Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve had the good fortune to find a couple of very distressed older Tyco cars for sale at extremely low prices. As much as I enjoy rejuvenating and restoring old slot cars, I didn’t exactly set out looking for junk; but I did think it would be interesting to acquire a couple of examples of another brand and type of slot car just to see what they’re like. I’ve done this before: see my detailed posts on my first Atlas slot car here and my first Faller AMS car here. However, unlike with Atlas and Faller, I have some backstory with Tyco, and I bet some of you do as well.
My choice of the Thunderjet platform wasn’t entirely organic, owing to the way I got into this hobby, something I’ve described in detail on several occasions. I picked Thunderjets primarily because of the way they look: I feel they are among the most accurate representations of real cars that you can get in slot format. Along with that came the huge variety of different body styles and customization parts that were available for them. The third consideration was the ease of maintenance, and how durable and long-lasting they have proven to be.
Now, since this is a blog mostly for slot car enthusiasts, I probably don’t need to launch into a full dissertation on the history of Tyco, because I suspect a lot of you reading this know as much about it as I do, or more. Telling the whole story would be preaching to the choir, and nobody likes that. But there are a couple of elements of Tyco’s history that are of particular interest to me as a Matchbox and Hot Wheels collector, so I’m going to run through a quick synopsis of what I know so far….
It began with the S line of 1963–64. The “S” stood for Speedways, and this was the company’s first real step into HO electric racing. From there, Tyco leapt into the performance age with TycoPro in 1970 and the refined TycoPro II soon after. The line then evolved through the later consumer-performance generations—HP2/Curve Hugger, Magnum 440, HP7, and the magnet-heavy 440X2, which became the signature late-classic Tyco chassis for many collectors. In corporate terms, the next chapter came when Tyco bought Matchbox in 1992, creating a distinct Matchbox-Tyco era, followed by Mattel’s acquisition of Tyco in 1997, which folded both Tyco and Matchbox into Mattel’s empire. Under Mattel, the old Tyco 440 family lingered on in modified form as Electric Hot Wheels / 440X3, but after that the line effectively passed out of active production and into the collector-legacy era, where it remains today: no longer a living product family, but still one of the great names in HO slot-car history.
And so, precisely because my choice of the Thunderjet as my preferred platform was not entirely organic, it’s interesting for me to look back on my own childhood and remember that my initiation into slot cars was actually via Tyco Pro. That was the format I first had, the one that first brought slot cars into my life, so it seems only fitting that the Tyco brand should have a place in my collection. And yet, up to this point, it really hasn’t. So…
My 1st TYCO “S” slot car!
Yes, it’s rough—but it was cheap.
The seller advertised this one as-is, with runner status unknown, and it has obvious paint damage and body fatigue. But for the price being asked, I thought it would be cool to acquire one of these even if it turned out to be completely dead, just to take it apart and see how it was constructed. This is the natural curiosity of the enthusiast mechanic/engineer, and I willingly gave in to it. I was quite excited when it arrived.
So, let’s de-construct and examine!
Just as the photos I’ve seen online predicted, the chassis looks a lot like an Marusan/Atlas design…so much so that one wonders how they got away with it! The in-line motor and worm-and-wheel final drive mimic Atlas almost exactly, and even the pick-ups shoes, with their built-in spring, have a very similar design. Likewise, the “S” mimics one of Atlas’ worst features, a closed drive line that is untouchable unless you take the body off the chassis! For reasons I described in detail here, this may look neat and tight to the eye, but it’s a bad design; with no way to “jog” the motor or axle other than just rapping on the car itself, there’s no easy way to free a stuck motor…and that tends to happen to slot cars kind of a lot, ya know?
There are many variations on the Atlas design over the years, as there are with the German Faller AMS chassis, and I see strong commonalities between all of these, as all used an inline motor “block” around which the chassis was built. The biggest weakness I see in all these cars is in the axle mounting, where it seems that the plastic chassis anchoring the axles is a weakness, as the mounting blocks are potentially fragile and if one of them breaks, the chassis is scrap; the strength of the axle mounts is another superiority of the T-Jet design. Tyco, however, did something different here, although I have to confess I don’t know why, and here’s where would ask if my readers can enlighten me. Unlike all the others, the Tyco has a pivoting front axle. On mine it appears to be locked into a forward position but it clearly was originally made to be steerable. What was the purpose of this? As best I can tell, the original design called for some sort of steering system that was perhaps never utilized, or maybe was so only on some versions. Anybody out there know?
