Articles |
Engineering Drawings of HO Slot Cars
by Michael Eckstein
As part of Michael Eckstein's research into historical HO scale scratchbuilt slot cars, he produces
technical CAD images of the chassis under study. He has allowed me to show some of them below. More can be seen
at his website, Michael Eckstein.
Thanks, Michael, these are great! --tja
Michael Eckstein will tell you more about his research in his own words. He writes:
Originally I started the design work when trying to understand the different designs. Most of these chassis
are unavailable today, or at least for me, so I had to rely on blurry pictures 30 years old, mainly b/w,
and descriptions in magazines and from racers.
"Reverse engineering" (as some call this) helped me to understand the different designs,
ideas and developments of the chassis, built in different areas in the beginning of the 70's. Later on I
started to "rebuild" different chassis, described in contemporary magazines for the same
purpose. After sharing some of the pictures (and CAD files!) with other collectors, I learned that
it would be a great idea to publish them somehow. This lead to my
Picturetrail album website,
and finally to the interest of Jim here! Thanks for that anyway!
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Above: 1. This is my CAD design of "Bob Kirchner's Lead Sled", featured in a story in the
Car Model Magazine 11/1971. It was one of the hardest to understand, since I only had a scan of the magazine pages,
and the pictures were not too clear. His design is really impressive, with all the joints these parts were
combined with, actually interacting with each other! This is a piece I would like to build some day in reality,
and try it running...
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 Above and Right:
2. This design is a car originally built by Gary Beedle, one of the last versions
before magnets took over. It is a quite sophisticated design, with the original Aurora AFX chassis
broken down to merely motor and rear axle drive train. The whole bottom is brass clad. The side pans
are hinged right in front of the rear axle, carrying the floppy body mounts. The outside pans underneath
the chassis carry the current from the wipers directly to the brush tubes, while the pan in the middle
has an adjustable guide pin (not shown here).
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Above: 3. Michael Eckstein has made available these 3-D interactive drawings of
an HO scale chassis built by Gary Beedle. This chassis is the predecessor of the chassis shown as #2 above.
To view this special feature, one needs to use Internet Explorer 5.5 or newer,
and a plug-in from eDrawings, which will download automatically.
The download and one-time installation took me about 20 minutes on a
dial-up modem; on cable or DSL the download will be much quicker. I had to give permission for Internet Explorer to run
ActiveX controls. I did have one freeze-up, but re-starting the IE browser solved the problem.
This nice piece of software allows you to rotate, pan and zoom the engineering drawings to any angle.
Click here to see the Gary Beedle chassis in 3-D!
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Above: 4. Here is another 3-D interactive drawing from Michael Eckstein, done with the eDrawings plug-in,
of the Bob Kirchner Lead Sled. Enjoy!
Again, to view this special feature, one needs to use Internet Explorer 5.5 or newer,
and the plug-in from eDrawings, which will download automatically.
Click here to see Bob Kirchner's Lead Sled in 3-D!
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