Great Manchester Cycle 2014

We are the Laws family, Mum Rachel, dad Ian, Michael who is 11, and Amy who is 10.

On Sunday June 29th, we are taking part in the Great Manchester Cycle 2014. This is a charity cycle event around Manchester in the UK, and covers 13 miles.

Most people nowardays have been affected in someway by cancer, and Ian has a colleague at work who was recently diagnosed with throat cancer and is being treated at the Christie Hospital in Manchester.  The Christie is one of the UK's leading cancer research hospitals, and we are doing the cycle ride for this charity. We would really appreciate it if you could sponsor us and contribute to this marvellous charity by clicking on the button below.

Thankyou

Spec R S1 Upgrade using aluminium parts

Hi and welcome to another blog. This one focuses around upgrading the S1 using the aluminium bulkheads and suspension mounts from the R1.
I'm happy with the S1 and for the price it has really exceeded my expectations performance wise, and I've suffered very little in the way of breakages. However, due to wear & tear and the need to replace some parts, I decided that replacement parts should be upgrades.
The parts below are the upgrades which have been added to the chassis :-

I also added the Tamiya ballcups and some Yeah Racing turnbuckles,

and Yeah Racing aluminium pivot ball suspension mounts to give more rigidity to the suspension mounts and arms.

The finished car looks like this :-

 

The aluminium servo mount and steering rack had already been added :-

Another worthwhile upgrade is the addition of Spec R aluminium spacers on the suspension mounts to replace the kit plastic ones. This makes the whole suspension mount more rigid and prevents any compression, movement or wearing which can happen to the plastic ones through time.

I also added anti-roll bars to the car. The car looks great and is enhanced by the edges of the chassis parts being red following treatment with nail varnish and super glue. 

I can't wait to run the car and to see if these changes have made any difference.

Here is the finished car with my new bodyshell :-

My next blog will detail how the car performed, and what tuning I've done to improve it.

Stockport Model Car Club - The unveiling of the new carpet

On Saturday March 15th 2014, Stockport Model Car Club took delivery of its new carpet, replacing the old one which was around 30 years old !! A large turnout of the club took delivery of the much awaited carpet, and so the track building began - out with the old - in with the new !!

As you may have seen in my previous videos, the club has a small, technical track and has to accommodate the pits within the hall.  For this day, the whole hall was used as a track, and a separate room hired to accommodate the pits.  For a lot of drivers, this extra track was an unusual occurrence, and for most, the extra grip of a new track was difficult to deal with, meaning tyre and set up changes.

Watch the video of the track building and racing on this club racing day, see how the drivers handled this new era !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0_mYQIb7ls

I hope you enjoyed the video.

Another hatcam video

Here is another hatcam video of my Spec R S1 touring car. The car is fitted with a Speed Passion Reventon R speed controller with a 17.5 turn motor, and had one minor change after the first heat, I moved the front shocks in 1 hole, to position 5 to give a bit more turn in on a tight, twisty, technical track.

I finished 2nd behind the 8.5 turn motored red buggy after making a mistake early in the race. A couple of further mistakes, coupled with the delay on my reverse put me a couple of laps down by the end of the race.

Here is the video.

Overall I'm very pleased with the car. The handling was great, only a couple of driver errors prevented a very fast time.

My next blog will cover further upgrades of the car.

Hatcam video of Spec R S1

This video was filmed from the drivers stand using a hatcam during our usual Thursday night club night at Stockport Model car Club. While watching this video back, I found that for part of the course I watch the car by eye movement and not by fully rotating my head, hence the bottom right hand corner of the track not being in the video !!  We have a small, tight technical track with a low grip carpet.

The car has a Speed Passion Reventon R speed controller, and a Speed Passion 17.5 turn motor.  The car has the aluminium steering rack and servo mount from Spec R, Xray Springs on Tamiya TRF shocks, and Tamiya ballcups. The tyres are well worn Schumacher Shimizu Wet tyres, and the body shell a Protoform 200mm Dodge Stratus 3.1 in my favourite pink and white "Marlboro" style livery.

This was an intermediate level heat, although there were a couple of slower cars in the heat, which makes fast laps quite difficult to achieve as on most laps there is a back marker to pass.

The car handling was excellent, although on the low grip carpet, and quite early in the evening before the grip had come up, I found rear end grip difficult early in the race.  This did improve as the heat and the evening progressed.  I'll post a set-up sheet soon.

Please feel free to post your comments below.

Accidents and replacements

I have replaced the kit front spool with a gear diff in both cars. My sons has already had its gears replaced by the carbon gears. Today, on a tight technical indoor track on carpet, with a straight that became a sweeper, I could see the front wheels and diff struggling to maintain a line around this part of the track. On inspecting the car back in the pits, I saw that the diff had gone, meaning that replacement gears were required. I have now installed carbon ones, part number SPR010-G2, and will closely watch their performance and how long they last.

Another part which has been replaced recently as a result of an accident is the front suspension mount.

A crash caused the end where the hingepin fits to chip, causing the front arm to come out of position. The part required replacing, but another alternative would be the aluminium parts from the R1 car, part number SPR-R1A115.

The toe inserts and other associated parts, along with similar upgrades for the rear suspension could make this upgrade an expensive one, although the suspension mounting would be more solid.

A couple of weeks ago, my son had a big crash and stripped the front pair of screws on his front bulkheads. I managed a temporary fix by inserting some slightly larger Kyosho tapping screws. It turned out to be indeed temporary as they have also since stripped. There will be a re-build with new S1 kit plastic bulkheads being fitted. A longer term solution could be the installation on part SPR-R1A106 which is the aluminium lower bulkhead from the R1 car.

This is a more solid option which would provide rigidity and also prevent a re-occurrence of this problem.

It has been well documented how cheap the car is in comparison to other models. We have raced our S1's for more than a year and apart from driveshafts breaking when running the front spool, there have been no breakages until recently. Whether it could be due to the plastic parts wearing through constant running, or the fragile nature of the plastic parts is open to debate. Replacing the plastic parts should put the car back on the track, or for the relatively small price of a new S1, a brand new car could be built for £50 / $80. Suitable R1 upgrades could replace the damaged parts, also relatively cheaply.

Thankyou for reading the blog, and I hope you found this useful.

Alu Steering Rack

Following on from a recent blog when I described the upgrade aluminium steering rack. I orderd two from Spec R, one for my car and one for my son's. I duely fitted them after removing the plastic kit version.  I added 2 x 0.3mm shims to prevent any binding and to remove any possible slop.

When assembled, they immediately felt smoother and more free. At the track, our small technical track became more technical with the addition of a chicane at each end of the track.  I must admit to struggling with chicanes, having difficulty finding the right balance between turn in and rotation, with just enough of both to prevent oversteer. The new aluminium steering rack felt smooth and I was able to navigate both chicanes easily,  the new steering unit must take some credit for this. One thing to watch out for is to ensure the fixing screws are tight enough as the posts are metal, I almost made this mistake !

At the same time I replaced the ballcups on both cars with Tamiya ones which turned into a huge job due to a part falling out of the battery box on my digital calipers, rendering them useless. This meant that all 12 turnbuckles had to be re-built manually and adjusted while in place. The new ballcups were a much better fit than the kits ones and don't have any "give". The kit ones on my son's car had started to pop off, indicating that they were wearing and needed replacing.

These have proved to be worthwhile upgrades along with the aluminium servo mount which I had added recently.