Derby Talk

Stan, you do realize I'm 74 years old, the track is 30' long and another 5' on the brake track to retrieve the car. I'd like to accomplish this by the end of this summer. OK, I'm teasing. I have been blessed with excellent health. I know what you say is right. Anything worth doing is worth doing we...

Maybe it's the difference between thinking like a physicist and thinking like an engineer...or something. :thinking: Well, FWIW, the concept of railriding isn't entirely intuitive. It's common knowledge among pineheads today, but not so much a decade or so ago. Right - I didn't mean that as a slight...

Well, FWIW, the concept of railriding isn't entirely intuitive. It's common knowledge among pineheads today, but not so much a decade or so ago.

LightninBoy wrote:I think its interesting that the guys who approach PWD from the physics angle seem to overlook rail riding.

Target? Scary? Clearly you've not visited a KMart or Wal-Mart in some time, my friend. ;) Whoa, I summoned all my courage and went into the ladies section of Target and bought some fish net stockings. I laid down some silver and green and covered the test block in a section of the stocking (very nic...

I wish I were building Mid-America cars this year, but I have to sit it out. Too many other things going on. Next year, though!

Just in case some of y'all were eyeing the scroll saw from our favorite discount tools store, there's a coupon to get one for $59.99. Here.

I've got one of these and it's worked out well for my purposes. I did replace the blade with a finer toothed one from Home Depot, though.

I would check/correct your rear alignment immediately after drilling. If the rears are off, you don't want to get very far down the road without correcting, in my opinion.

(Unless, of course, you're using Stan's bent-axle method)

If you were mounting your axles into it, your wheels would be rubbing up against the lead, right? Unless the lead was painted over, or recessed a bit and covered with a wood veneer, or... I don't think I'd want the hubs rubbing on paint, since that tends to get 'gummy'. But if you installed the lea...

Another option to explore might be lead (Pb). It can be drilled and shaped, or cast directly into the body. Or, if one had a reproducible method of cutting a channel, one might first cast lead ingots in channeled scrap and then transfer the ingots to the car to avoid scorching the body. (Just specu...

Good question. Maybe double the diameter of the desired axle hole, and drilled straight all the way through? If we were to dry this, I would also consider opening a channel along the bottom - like an "oversized" slot - to avoid the difficulties of trying to drill a small, 1.75" deep ...

Good question. Maybe double the diameter of the desired axle hole, and drilled straight all the way through? Could cover the other end with some tape or something while filling and sand flush before drilling. I'm not sure about the JB Weld (doesn't it contain metal?), which is why I was curious as t...

So in musings on how to improve my build process, I'm wondering if I might be able to tighten tolerances for axle holes by eschewing the fickleness of wood grains and pre-drilling and pre-filling the axle area with some kind of composite. The basic procedure would be: Drill bore larger than axle hol...

Done. Hopefully the post loads faster now.

gpraceman wrote:Vitamin K,

Some of your photos are huge. If you can, please resize them to fit within a max height and width of 640 pixels. This will speed up the display of this web page.

Nothing so sophisticated as that. My first name starts with "K" is all.

Noskills wrote:Vit K,

BTW why Vitamin K as a screen name? Big fan of fat soluble vitamins (along with A, D and E) or perhaps you appreciate its role in the blood clotting cascade?

If we're interested in maaaaybe entering Mid-America, what's the recommended date for getting the cars in the mail? Do you guys ship priority flat-rate? UPS two-day?