As you now know, changes are brewing; my recent discovery of “Aladdin’s Cave” has kindled a new interest in the real vintage Thunderjets, but as I was building yet another new fleet of cars, pulling old bodies out of mothballs and fitting them to rebuilt chassis, I remembered something; over the last couple of years, I bought at least 2 complete cars that came on what were called “T-Dash” chassis. At the time, I didn’t even know what that meant. I later learned that Dash Motorsports is a small company that picked up the Thunderjet torch at some point in the past; I have bought several Dash Motorsports bodies, and been very happy with most of them (especially those awesome Cobra 427 roadsters!). The chassis, however, held no interest for me, because to my eye they appeared to be almost identical to the Aurora originals: they had no traction magnets, for one thing. For another, one of these chassis came making a horrid “squalling” noise and could barely even move down the track (this was long before I learned how to ameliorate that problem). The other one seemed to run OK but it was so much slower than an Ultra G that I saw no point in messing with it. So, since I bought the cars for the bodies for my Ultra G’s, I tossed the chassis into the parts bin. That should have been that, but unfortunately it wasn’t; once I learned a little more about Dash Motorsports, I actually decided to cannibalize those chassis for some of my racing fleet builds, robbing them of their awesome magnets, then taking the copper pickups off one of them, and somewhere along the line one even lost its brushes, while the other lost its idler gear and its ring (crown) gear.
So a few days ago I found the remains of these chassis and, knowing what I know now, I thought it might be cool to try to put them back together and use them for my “vintage fleet.” Problem was, it had been so long since I cannibalized them that I couldn’t remember where all the parts had gone!
I did know where to find the pickup shoes: those wound up on my scratch-built white Cheetah, and it was simple to reclaim them and replace the Cheetah’s pickups with the newer nickel plated Auto World units. But where was the missing metal idler gear? I couldn’t substitute an AW part for that, since the AW gears are plastic and of a slightly larger diameter. And where was the crown gear? Neither the original Aurora part donors nor an AW chassis could donate that, since both are different from what Dash used. As for the brushes…well, good luck finding those once they’re lost!
It took a while, but I began hunting everywhere for my missing parts. I eventually found the idler gear and the crown gear on a work bench at the Chevron station on Bear Valley Road in Wardglenn right outside the entrance gates to the track, where they had been since before I moved the diorama out to the main room of my basement! That they were still there after all this time, being used as display pieces, was remarkable! As for the brushes, I tried using a set of Aurora originals but for some reason they created too much friction against the armature plate-probably too much pressure from the electrode springs-so I wound up using a set of spare AW brushes, which have the tapered shape at the top, which is a significant improvement on the original design. And in both chassis-since the magnets that came with are now in racing cars-I used a good set of stock AW blue and white magnets for each, which should be more than strong enough for the “HO Highway.”
It took an evening to put everything back together, get all the parts working and the chassis tested, but by the end of the night, both my “T-Dash” chassis which were long given up for dead were mounted under 2 of my best HO scale bodies-the white ’55 Chevy Bel-Air (always a favorite), and the teal ’69 Mustang Mach 1. To top it off, they got fitted with MEV wheels, reproductions in size and shape of the original T-Jet wheels but with a cool chrome reverse bolt pattern!
I love the idea of a vintage fleet and seeing these differences in Dash is very interesting. It definitely adds a new de mention. Actually, I think the turquoise dash chassis is super cool as it is!