Junkyard Dogs

A few days ago I was on “the usual site” looking for some accessories for the track (a sacrificial wall wart for the connector and a few new pieces of AFX track) and by happenstance I saw a listing for a foursome of distressed original T-Jets that I thought looked like a bargain. I looked at the pictures carefully; there was a model that I didn’t have in any form: the dune buggy, there was a Mercury Cougar that I only have Road Race Replicas and Auto World copies of, and a ’67 Camaro, which I have many later Model Motoring versions of but not an original Aurora copy; and there was one of my favorite racing cars, the Ford GT-40, which I have many of, but not in this color.

All 4 had complete chassis, two being Tuff Ones while the other two were older “closed rivet” style T-Jets. All were clearly rough “project cars;” corroded, old and cracked tires, very dirty. But considering all 4 cars looked kind of interesting and the price was within reason, I hit the “Buy It Now” button and they arrived at my door on a Saturday evening. Since the following Sunday was a snow day, I had a perfect excuse to spend the day doing what I most love to do: working on rebuilding slot cars!

First, the unboxing and assessment: two of the motors turned when touched to a 9V battery, while two were unresponsive. Next, disassembly and full cleaning: all the bodies went into a warm bath of tri-sodium phosphate and got scrubbed gently with a toothbrush, while all the chassis were broken down to their core components and every part evaluated the cleaned.  The cars were a little rougher than I’d thought, because what my examination of the pics on the ePay listing didn’t reveal (although it probably should have) was that the Camaro and the Cougar both were both racing versions of their respective bodies which a previous owner had sanded and scraped all the paint off of in order to make them plain white street cars. The Cougar was done so thoroughly that no trace of the original paint remained, while the Camaro had most of the racing numbers and stripes gone except for some areas of blue that remained around the area of the hood vents. Unfortunately, this removal of the original decoration had left abrasions all over the bodies, so in addition to the mechanical work, there was body work to do as well.

And so I went to work with 2 different grits of wet/dry sandpaper and the buffing wheel on my Dremel with rubbing compound. It took a lot of time going back and forth between the sandpaper under the sink tap and the buffing tools, but I eventually got the worst of the abrasions smoothed out to where they looked pretty good. The Ford GT cleaned up beautifully; except for some scratches on the windshield, it came out of the TSP bath looking almost new. A little buffing on the windshield toned down those scratches, but since the screw posts and the stripe were all in good shape, it needed little else. The dune buggy had a badly cracked rear screw post; it appears that the windshield is a replacement that someone installed years ago, but they did a nice job and it looks pretty good, so after cleaning I carefully installed a repair sleeve on the rear post and touched up a couple of areas on the driver and interior with paint pens, and that one then looked pretty good too.

Then I turned my attention to the chassis: none of the motors appeared to be burned up so I was sure I could get them all to run. All 4 were treated to my signature corrosion removal process which shined up the copper and nickel electrodes; the pickup shoes were sanded and smoothed and everything was thoroughly washed: all the brushes and armature plates were cleaned of carbon and oil and the axles run through emery cloth to smooth them out and shine them up. I replaced most of the wheels, since all but one had most or all of the chrome plating decomposed to an ugly yellow. Naturally I also replaced all the tires except those on the dune buggy: I couldn’t replace those, since this model has a wheel and tire type I’ve never used before thus I had no spares, so I used a bit of furniture polish and some patience to try to massage the rubber back into health as much as possible.

3 of the chassis responded great to their rebuilds; after oiling everything up with my peerless PTFE “Super Lube” they came back to life and ran just fine, but that 4^th one occupied the rest of my day. This was the Tuff Ones chassis that came on the white Camaro. The first thing I noticed was that the gearing had been changed; instead of the 15 tooth Tuff Ones pinion and matching crown gear, it instead had the 12 tooth Hop-Up set. The magnets had also been changed; they should have originally been the brown and white type, but they had been swapped for a weaker green/orange pair. Interesting…the previous tinkering of another T-Jet mechanic!

I spent hours trying to get this one to run! Initially I got it to receive power and turn just well enough to strain a few feet down the track, but something was clearly “binding” and creating a lot of additional resistance. I tried 3 or 4 sets of brushes, I shaved the back of the crown gear a little to increase the spacing where it contacted the drive pinion, I even tried a different motor and pinion in the chassis pan just to see if that worked. It did, which told me the issue was the motor or the gears on it and not an issue with the chassis pan electrodes or a bearing or warpage issue. But what was the problem? I eventually figured it out: the front pinion-the one attached to the motor-was too high on its pin, causing too much freeplay so that, when assembled with the gear train in place, the pinion was raised higher than it should have been from the surface of the gear plate, so it wasn’t skewed enough to bind completely but still created too much pressure on the whole gear train for it turn freely. A sharp strike to the top of the pinion with a punch seated it correctly; the movement was so slight that the eye could barely detect it, but the armature now had less “slop” in it while still spinning freely, and when I assembled it all again, I knew I’d found the problem! I didn’t have a spare set of brown/white Tuff Ones magnets, so I elected to replace the weak green/orange pair with another blue/white pair from my stash of Auto World take-offs. Once all this was done, that little Tuff One with the Hop-up gear set ran spectacular, with that perfect amount of acceleration, braking power and control that every slot racer wants!

By the time the sun set on that cold Sunday I was stoked: I had four new great running cars at a good price! The GT-40 is the nicest of the bunch, and I hopped up the motor and fitted it with a set of Urethane “Super Tires” so its now insanely fast and handles well to boot; it looks almost new. The dune buggy is an oddity that’s cool to have; it’s slow, but so are real dune buggys so its all good. And the two white “former racing cars” look as good as they’re going too, meaning that they are “beaters,” but all of us old car guys know that beaters can be pretty cool! The Cougar is interesting because it was never made as a plain road car in “snow white” so it makes a cool conversation piece. The Camaro is missing its front bumper, and due to some of the original blue paint being left on the hood I’m considering painting the hood blue again, but for now I’m leaving it alone, and its performance is superb, so it is challenging the other Road Crew muscle cars like a sleeper. There’s nothing more fun than bringing them back to life! That’s why my collection of these original Thunderjets keeps growing.

If you have an interest in seeing the chassis rebuild process firsthand, I filmed it from start to finish with a nifty time-lapse video uploaded with my post from August 8 2021, “REANIMATOR: Bringing original Aurora T-Jets Back From The Dead!“