Finally at the rear of the chassis we have another interesting innovation: a weight designed to fit directly over the rear wheels to give the car more traction. That’s clearly the function of the heavy plastic block that fits over the rear axle on either side of the worm gear: its a trick bit of machining, and its heavy enough that it made me think it was metal at first.
The Tyco S naturally had their own wheel and tire design, as all manufacturers did, but sadly this is probably the biggest weakness of this platform today: the tires on these old cars have dried up into hard brittle pucks; all the pliability is gone, so there is no removing them without shattering them, and so far, I have found nothing in my tire stash from all my various customs that looks like they may replace them; the hubs are far larger than a T-Jet; T-jet truck tires, later Tyco tires, and even Road Race Replicas and Vincent variations won’t fit them. That’s a shame, since my purchase not only has the dried-out tires but also has one on the rear with a pronounced flat spot.
Does anyone know if any enterprising slotists out there have made reproductions that I haven’t found yet, or has found an existing tire that fits?
I’m still looking, and intend to try some Matchbox “regular wheel”-era tires-those will be plastic of course, not ideal but better than nothing-and even thinking of seeing if there’s anything from the 1:43 scale world that might work. I’ll experiment, and if I find a solution here before someone else proposes one, I’ll let you know!
Now then, can we get it running?! The condition of the window insert that fell out of the Jaguar body was not encouraging, distorted and discolored as it was at the lower front edge by heat! I figure that was a bad sign, and the motor did have a hint of that dreaded smell, but I worked on it anyway: de-corrosion with Tarn-X, thorough cleaning and oiling, sanding and brightening the pick-up shoes and their mounts with fine sandpaper and a polishing stone on the Dremel. Of course, the motor block is well-nigh impenetrable, and I didn’t want to get into taking that apart, since an attempt to do the same with a Faller AMS resulted in a lost part that I never was able to find and ruined that motor! I would if I had too, but it turns out I didn’t; after a lot of careful cleaning and oiling, I put it to a 9V and got a sign of life! It took a while – over an hour of coaxing – but little by little I was able to restore connectivity from the pick-up shoes to the motor and eventually I got it going; first it would move only a few inches, then a couple of feet, and before too long, I had it doing a circuit! WOW, it works! I didn’t expect that!
I cleaned up the battered body as best I could. The Tyco S is held together by 2 screws exactly like a T-Jet (so here they borrowed Aurora’s weakest design point!) and naturally the posts were both a mess; the rear one is cracked in half completely and the front one, while in tact, is split in 2 places and is just barely holding, so this body’s days on the track are over without some fabrication; even so, I polished her up and removed the grime “baked in” over years. The paint is badly damaged as you can see, but here again I’m choosing “patina” over restoration and going to let it stay in the “barn find” condition it’s in. Once done, I put it all back together as best I could, and decided to put it on the track to see if she’d play along…
It lives, IT LIVES!!!
At the end of this experiment, I was so taken with the Tyco S that I decided to spend some fairly big money acquiring another, because a rare and beautiful example came up for sale at a price I thought was reasonable in context, and I grabbed it. This latest find is in great condition, but in order to see what it is, you’ll have to tune in for a future post! Suffice to say that bringing this car back to life was a blast, and once I work out something for the tires/wheels, I’ll have a pair of Tyco S cars to run on The HO Highway!
Going “Pro”…for the first time in 50 years!
My next acquisition from Tyco-land was a real throwback to your humble blogger’s own childhood: now we’re going back to my own personal past to the very first slot cars I ever owned: the “brass pan” Tyco Pros! I found this Chaparral in the 1976 Bicentennial celebration colors selling for next to nothing because its missing several body parts: the wing and the window insert are all history…kind of odd considering the rest of the body seems to be in great condition. The seller advertised it by saying “This car runs when it wants too.” That sounded like a challenge, so for $15, I grabbed it, and within a week was holding the first Tyco Pro my hands have touched since I was 7 or 8 years old!
The Tyco Pro design is elaborate; at a glance it appears to be fragile but its actually quite robust, the one exception being the ever present danger of those tiny wires breaking one of their connections. I’ve brought this up before in the context of the lighting wires for the Thunderjet “Flamethrowers”: I don’t know who out there has the equipment or the skill to solder wires this small, but I sure don’t, so if any of these connections were to ever break, my own Tyco chassis would be history.
