Ford GT LM - Printable Version

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RE: Ford GT LM - Tamar - 13th-Aug-19

Posted 14 March 2019 - 07:49 PM

The Road to Le Mans 1/32: 3 weeks, some Team news-updates
In just 21 days we should be arranging all the tables, chairs and the Marshalling floor mats @ Warwick college sports hall in Henley in Arden.
With all the time and effort it takes to set up the 1/32nd DiSCA La Sarthe track a helping hand is always appreciated.
Alex and Gary have a place for every bit of track and scenery firmly locked up in heads...(a couple of thousand items, but they do have a written manual to fall back on) 
...so we'll just be taking the dumb and heavy work of their hands. 
Took a few nights off working on the Ford's, also needed time to catch up on posts, pm's, emails etc etc. One of them lead to a very interesting bit of team news
 
Scalextric detail parts...
As I mentioned before the Scalex Ford is a very nice and detailed car with some nifty design features to prevent breakages in case of a crash (well..with exception of the aerials)
Before I start my builds I usually dismount all of them and store them safely in a box for later mounting or to use them to create masters for rubber casting or vacforming.
To be honest I had a very hard time trying to get the mirrors off the body (as I wanted to recast them in rubber) noticed that they were quite flexible and upon closer inspection found them to be cast...in rubber!
Now that was a big time saver and it's a real pain in the "buttocks" to paint rubber nicely, so here a feather in your cap, way to go Scaley. 



For most of you that have acquired a Ford one of your concerns might be how to keep that delicate rear wing sticking way out the back, on your car..in a crash...
Well you shouldn't ! You should allow it to come off..at least in a hard crash.
The rear wing has been designed as such that it clips into a mount and would come off in a hard crash..if not for a tiny drop of glue added in China.
But that tiny drop of glue actually prevents the wing supports to come free in a hard crash and may result in breakage.
So stick a thin scalpel next to the supports into the wing mount and wiggle to cut the glue and you're home free...but there's more.

Once you have the wing off the car and flip it upside down you'll notice a seam line and that its actually cast in two parts: the rearwing supports and the top wing with the endplates.
So again, take out you thin scalpel blade and carefully, and I do mean carefully (as in always point the sharp end of the blade away from you) try to pry it between the wing supports and the wing.
Now on two of the three wings I have treated this way there were only small dabs of glue used to fix the support. I could easily pry the blade between them in the middel and wiggle my way with the scalpel to the sides and the wing would come off.
But with one wing someone in China had been really thorough and more generous with the glue, couldn't get the blade in between.
In that case I would advise you to leave it as it is and "just" be content with the "clip in" safety. But if you can separate the wing from the support and clean the recess from glue.
Just a tiny bit of thin double sided tape or a small dab of shoe goo will give you an added safety feature to prevent breakage in case of a serious crash. 
 
 
...and Scalextric after sales service
Ok so back to that PM I had send, the one leading to a nice bit of team news. DiSCA sporting rules require all detail parts to be present on the cars.
Small detail parts (like mirrors and wipers) only need to be present at the start, but wings need to be present at all times.
Should they come off you'll get a notification from Race control and  you'll need to Pit within 5 laps to replace it.
Which (if your car is prepped for it) should not be a problem as by that time..a Marshall will kindly have placed the part in the "lost & found" bin at RC.
And if the Marshall is bit a slow, you mount the spare and place the retrieved item in your spare parts box in the Parc Fermé... later.
This procedure works well in the day time...but in the night darkness.... it may take a lot longer before the "lost" wing is retrieved...and some are "lost" ...forever.
So it is handy if you have at least 3 or 4 spares.

