Fetch modellers - model cars, trains, lego, meccano, airfix etc. :-)
17 watchers
Sep 2018
12:34pm, 20 Sep 2018
432 posts
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Claypole
Yeah cheers for all the updates Happy sounds like you're really getting into. I googled your GT12 - tasty, tasty looking track car, and hopefully less grass to be cleaned out of the front shocks! Bet that car is just a blur at full beans. Hope you get your tweak on at the w/e 
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Sep 2018
12:57pm, 20 Sep 2018
29,216 posts
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HappyG(rrr)
Thanks Nick and Claypole. Glad I'm not just talking to myself! (nothing new there!) The GT12s do look very cool (I think). Proper little racing cars! I'm going to have fun making mine look pretty! rcnews.net Think that one's based on a McLaren? They're not as fast as the buggies Claypole - though the racing is incredibly close and precise. Great to watch (I think!) Buggies have motors down to 6.5T whereas GT12 unmodified is 13.5T (fewer turns = faster). Because they're designed for indoor, they need not to go too fast! They're not as quick in a straight line, but they corner brilliantly as they stick to the ground. Combination of aerodynamic down force, sticky tyres and stiff suspension and carefully engineered chassis keep them flat and stable. It's fascinating engineering actually. Ride height is adjusted to fractions of a mm. Anyhoo, I'll keep you updated. Hope weather holds for Sunday for the outdoor stuff. Last Scottish regional round of year then one more local one, and it's indoor after that. No more mud! G
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Sep 2018
1:00pm, 20 Sep 2018
433 posts
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Claypole
Ah didn't realise that about the indoor cars, makes sense. Yeah I know i think the engineering is amazing. I googled those XRay cars like you got and the level of design just blew my mind to be honest, so precise and thought out. They seem like minature real cars to be honest - what a blast
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Sep 2018
1:05pm, 20 Sep 2018
29,217 posts
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HappyG(rrr)
That's why they cost £1000! Here's a thought to blow your mind. The lad that's helping me, his dad works as some kind of heavy engineering at the big dockyards locally (Rosyth - they build battleships!) and he wanted to build himself a car. I said, "Oh it's a Caterham 7 or some other kind of Lotus 7 lookalike kit." He said, "Half right - it's a Lotus 7 lookalike, but it's not a kit. I just made each bit from scratch myself." He used donor engine from a Mondeo, but he build the chassis himself, just welding bits together, shocks everything. And he designed it based on the shocks, steering etc. in the toy cars!! That's how close they are to real car engineering! G
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Sep 2018
2:00pm, 20 Sep 2018
434 posts
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Claypole
Blimey That has just blown my mind. Thought I was doing well just to build them from kit......LOL
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Sep 2018
1:56pm, 24 Sep 2018
29,227 posts
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HappyG(rrr)
Final Scottish regional round yesterday. Great fun, but soooo tired from suuuch a long day! Set off at 5am to get to Dumfries for 7. Back at 10pm drinking red bull to avoid falling asleep on motorway! Summary was: good fun, well organised, perfect weather, car was fine, I was better organised, a few decent laps, but too many mistakes and overall not a great performance. But all good experience and lots of nice folk and a great event overall. Got there at 7, or at least Sat Nav said I was there, but couldn't see the track. Knew it would be tucked away behind something but it took me 15 mins of driving up and down random roads to find it 100 metres away! The guys were waiting for me for one of the gazebos. But as it was the other gazebo wasn't there yet either, so I was still first. Set up quick enough, and my own table, chair, power lead and box worked well. And I got a "pit mat" that I'd ordered from one of the guys who gets factory stuff. It's just a plastic mat with holes in, but it's branded, so that looks nice and professional! Car didn't really need setting up, just got batteries on charge. Then some folk were walking the course. It had some very tricky bits actually. A couple of big bumps on the fast straights (try hitting a bump that's as deep as your wheel at 40mph!) and a double ramp (not done one of those before!) and a drop (about 2m at 45 degrees? not done one of those either!) Apart from the trucks (a sort of "fun class" by themselves) I was in the bottom heat of the buggies, so meant I was first practice, first race heats etc. and got started early, about 8.30am. At least I made practice this time. I was much less nervous and knew better what I was doing. The double jump wasn't too bad, nor the drop actually. The worst bit turned out to be the far straight and corner. My eyesight is fine, but this was up a bank, so no perspective whatsoever, as the rostrum was only 5ft off the ground, so impossible to see where your car was across the track - too far inside and you were catching inside of the corner, too far out and you were catching outside of corner and another big hole out there too. So I was tootling v slow round that while the better guys were zooming it. Found I could do the uphill then straight fine, the next two corners and straight I was quick enough, then 180 up a bank and small jump, right, left onto the short straight before the double jump. This was closest to rostrum and I was fine here as I could see OK. After jump 4 S bends up and down a bank was best taken slow, then back on to that far away long left hander. Argh! Anyhoo, was fine in practice and 3 out of 4 of the heats not bad. Because it was the bottom level, with quite a few kids, I did get taken out a few times, as they tend to be a bit random and crash happy. Whereas the adults are a bit more sensible - I guess its their own money when they break the cars! At one start I got stuck behind a girl and tried to go round or over her car (I was due to start 3rd and she was 9th.) But I got completely out of shape and binned the car at the start in middle of the jump. Lost so much time I wasn't going to make it up in the whole of the next 10 laps! Oh well! Anyway, qualified for the not-slowest-final. But only by virtue of the organisers putting only 5 together in the slow one. Had it been 8 or 9, I'd have been in slowest! As it was, in the final, I was with faster folk. I was 7th of 9. This would have been fine except that I got caught up in an almighty pile up after the start and got put back on the track last! I got one place back up to 8th, so second last, in the end. Great to watch the fast folk racing. Including some of the juniors - one very good 14 year old from our club is one of the quickest and he had a right ding dong battle with an amazingly quick 7 year old. In the end, they tied the 7 race serious on points, and even counting back who had beaten whom in previous races they couldn't separate them. So they decided to give them joint first, which seemed very fair! And the top guys in Scotland also had a close final, trading 1st and 2nd place throughout and with just 0.5s separating them at the finish. Some exciting marshalling action too - the 2nd place guy was catching first, who had made a couple of uncharacteristic errors, then 2nd made a mistake and was off, but was marshalled back onto the track in probable less than a couple of seconds, by a marshal diving across to flip his car back on its wheels. Who was this athletic marshal? Turns out it was his ageing dad! Great day all round and I look forward to getting the hang of the outdoor racing more. But from this week on it's indoor racing. Just as well, as the sun was rising when we started and set by the time we finished! Though the sun was glorious for the whole day and in late Sept it could have been anything but! Roll on the next race. G
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Sep 2018
2:46pm, 24 Sep 2018
29,228 posts
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HappyG(rrr)
The bumps were holes, and 7 race series, not serious!
