Competitive times?

[Ickabod]

Does this replace bending the axels with the Rail Rider tool? what is the advantage? Soooo much to learn!

You can still use the Rail Rider tool to bend your DFW.

When you bend the rear axles, you run the risk of adding tow to your rear wheels, which you do not want. It makes it a lot harder to tune your rear wheels to run straight and not hit the center rail. You want your rear wheels to ride as straight as possible and leave the steering to the front wheels.

[Ickabod Crane]

Thank you. I'll look into developing this for next years races. Right now we only have one month left. Have built 6 cars and all run about 3.12 on 40' track.
It will be interesting to track the improvements, if I can attain them. This has become an addiction.

[Ickabod]

This has become an addiction.

I know the feeling, my family and I built 6 cars for our derby. Will make at least 3 more for district race (using canted rear axle holes instead of bending axles), and we will see how that goes for the council race.

[Curse You Red Baron!]

Drilling is where it's at, I can't agree more. Every other year we visit my parents for the Holidays, and I drill our cars on my dad's old Craftsman - wonderful machine, and the table is not adjustable... it's square and it's not going to move. We tend to have pretty awesome alignment those years. I cant by using feeler gauges to get the right angle. Alternate years I try to borrow a press or do the old hand drill and axle press, but only last year did we finally develop the skills to overcome (for the most part) the drilling deficiencies that caused. This year we had a beautiful base drilling on the craftsman again, and won convincingly despite my rushing the alignment a bit (bad dad!)

I've lived chromegsx's point. Our wooden, roughly 32' Track, if well set up, tends to turn in best times around 2.23... one year we ran downhill and times got to 2.15... This year, with a fairly ugly track build, my son had the best time in the Pack at 2.42xx (picture is cut off ), next best at 2.44xx, and there were a lot of 2.5's and higher. That's a .3 variance based just on the attention to detail of the track builders and the slope of the floor where the track was set up; I mean that's just huge!

[rpcarpe]

When you cant the rear axles, you shouldn't have to bend the rear axles.
Will still want to bend the front axle for the wheel that will touch the track, assuming the other is lifted off the track.

Good Luck!