These chassis were made in Hong Kong, and I can only imagine that the factory procedure to assemble these was intense; I bet those tiny solders were all done by hand! You could never do something like that economically now…well, at least not until AI robots become sophisticated enough to bring that kind of productivity back! The pivoting, self-centering head and elongated “slot” was abandoned on later designs for a much more conventional metal pin, but seemed like a clever idea to give the car some steering ability and make it more “tossable” in turns, giving your racing activities a feel of reality that other brands at the time couldn’t match. And we all remember the “plunger” style pick-ups, a remarkably intricate design that can be problematic to fix but works well when it works at all! That’s where my purchase was failing…
If I pressed down hard on the front the “head” would make contact and the motor would run, but left alone, there was not enough pressure to get a connection. What to do with this, then? Well first, another de-corrosion and cleaning on all the parts…and then, an inspiration to add a tiny amount of dielectric grease to the shafts of those plungers to try to tame the wobble in their bearings that high mileage had likely caused. The combination worked; after about an hour of careful cleaning and experimentation, I had her reliably running!
The next thing to address was the rear tires, which of course were hard and brittle, and one of them shattered when I removed it. I tried a set of Road Race Replicas silicones, and those fit and worked, but they were a little too short and tilted the chassis backward enough that contact problems at the front began to return, so I hunted around through my parts bin again. It took a while, but I found a pair of rears that I believe were originally from a set of AJ’s aluminum wheels that fit very nicely! They are a hair thicker and a hair taller than the originals, but they fit and looked decent, and although they themselves are old and a bit “out of round” and don’t have the best traction, it’s nice to know that reproduction tires that will fit these Tyco Pros are available today from vendors like JAG Hobbies. These AJ’s tires would do for now, though, to get her on the track!
Like many Pro era cars, the Chaparral coupe has lighting, and the tiny bulb in the chassis not only worked, it worked very well: it lit up extremely strong and bright – much brighter than the same bulb on my lone working T-Jet Flamethrower – and once it was worked into the little recess in the plastic of the headlight “manifold,” it looked great on the track! So, let’s see what she can do!
When Tyco advertised the Pro models as the fastest slot cars on the market, they weren’t kidding! These things move! Their speed might not be impressive by modern standards, but they leave the early T-Jets in the dust! Aurora would of course response to this with the AFX line just a year or two later, which started the trend of what were once “HO” slot cars getting bigger and bigger. I was very pleased, however, to find that this Chaparral is almost the perfect size and scale to co-mingle with my vast collection of Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars! They are a little smaller than I remember them being, and while they are a hair bigger in comparison to original T-Jets, they look right at home on the Drag City diorama!
This raises a new question: where in my world do these Tyco Pros belong: on the HO Highway, or at the “big track?”
Well, considering they don’t have traction magnets, they don’t like the banked turn, although I was able to get this one moving fast enough to negotiate the high bank of lane 2; it won’t do the low bank of lane 1, so although the elongated slot design likes to hang up on the older Model Motoring track, that is probably where she belongs. She’ll out run all the T-Jets there, though, even the “Tuff Ones!” Perhaps some of the Dash Motorsports chassis will keep up…we shall see, and it will be fun finding out!
Having seen this, I’m now turning my attention to some of the really cool early Pro bodies that I never had as a kid, such as the Lamborghini Miura P400 I mentioned here, as well as a few others like the Ferrari 512M, the Iso Grifo, and the DeTomaso Pantera. I also want to recapture the first two slot cars I ever owned exactly as I owned them: the Porsche 908 in silver and red and the 917K in light blue and orange. And there’s a Datsun 240Z in red and white that I definitely want again, as the one I had in childhood was the fastest slotty I owned: I beat all the neighborhood kid’s Pros and AFX’s with that one, and while that has zilch to do with the body, its a fun memory that makes me want it back! These cars also look really slick with the white rear tires they made for a time, so I’ll be on the lookout for some of those as well. So, I can assure you that there’s a few more Tyco Pros in my near future!
And so, there’s some thoughts from my “week with Tyco.” Hope you enjoyed this little diversion into a look at the competition, Thunderjet fans! I personally think these early Tycos are really cool, even if the Pro chassis design was a little too clever for their own good. More conventional designs were coming in the next series, the HP2 “Curve Hugger,” which introduced traction magnets and lost the elaborate “steering head” pick-up design, but there’s just something cool about these early “brass pan” cars that recalls a time when Tyco was the brand to beat on the track! Competition is good: it drives innovation and its exciting as well! And competition and excitement are what racing is all about!
Another great read and such cool work you do bringing these back to life. I think there is something special about bring these little beaters back to life and giving them some love.