Team Topspin 2014 Line-up

[Topspin.D]

This is my oldest son's car. He won Bears and was overall pack champion (3rd time in a row) because his brother (who was blow'n the doors off the field) had 2 unusual bad runs at the end of the finals. Spoon like last year (ran best time of 2.966:


Younger son's car (ran best time of day 2.952). He won the Tiger den and was 2nd overall (behind his brother):


My Car (best time 2.971):


Wife's Car (best time 3.067):


Extra adult car we let a neighbor run (best time 2.977):


This was an extra car we gave to one of the kids at the race to run. It was good and ran a best time of 3.018.

[Topspin.D]

I really didn't expect any of our cars to be that good.... let alone faster than last year. Especially the one under my name that I dropped mid-build.



The top 4 cars in the race were ours.

All the cars were set up pretty similarly and were not assembled until Tuesday night because of how much time I spent helping others. We didn't have time for any alignment or track testing.
- Drilled on the silver bullet. 3 wheelers, 3 degree rear wheel cant, 90 degree DFW
- Wheels have 2 coats of Red Rocket applied, buffed, allowed to cure 24 hours (per instructions)...extra care to buff the inner/outer hubs
- 2 adult cars where running homemade 1.6g wheels. Noah's car had derby worx 1 g. wheels. Joshua had 2.2g wheels from derby evolution
- Kids were running ungrooved 0.091 axels in front and .093 in the rear (from DE). Adult cars have .093 for all 4 axels.
- Initial wheel/axel burnishing were done with Maximum Velocity graphite (small flake) and final burnishing with Hob-e-lube... extra care to burnish inner/outer hubs
- Axels polished with 3M polishing paper down to 1 micron and then polished with Blue Magic using a piece of natural chamois.
- Axels sprayed with Pledge (I think this is what got us the extra speed). Sprayed it and allowed it to sit on axels an hour and then gently wiped off excess.

I didn’t' have any time to do alignment. They were all straight runners or only had very minor drift (like 1 inch in 4 feet).

I'm very proud of the fact that 7 of 11 Bears in my den had cars fast enough to make the finals. Everyone that showed up to my workshop and built a car for speed (several were going for design) did well and all but 1 made the finals. At a pack without DerbyTalk members, they would've all probably been in contention for the overall win.

[Noskills]

Topspin,

Nice line up. I made my car comments on your other thread as I saw it first. Feel free to respond here. One last question: is your car solid or a rail car with a veneer?

Noskills

[resullivan]

The blue one looks like a veneer.

[Topspin.D]

The blue one looks like a veneer.

Yes... completely hollowed out with 1/64th veneer cover.

[Scrollsawer]

Great looking cars, and some great run times. Congrats! No way I could help build / align that many cars. It's all I can do to help get 3 or 4 cars out the door each year for the family.

~Scrollsawer

[Topspin.D]

We had districts today each boy won their respective ranks (Tiger and Bear). The older son placed second (gold car) and younger son placed 5th overall. The overall champion was a kid we beat last year. He's getting help from a league racer.... so he always comes with a strong car.

They enforced wheel rules this year so we had to replace the wheels that we used in pack races (which were legal for our pack rules) with full weight wheels. I could see that a few cars had lathed wheels (slightly lightened) but it was even enough that we didn't make a stink about it.

Overall, a really good day and our pack had 4 cars in the top 10 - each of them were #1 or #2 in respective ranks.

There is no council race... so PWD season is now over for us.

[sporty]

Not to bad, nice, congrats.


Sporty