So Tuesday evening I send a PM to the only Scalextric rep I know, well at least I knew he is a SF member. I modestly asked if he could maybe act as a liaison...
... and ask Scalextric if they would be willing to "support" our effort with 2 or 3 spare wings and mirrors. 
Got a PM back the next morning with a reply that Scalex really doesn't have any facility to supply spares. But, to drop him an email with my contact details...
...and  he would dig round the office and to see if they had any spare shells etc. etc.
In the afternoon I got an email that he couldn't source any spare shells, but that 3 complete cars were now laying wrapped and ready to be shipped out in the post room.
Way to go Scalextric, that's what I call "after sales service" You ask for 3 wings and mirrors and you get 3 complete cars, it was like Christmas all over again.
So as a thank you the Ford MonkeyTown Team NL  cars will now proudly carry Scalextric decals on their bodywork.  

And while we're talking decals, here's an other Team update: on the roof we'll also have decals with the names of Wayne and Stephen Lander listed as drivers of the #18 car.
Regardless of how Brexit will end..here's to another Anglo-Dutch cooperation  

To be continued
 
with kind regards
Tamar 
 

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RE: Ford GT LM - Tamar - 13th-Aug-19

Posted 17 March 2019 - 02:12 AM

Spotting the tales of Tail-end Charly
So with me taking a bit of time off watching motorsport, not much work has been done on the car this week, but..there's plenty of stuff I have not posted yet.
One of the things I'd thought at least someone to notice, was the work done at back of the car. I mean there were more than enough hints in some of the pictures I posted.
But apparently nobody dared to ask what I had really done to my Tail end Charly...the huge diffuser sticking out the back of the Ford. 
Ever since the ACO/FIA/IMSA aero rules changed a couple of years ago diffusers, almost bigger than those seen on LMP's have become a trade mark on the GTE/GT-LM class cars.
And as such they've started to appear on slot-car models. Not that much of a problem on a stock chassis, but as we learned with the BMW M6 ....
they can get you into trouble on a podded chassis with lots of suspension travel.


 
The wishbone's connected to the collar bone, the collarbone is connected to?
On a podded chassis with suspension, you max amount of suspension travel should ideally be smaller than the ground clearance your running. Other wise you chassis will rubb the track.
No matter how long your screws are or how tall you springs are...your looking at 1-1,5 mm of travel max. But as the back of the chassis sticks out behind your suspension mounts...
...a small the amount of travel at the suspension mounts will be translated in to a bigger movement at the back.
Meaning that if a lot of chassis is sticking out at the tail end...  like on the Ford....it will be rubbing the track way before you get near 1,0mm of travel.
So somewhere in early februari, I'm working on the chassis side suspension, fiddling with the motor-pod, mounting it to the chassis for the umpteenth time. 
To keep the pod in the correct position for me to drill the holes for the suspension screws, I fully tightened the rear pod screws.....and then it hit me!
With the pod now firmly connected to the chassis and the rear diffuser behind it... no movement between the two parts, the diffuser was just as much connected to the pod.
What if.....




So at the end of first shakedown on Sunday feb 10th there was one more test we needed to do. The "What if" I wanted to test was how the handling of the chassis would be influenced...
...if the diffuser was not connected to the chassis but mounted directly to the motorpod.
As this would be a "no way back" kind of test, we first tested if the handling of the car became worse with the rear pod screws not connected to the chassis at all.
The handling of the car remained the same..all we needed to do was ad some extra spacers inside the springs to limit the suspension travel. Ok ..so far so good, next step.
Now it was time to cut the back of the chassis off and mount it fixed to the motorpod. Immediately we noticed that even with the full amount of suspension travel the diffuser was no longer rubbing the track.
Yeeeeeeeeeeeah  

With a big smile I added the pod mounted diffuser to the number of modifications to be discussed the next day with Stefan Nalbach to be incorporated in the MK2 chassis design.


