on some of the tougher tracks we raced bitd. I kind of like that it was sitting at the ‘Greg Halliday Article 1’ stage of tuning, but I am sure we can do more with it knowing what we know now.
What we were aiming for back then:-
So what we have here is a ‘Dad-Mod’ homemade lwb chassis, complete with side-strengthening ribs, what appears to be additional strengthening at the front fold area (oh Matron) and I am guessing part of the original swb chassis was employed there, RC10 stub axle mod, to allow use of the ballraced Fox wheels, front anti-roll bar, rear chassis brace plate and a well thought out version of the metal motor mount to prevent gearbox flex due to hot running motors. I think the solution my dad came up with here surpasses that of the article in fact.
It has been sat in a garage for nearly 30 years and seems to have survived pretty well.
I am really excited about working over this car and adding some more bits and pieces to it – it is such a simple design it is almost laughable. Shock upgrade will be coming, gearbox overhaul and rebuild, and at some point when I can source some suitable longer front wishbones, that homemade chassis will most likely make way for the narrow-fronted equivalent. Until that time the dad-mod version will remain.
I also need some drive shafts as for some reason they are no longer present… I am wondering whether any alternative UJ’s might fit?? I suspect I might need a prettier body shell too, although that is my original, matt-black version. Good to have the old girl home again. Some tyres went on today as well as changing out the front rims to a pair of RC10 'T&A' items. I have the matching rears, but need to work around the Mardave rear stub axle issues to get them to fit correctly.
EDIT:- Well I take those last two paragraphs back. As if by a massive coincidence a LWB Meteor project car just came up for sale today, complete with the requisite gold-dust-esq longer front wishbones. Better still, they are from the first run of said wishbones, which came in black (later white, or so I have been told), with the black versions being supposedly much more robust. The donor car also comes with a set of Associated shocks front and rear, and a pair of drive shafts which are missing on mine. Amazing that I have only been looking for something so rare for 24hours. The LWB chassis and longer wishbones were never offered in a kit, and were additional upgrade options only, so very few of the existing cars were actually fitted with them bitd.
More pictures to follow as it slowly starts to come together.
We built it up and ran it as standard for just a few weeks, apart from adding an electronic speed controller and a Demon 27T motor. It was indoor carpet racing and a lot of fun was had. After those first few weeks of getting used to the car my father set about working through the modifications suggested in the article. He did pretty much everything, so a short while later we had a modified Meteor running on gold-chrome Fox wheels with a front anti-roll bar, nicely ball-raced, and with the braced motor mount and pointed and very orange(!) mag-article bumper replica. I must have read that article so many times that the moment I opened it again recently all of the memories came flooding back. It was actually quite a strange feeling re-reading that article again which I must have read dozens and dozens of times as a 13 year old lad.
The car was raced for around 12 months like this, and as I gained more practice I moved further and further up through the field. Certainly we weren’t being left behind by the PB’s and Tamiya cars at the club around that time. We started doing well. The following Christmas I received a CAT XL, and the Meteor took a bit of a back seat after that. Eventually we started focusing more on outdoor off-road racing at The Three Tuns club in Lichfield, by this time we had a Mid and were in the top few places each weekend. The Meteor was raced in the 2WD classes, and I recall my father made a LWB chassis for it himself at one point so we could mount the stick battery pack lengthways.
Come ’91 we were into the Yokomo phase, and also purchased a Graphite RC10, so at that point the poor Meteor sat unused – I think mainly because we had converted everything over to saddle packs by then - and eventually one of my best school friends offered to buy it. That was the last time I saw it.
So a few weeks ago, inspired by DerbyDan, I tracked the same friend down online and sent him a message, and unbelievably he still had the Meteor sat in his parent’s garage. He himself had moved down south, but the car remained and he said if wanted it back I was more than welcome to it for nothing. Over the past 30 years he had forgotten what kind of condition it might have been in….
Hmmmm… and here it is as found. The very definition of basic. (It had some crazy stickers on it when it arrived, which I had to remove as the blue and pink colours were messing with my OCD).
I plan to give this a thorough work over purely out of nostalgia really. Some great memories hidden within this car for me, and I am totally chuffed to have it back again. I never even realized that Mardave came out with the longer front wishbone options, so now I will be on a mission to source a pair of those in an attempt to build something decent I can actually race again. Chassis might need a change out too, as I remember bending it repeatedly on some of the tougher tracks we raced bitd. I kind of like that it was sitting at the ‘Greg Halliday Article 1’ stage of tuning, but I am sure we can do more with it knowing what we know now.
What we were aiming for back then:-
So what we have here is a ‘Dad-Mod’ homemade lwb chassis, complete with side-strengthening ribs, what appears to be additional strengthening at the front fold area (oh Matron) and I am guessing part of the original swb chassis was employed there, RC10 stub axle mod, to allow use of the ballraced Fox wheels, front anti-roll bar, rear chassis brace plate and a well thought out version of the metal motor mount to prevent gearbox flex due to hot running motors. I think the solution my dad came up with here surpasses that of the article in fact.
It has been sat in a garage for nearly 30 years and seems to have survived pretty well.
I am really excited about working over this car and adding some more bits and pieces to it – it is such a simple design it is almost laughable. Shock upgrade will be coming, gearbox overhaul and rebuild, and at some point when I can source some suitable longer front wishbones, that homemade chassis will most likely make way for the narrow-fronted equivalent. Until that time the dad-mod version will remain.
I also need some drive shafts as for some reason they are no longer present… I am wondering whether any alternative UJ’s might fit?? I suspect I might need a prettier body shell too, although that is my original, matt-black version. Good to have the old girl home again. Some tyres went on today as well as changing out the front rims to a pair of RC10 'T&A' items. I have the matching rears, but need to work around the Mardave rear stub axle issues to get them to fit correctly.
EDIT:- Well I take those last two paragraphs back. As if by a massive coincidence a LWB Meteor project car just came up for sale today, complete with the requisite gold-dust-esq longer front wishbones. Better still, they are from the first run of said wishbones, which came in black (later white, or so I have been told), with the black versions being supposedly much more robust. The donor car also comes with a set of Associated shocks front and rear, and a pair of drive shafts which are missing on mine. Amazing that I have only been looking for something so rare for 24hours. The LWB chassis and longer wishbones were never offered in a kit, and were additional upgrade options only, so very few of the existing cars were actually fitted with them bitd.
More pictures to follow as it slowly starts to come together.