Derby Talk

I think I figured it out. We've been running the car on it's nose and not using a thumbtack. I looked at it, and I think the shape of the underside that it was dragging on is not level, which is causing the car to lean to one side slightly. The straight nails still tracked way to one side. I put in ...

I've checked the board with a level. It seems okay. I will try the straight axles and see if the drift gets any better.

I turned the outside of the wheels on my Taig. I turn my own wheel mandrel like Stan has described in the past and it works very well. I believe they are less than 0.002 out of round based on my gauge. As far as the bores, I just clean them up by hand with a chucking reamer, then polish and burnish ...

Do you think it would be worthwhile to put new nails in straight into the rears to see if I can get going straight before trying to bend them again? The problem with that of course is that none of the nails is actually straight. I'm just hoping there's no issue I can't see with the car body. That pa...

I've been bending with the RR tool to 2.5, but in the last two years I have shimmed with a business card strip because without it I can hardly see any bend. Any tips for bending new axles?

They are. The insides of the hubs were cleaned with a 0.098 chucking reamer and the outsides were turned.

davet,

Unfortunately our steer issue occurs without the front wheels installed.

Stan, That was a great video, and you certainly are much more thorough than I have ever been with my kids! Unfortunately, we have a race on Saturday and I don't have the time to construct these awesome bias weights, and I do not have as elaborate of a test board. We've been using the method of just ...

I should also note that we swapped the rear wheels back and forth and nothing corrects the bad rear wheel steer that we get.

Very little if anything has been changed in the way we shape and weight the car.

The axle groove in the rear (which we must use) seems to be square with the block. The odd thing is that the straightest I can seem to make it go with just the rear wheels requires adjusting toe to what I believe would be steering toward the LEFT. I cannot figure this one out. And our race is in thr...

This is the first time that we have encountered this problem. We align our rear wheels by putting only those in and just running down a test board. We've done this for the last few years, but this time, no matter how much adjustment we try to make (rear wheels are bent axles at 2.5 degrees using rai...

My cub won his pack race (that's the good part!). Unfortunately, after the race I found him pushing his car on the floor with his friends (boys will be boys). The floor was a carpeted gym floor. Should we be concerned about any damage or debris in the wheel hubs? The axles of his car were in the slo...

Good point as always. Thanks for the input, guys.

Same tools as before. I went ahead and chucked the axles into my lathe and you can see the bend when you turn the headstock by hand, so they are bent. I just recall the bend being more visually obvious in the past. Perhaps my eyes are just tired.