Vacation over, thunderjetheaven.com now returns to Drag City Raceway for our regularly scheduled programming! Behold my first ever FALLER slot car, a brand made in Germany beginning in the early 1960’s and continuing in some form to this day. It has taken me some time to get around to showcasing this one, because once you start unpacking Faller, you’ve opened a Pandora’s Box! A potentially very expensive Pandora’s Box…
This MBZ W112 (yes, because the body is stamped underneath as “300SE” so it is the top-of-the-line W112 rather than the far more common W111 220/280SE) was made as both a coupe and convertible, though in inverse proportion to reality, the ‘vert appears to be far easier to find than the coupe. I got this one from my favorite proprietors @ Performance Slots & Hobbies when I met them @ the Colpar’s basement toy swap meet on June 1 shortly before taking off for CA. It is in excellent condition, I daresay near mint, and it runs great! That’s a good thing, because when I took it apart, I got quite a shock! Here’s what I mean…
Here is a photo of what I believed was the more or less “standard” Faller chassis design. As you can see from the water mark, I stole this photo from our friends at Slot Car Central, who have created this handy-dandy chassis guide complete with illustrations that every HO slot head should bookmark! To look at the design shown here, it looks rather familiar…kinda like…an Aurora Thunderjet! Well, that made sense to me, because in my now 4.5 years as a slot car racer, my research has lead me to believe the following story, which I have read with some variation from multiple sources…
The story I’ve heard goes that Faller did copy the Aurora T-Jet chassis design, and did so rather blatantly. So blatantly, in fact, that Aurora threatened them with a business-ending lawsuit. But somehow a deal was struck between the two firms, with Aurora allowing the Faller design to continue provided they promised not to market their toys in North America. And that’s why Faller slot cars and sets are so hard to find here in the States!
But, is that story true? Well, maybe; I’ve read enough variations of it from enough sources that I figure there’s some truth to it, but I also think its probably not the whole story, and to back up that assertion, I offer you a look at the Faller slot car that I bought! When I went to take it apart to inspect, test, and lubricate it, what I found hiding under that Mercedes body is not at all what I expected…
Well…WTF? This is an inliner!
Now, to be fair, Slot Car Central never claimed their chassis guide was completely comprehensive, so I won’t hold that against them, but take a glance at the guide I posted the link for above and you won’t see this design listed in their Faller index! This looks much more like the Marusan/Atlas design that I profiled so exhaustively in my previous pair of posts about my first Atlas slot car, but its much more complex than that design; there are resistors, and multiple kinds of shims at work here, both for the position of the motor and the position of the axle relative to it.
I did find an entry on Hobby Talk from many years ago where a reader profiles his own Faller car with a similar chassis, but not identical, as that one appears to be newer, with some sort of detachable plate for the pick-ups shoes. Finding these variations led to 2 days of research online, from which I concluded that the number of different chassis designs that Faller made through the years is staggering! And I thought the 8 different Atlas designs were confusing! They had several different series for different purposes, some made for racing with high speed motors and other made for railroad dioramas and layouts which were equipped with motors designed to run much slower and with much more control. My question is, which of these two categories does my little 300SE “cabriolet” fall into?
Well as I said, it runs great!
I did nothing to it other than clean it a little and put a dot of oil on the shaft of the inline motor and the worm gear. It seems pretty fast to me, but more than that, it’s steady; it runs at a very consistent speed. Since this car will be a member of the Road Crew, it doesn’t have to be fast, and that steady, smooth running is very impressive and much appreciated! Kinda reminds me of my old 1:1 scale Mercedes diesels when I had them on the highway!
Well, Faller has been in business for a long time and still is, and their current product is this awesome “slotless” product called the Faller Car System, which, like one of their original products from the ‘60’s, the Faller Traffic layout, was designed primarily for use as an augmentation for model train layouts and not for racing enthusiasts. They’ve made a huge array of products, including intricate traffic systems with electro-mechanical controls, some of which remind me of the Tyco USA-1 trucking sets from the 80’s, which were extremely cool! As for the Faller AMS series (that’s “Auto Motor und Sport”), which was their principal HO scale “racing” offering, those products and accessories for them ran-as I understand it-from around 1963 into the mid or late ‘70’s, which paces the production of the Aurora Thunderjet almost exactly! After that, Faller actually wound up going into business with Aurora and repackaging a lot of AFX cars as Faller items for sale in Europe.
But there’s a LOT more to learn, starting with the design purpose and history of this inliner chassis! Over the next several months I plan to do a lot more digging and lot more learning about Faller, and I also plan to acquire more Faller AMS cars! Yes, dear readers, just as I was beginning to reach the end of the catalog of Aurora T-Jets that I actually want, I discover something new! I have verified the compatibility between the Faller chassis and the both the original Model Motoring track and controls, the Tyco track and controls, and the modem Tomy AFX tracks. Of course I was concerned about power input/output since I don’t know enough about these to be sure I won’t burn it up, but running it on the Model Motoring “HO Highway” with my laptop power supply, the motor never gets too hot to touch, so it seems happy!
This means that by purchasing this one car, I may have opened up a whole new world of slotty fun…and spending! Yes, spending…because, like all things German, Faller stuff doesn’t come cheap. You find deals now and again, but the brand’s scarcity in the US makes these hot items on the collector market here, so while my learning will continue as I have the time, my acquisitions will continue as I have the money. What that means for you is that you can look forward to plenty more posts about Faller cars here on my li’l blog, and more info as I discover it. As always, anyone reading this who is more knowledgeable than I am is encouraged to reach out and set me straight where I make mistakes, including any clarification on that infamous “Aurora VS Faller” story I outlined above!
Man, you weren’t kidding about a Pandora’s box, especially about that chassis and the inliner. Talk about some Slot Care Archeology! It’s even better that it runs great on your current set up. That is good news that the power set up didn’t burn it up. The model itself is very cool and the little driver is a nice design touch. All in all, this is a fascinating little car!