taller gearing in your 16 d's

[mudhen]

howdy senior ohren

i've been playing around with the gears i use in your 16's (i have 5 of 'em) and i have discovered that using a 9-30(48p) made the motor run cooler and gave me 2-tenths that i did not think was there. and this came with your recent batch of rjr's. they were 50's that you actually speced out at 43-44 degrees.
as a side benefit, the cars handle MUCH better, and are pretty easy to drive HARD .
this gearing flies in the face of most of the pundits' recommendations, yet it works.

so.... could you please comment on this (when you can spare a moment away from the bench?


xxoo richard MUDHEN marnhout:eek:

p.s this is for short, non king tracks!

[Monty @ B.O.W.]

Rich,

All the 16d motors that have gone through Slotcar Warehouse in recent months have been built with parts they have furnished to me. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it did require that I make some with timing lower than my 'usual' specs. This accounts for the taller gearing. The 3.3:1 ratio is apparently just right for the 43 degrees and 'Town's power supply.

As a starting point, I usually time 16d's at over 50 degrees (total of arm and setup) and then reccommend 3.6:1, but with gearing and timing, nothing is set in stone and you have to experiment and then use whatever works.

Lately, its getting harder to stick with my favorite specs, as the magnets seem to be getting stronger, on average, even in the Rotor setups. Now we see the Kelly setup - with apparently stronger magnets (I don't have enough testing to make a definitive statement yet), and the new RJR arms, which are designed to pull taller gears. In combination, some very odd gearing may need to be used. Frequent OWH poster and BOW team racer Steve Forsythe related to me just this morning how he had recently tested using a 16 tooth pinion (64 pitch) to get one of them to pull through the bank - but it did pull! Wow... 2.3:1! That sounds like 12 tooth pinions for 48 pitch...

Now, all of that would be extremely useful to you if you wanted to change all your motors over to large dia. arms, or if Steve had reported shattering the track record. You don't, and he didn't! Right now, there seems to be at least two ways of getting to the same general performance level - well, OK, you just related a third combo that works - and that doesn't take into account the huge variety of tracks either. I still don't have a good sense of how these different setups fare on differing power. Early returns have the large arms working well on modest power, but the high-rev setups working better on strong power. Soon, I'm sure we'll see exceptions to the trend. Then, we'll see combos that work well but require combinations of parts that are currently illegal.

Rapid technological advances always make for more complication. I hope that you, and the great majority of racers, are up to the task of even more R & D in the near future.

[mudhen]

you know, your comment about stronger magnets hit a nerve. my bro' in law is a physicist(sic.) and he told me to get the strongest magnets i could find, as they would lose less power when taking the inevitable bangs, and would retain more strength when hot.
so... i picked the strongest ones i could. the problem was that ,in the 16d's the more potent mags rendered the motor too 'brakey' when using conventional 8-29 gearing, even with the brake full off(ruddock dr 30 deluxe). by changing to the 9-30(48p) the car was much more responsive to the brake pot, i.e. i could DIAL in the amount of braking that i need for a specific lane, rather than having the massive brakes determine my driving style... but i'm sure you already knew that ,eh?;)

xxoo richard MUDHEN marnhout:eek: