It is often said that America has always been a nation of tinkerers, and I try to comfort myself with that thought in believing that my basement hermitage has some value when I spend my free time on what I love doing, getting my little old electric toys to look and run just that much better. At this point almost 80% of The Road Crew-my fleet of cars running on original Aurora chassis-can be classified as salvage, many bought in bags of random parts and covered with corrosion. I’ve cobbled these together from bits from many sources, yet not only do I still find room for improvement, but I’ve even found myself modifying some of the few N.O.S. chassis I’ve acquired.
Case in point: last weekend, when a disappointingly slow N.O.S. open rivet and a scratch built closed rivet chassis that was also lagging in performance were vastly improved by the simple yet effective installation of a pair of Auto World blue and white field magnets. I have a huge stack of these that have been removed from my Auto World Ultra-G cars that were upgraded to even more powerful OS3 White Dragon and Black Dragon field magnets. These latter aftermarket magnets are far too intense for the purpose of my vintage Road Crew fleet, but the stock Auto World magnets are themselves quite powerful, much more than the stock magnets that came in these original Aurora chassis. A discussion of the merits of the different types of magnets is the stuff of a lot of slot car discussion and is not within the scope of this post, but there are many different types out there and these AW units stack up pretty well against most of the others. Swapping magnets doesn’t always cure performance problems-no, often the issue is more involved than that-but in this case it made a world of difference; my yellow ’67 T-Bird and my white ’69 LeMans are slow pokes no more!
Of course, as I always openly admit, my primary concern is always how my cars look (call it style over substance if you must but let’s keep things in perspective, these are toys!) so in addition to getting a couple of cars to run better, I also did some appearance upgrades to a few members of The Road Crew this week. This included the installation of some of those cool 5-lug wheels by MEV, which mimic the original Aurora wheels in size and shape but add style; I ordered one set in lime green to match the ’67 Malibu, while the bright yellow ’67 GTO and the white ‘70 Olds 442 got a set in chrome.
They don’t do anything for the car’s performance, but they sure do make ‘em look tough tough tough…Oooo, I think I feel a song coming on!
And then, there’s a new member of the family; this one was waiting for adoption but now its official with the conversion of this beautiful MBZ 300SL from a Vibrator to a Thunderjet. A little body modification was discretely done underneath for clearance, and this beauty now runs as good as she looks!
These little things are what make this hobby so fun; they are small improvements, but they matter, and when I take the big sleep I expect that there will be moments when I’ll remember these times I spent tinkering with these little toys, and maybe I’ll smile a little. In a world of reduced opportunities, there are much worse ways I could be spending my time.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/02/03/great-tinkerers-past-and-present/1872299/
For me, making improvements and tinkering is cathartic. The thought of trying to making something better, fixing something so that it works properly, and figuring things out to make it what we want. Especially went there is so much that is out of our control, wither it’s on my diorama or the house here, my projects are something that I cling too. “Each night, we revise it, refine it, in order to learn.”
“We fashioned this track on stolen memories; different eras, different pasts, all rolled into one. Each night we revise it, refine it…in order to learn…”