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Sep 2018
11:44am, 26 Sep 2018
29,231 posts
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HappyG(rrr)
I've just got my F-rating. I'm F5 (I'm assuming it's like Formula 1 to Formula 5 and I'm the bottom. Seems accurate!) Going to do my first indoor on Sunday at my own club rather than visiting another club. Safety and support on home turf and all that! G
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Oct 2018
2:13pm, 1 Oct 2018
29,278 posts
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HappyG(rrr)
Weekend double racing report Outdoors - 15 2wd and 9 4wd out. Good fun. Stayed dry. Cold early but sun stayed out. Nice end to the year. I was mostly in qualifying heats with the kids. And some new ones at that. So managed to be at the front of all of those. But in qualifying it's only your time that matters. Was 11th out of 15 so last of the adults (actually there were two teens in the 10 above me too). So the 3 heats became two finals, so the kids, plus the bottom two from the heat above us. That gave me only one thing to do which was escape the kiddie carnage behind me and stay with the two better racers. Fail! I got tangled up with the random driving kids and lost 10 plus seconds in the first carnage at the first couple of corners and never got back in contention with 1 and 2. All good fun though! Then indoors, 10 GT2 racing and a few buggies trying out the indoors. I got very confused with two cars to charge batteries for, swap transponders between and for the buggy, change the tyres to try the different indoor tyres we were trying. All ended in disaster - I forgot to swap transponders one time, so had no lap timing. Another time missed start of my heat! Another, had some mechanical failure so missed a couple laps. On the buggy, tried my own outdoor tyres (loads of grip) the rubber indoor ones (slidier!) but couldn't get the 1/10 touring car foams on at all. Eventually hit a post and broke me steering. Hope it's not too hard to fix. Loved the GT12 though. Again, I was in the slower of the two heats, but after the mechanical and missed starts I was lapping in 2nd place (behind a 12 year old admittedly, but he's pretty good!) and then in the final manage to hold 2nd too. Pleased with that. And it was my first time driving it and it worked fine. New tyres, bit of "additive" on the rears, advised to change the steering to have some toe-in and it all drove quite nicely. You have to be much more accurate with the GT12s. They're slower, but it feels fast round the tiny hall. Think 23 laps of 14s a lap, compared with 13 laps of 25s for outdoors. So it's indoors for winter now. There are once a month winter series of indoor buggies at Falkirk Sunday day times - apparently 50 or 60 racers. 2 weekly Fri evenings at Broxburn with 20 plus racers of GT12 and the 10 or so local Dunfermline club Sun nights for GT12 and buggies. Should be fun for winter! G
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Oct 2018
12:17pm, 8 Oct 2018
29,305 posts
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HappyG(rrr)
Full on Sunday indoor racing - 2wd buggies at Falkirk and GT12 at Lochgelly. Here's a 1 min video of Lochgelly GT12s just to give you a flavour, if you're interested. Falkirk was about 40 odd folk, 25 2wd and 15 4wd. Decent size indoor track, with a big jump, lumps and bumps strategically scattered around, so proper off road buggy terrain, not track like the F1, touring cars or GT cars do. But because it's a type of carpet, it's really grippy, so you can drive quite precisely, which is good fun, compared to outdoors. I did OK in some qualifiers but overall just started at the top of the bottom group (kids, and new drivers) and qualified bottom of the middle group (ooh, get me!) but then finished bottom of that final, which was disappointing, because I feel I could have done better. Just too many mistakes, even though I go very slowly. I get confused when another car takes me out or overtakes me (or very occasionally I overtake someone else!) Or after I've had an accident, I then lose my driving for a few corners and it can compound the problem. Was quite fun, but a long day - left home 9 and back 5. Then had to drop some stuff off at local club, but decided to stay and do GT12, but not the buggy. And it went quite well. 11 cars and I was middle of the bottom group. But driving a bit more smoothly. Plucked up courage to get some car advice - put additive on tyres for more grip, changed the steering dual rate down to 80% to make steering softer, need to move the rear suspension to outer position for more stability. All fun, onwards! G
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