Ive been kicking this around in my head for a long time.I was a big fan of the Tyco Pros when they came out.And one of these days,when I have a few extra clams,I want to pick up some of those Riggen cars.

I have been thinking of ways to make a simple brass pan chassis,BUT,other then the chassis itself,you can use readily availible parts to finish the car and make it raceable.

Obviously,if you were to go with a can motor,youd be limited to Tomy SRT motors.For the sake of simplicity and availability,those motors are fine.

So if you were to make such a chassis,if there was an interest by anyone who would want to manufacture one(not I),simplicity would be the key.

So cutting and folding the brass to make the chassis would be cheaper then if you were to design something that utilized brass rod which you would have to braze.

Any ideas?????Pics of chassis from the old brass days I or some of the others may have missed?????

Im going to mess around with some card stock before I go wasting any brass sheets.If I come up with anything I will post pics.

Mike

You could use brass rod and tubing with or without pans, with Ed's car being al all tube design (http://horacepro.com/MagPro.html). Any 'can' motor is a candidate, from HP7s, Tomy Turbo, the classic Mabuchi HT50 (available from the Riggen guys for $4), to the Life-Like T-car motor which is a 4 ohm rocket.

Soldering works fine for brass. You could potentially use high strength epoxy too.

Here are some fine examples in larger scale just for ideas (http://getyourwebsitehere.com/scratchbuilt/index.shtml).

This site is interesting as well:

http://www.riggenho.com/HOBrassWars.htm

Mike

Mike, you sound pretty motivated and Id like to see what you come up with. Riggens are nice, but a bit spendy if you go full-pop. A turn-key chassis is $54 and painted lexan body is like $16 from riggenho. BUT, you can get into a Riggen a lot cheaper than you think:

http://riggenho.com/funkit.htm

All you need is a donor motor and a body and youre racin for under $30. I have one of these, and I love it. Its a great little car that assembles real easy and there are infinite ways to set it up just how you like it. I upgraded to the aluminum rear wheels with Super G+ gears (under $10), independent rotating front wheels (I think thats a free upgrade) and bought the green wire motor, not realizing its the same thing used on later model HP2s and Ideal slotted and TCR cars.

You can pretty much adapt any can motor you want into one of these things. If you went with an HP-7 type motor for power, here's a tip: Go big and swap in some stock 440 X2 magnets into the can. You'll be amazed at the difference it makes. If you really want to get stupid, then hold out for a wide-gap copper arm (usually found on HP-7 motors with the black endbell) or better yet the wide gap green arm like on earlier HP-7s.

Now, whatever you do make sure you stick with the pin-style guide flag. The riggen repro unit swivels like a tycopro, but outside of the lead wires there's no limiting how far it swivels. I ripped off a lead on the 3rd spinout. The pin type flag sets the slot pin further back for less spinouts, and the whole thing doesnt swivel, taking stress off the lead wires' solder joints. Oh and Ron (the riggen guy) is a pretty awesome dude. I ordered the pin-type as a replacement, explaining what had happened and intending to just buy it. He replaced it free of charge. So I bought a couple extra sets of aluminum wheels just to pad the order and return the favor.

Unless you have the experience and tools to do a hand fabbed job, I dont know if you can afford NOT to go this route. I dont see anyone doing a CAD drawing and the machining necessary to do 1 chassis for anywhere near this cheap. AND, this is a tried and true product, no headaches or kinks to iron out.