Overclocking? Why am I suddenly burning out motors?

Well, October has gone in a blur! My paucity of posts for this month is accounted for by my spending much of my spare time out and about, hanging out with friends or making road trips; I’ll tell you, nothing soothes the “Blue State Blues” like a drive across Colorado in October to remind me of why I live here in spite of the political madness!

However, there may be another element about why I haven’t spent as much time at my track as I was hoping this month: it appears that I am yet again having power problems with the track. This time, however, they are a little more mysterious than my voltage drop issues, which I wrote about several times before coming up with what I thought was a final solution. This time, its more serious, as damage has occurred: my last two tournaments burned out a huge number of motors! I cooked 3 in all, 2 muscle cars and a sports car, and I could smell that I was very close to burning up another before crossing the finish line. The question is, why? In my 3 years of slot racing so far I’ve only burned out 2 motors, and now I’ve burned out more than that within the space of less than 2 weeks! What has changed all of a sudden?

I think maybe I had the voltage cranked up a little high at 22V, but that is the exact rating of the stock Tomy AFX wall warts; what’s more, I’ve used 22V from my DC power supply before without incident. One of my good friends who is a retired professional electrician told me he beleives I had the amperage turned up too high. Far be it for me to question a professional, but it was my understanding that the cars would only pull the amperage they needed, regardless of what was available. Even so, I think I was right about the voltage, for shortly after the beginning of the “Secret Oktober” sports car tournament-which cost me my 3^rd motor-I dialed the voltage down to 20V and the amperage down to 3, and since then I have had no further “fry-fests.”

All of this has got me thinking about the most controversial aspect of the chassis I use: the neodymium traction magnets. Part of the reason I can turn the voltage up so high and get these cars to move at such extreme speeds is because of that magnet. I have always known that the combination of the power of the magnet with the demand for speed is putting extreme wear on these little motors. Considering that 2 of the 3 motors I burned up were in two of my oldest cars, its likely that they had just hit their limit and fried: just like the motor in a real racing car, they will only take so much punishment before the need for a rebuild or replacement is evident. But one of the 3 was a newer one; so what happened there?

Well, that burn victim was in a car that has been a historically bad performer in spite of its great looks, so I had taken a “cheater’s way” to improve it: I disassembled the chassis and “dropped” the traction magnet a bit, pushing it down from its stock position in the chassis to bring it fractionally closer to the rail and thus increase its strength and improve the car’s grip. It worked, but at a price. And the conclusion I’m drawing from this is, maybe it’s  time for me to slow things down a little.

I’ve said this before when talking about the AFX track and the voltage problems: maybe I’m demanding too much performance and too much consistency out of what are, at the end of the day, toys. One solution would be for me to spend thousands of dollars on a new Viper Racing track and all the of the connectors, wiring, and effort that comes with it. That’s something I’ve considered and still am, although, thanks to losing my excellent paid-for car recently, money is tighter than ever so such an indulgence seems less likely. But another solution would be to just chill out a little; lower the voltage, put all the traction magnets back in their stock positions, run the cars around the track a little slower. The loss of speed could be compensated for by the increased need for skill and adding a little drifting to the action; this, after all, is the very thing that the opponents of the traction magnet say is what’s missing when you race slot cars with the trac mags. Having spent a lot of time with my ever expanding fleet of much older and slower Aurora originals, I’m finding that in some ways I actually enjoy those cars more, because just trying to keep them on the track is as much fun as trying to break a previous lap record on the big track with the Ultra G’s. Of course, it is a very different experience; one feels like playing while the other feels like racing. It’s a tough call to make, and at this juncture, I’m honestly not sure which direction I want to go in.

ABOVE: A couple of reasons for my absence from racing and blogging; putting miles on the new 1:1 scale “slot car,” and spending quality time with my buddy Patrick at his home in the northern mountains. Its been hard to pull myself away from either of these!

Winter has arrived. I hate the time change: not because of the disruption to my circadian rhythm-although there’s that too-but because I hate leaving the office when its already dark outside: nothing makes you feel more like you’ve devoted your entire day to work than that. Considering that this promises to be both a very cold and-thanks to “Uncle Joe’s” energy policies-a very expensive winter, I expect to be spending quite a bit of time in the basement, so it’s a given that the answers to some of these questions are going to be found within the next few months. One thing that I think it quite definite is that I feel I have reached the limits of this current layout, and I am very seriously considering taking it all apart and starting over from scratch. Whether that means a new layout made again with Tomy AFX, or going back to my original Tyco format, or moving forward to a “big boy” track from Viper Racing, all remains to be seen…but you can bet I’ll blog about it here at DRAG CITY RACEWAY!