On the left the diffuser cut of the prototype MK1 chassis here the diffuser was still mounted with screws from the bottom, on the right the MK2 version with the top mounted screws. 
Rubber washers were added for e bit off extra flexibility in case of a hard hit to the rear of the car.
 
to be continued

with kind regards
Tamar

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RE: Ford GT LM - Tamar - 13th-Aug-19

Posted 01 April 2019 - 02:45 PM
The Road to Le Mans 1/32: 5 days and counting 
 

Yesterday we had an 8 hr marathon session in Best. Not that we drove for 8hrs..unfortunately no. The 3 Dutchies (Lennard, Marc & yourstruely) started work @ 14:30 to get the
Mk2-A 2018 Ford ready for its first shakedown. 19,5 man hours later (6,5hrs x 3= 19,5 hrs in total) the 2018 liveried car ran its first laps alongside the 2017 MK2 Ford on the Suzuka track.
And here's were all the testing, development and preparations of the past 8 week payed off. The MK2-A was stable, smooth and fast straight out of the "box".
So we now have two set-up's to choose from: the Mk2 2017 car with a 1mm offset and the Mk2-A 2018 car with a 0,75 offset.



Does that mean that both cars are finished...No, bodies need to be reinforced. Got some minor paint touch ups to do and the SMD led lights still need to be installed in the bodies
The latter is most likely to become a Friday morning job, and you can expect us to add the last decals on Saturday... just before concourse 

But we've made serious progress yesterday, so I confident that we'll be able to hit the ground running when the track opens @ Henley on Friday 12:30


to be continued

With kind regards
Tamar 

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RE: Ford GT LM - Tamar - 13th-Aug-19

Posted 09 April 2019 - 03:17 AM

The Road to Le Mans 1/32: 360 days and counting
Back home after an eventfull 8th edition of the Le Mans 24hrs. So how did it go? Not as good as we were aiming for I am afraid. 
I blew the light installation on the 2018 racebody Friday evening just before the start of qualifying, so that had to be redone on Saturday morning 06:00 hrs.
Then we failed  post qualifying tech (rear axle too wide) which meant we ended up in Siberia rostrum wise.
We'd also been chasing a weird package drop problem which ruined most of our free practice sessions and persisted till finally solved by Maurizio after 1 hour of running in the race.
After swapping chassis, chips, ID's, firmware and controllers, faulty cartridges on both our prime and spare controller were finally diagnosed as the root problem.
We got a new one from Maurizio and from then on the Ford finally started to live up to its potential, but on set-up and fine tuning we were running a day behind so we had to do that during the race.
We sorted what we could and slowly but steadily started making good progress, climbing up from dead last to 7th overall...
...but dropped back to 9th overall after a string of pitstops trying to solve what looked like a loss of power problem but in the end turned out to be a binding front axle.
The good things were that with the front axle sorted the car ran faster than ever and Lennard posted our fastest lap time of the race with a 14.96...
...on a track that was definitely a good 2 -3 tenths slower than at the start of the race.
And that all the development bits and pieces that were on the car performed as predicted and both chassis and body survived the 24hrs nearly scratch free.
We lost a mirror, one wiper and a sideskirt.
Last but not least, our cooperation as a mixed Anglo/ Dutch team worked really well, by working as a team we managed to solve most of the problems that the event threw at us.

There's still plenty of development room left in the Ford..so we'll most likely run it again in the other DiSCA WEC events planned for this year.
That will hopefully sooth the pain of having to wait for 360 days before we can head up the road to Le Mans... again.

With kind regards
Tamar


Post race pictures, the Ford finishing the race on the Mulsanne Straight.

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RE: Ford GT LM - Tamar - 13th-Aug-19

Posted 11 August 2019 - 11:47 AM

The Road to Le Mans 1/32: 240 days and counting
Hello Guys, its been more than 4 months since my last post on the Ford GTE, in that time we've been on the Road to Rockingham and are now preparing for the Road to Barcelona.
(well actualy Igualada but nobody has heard of that place) So...time for an update. To be honest the Ford had been negelected a bit during those months.
After the intensity with which I had been building slot cars from January till April, I needed a break... and when I did get back into the groove, some new projects required my attention. 
So I just reread my last post LM post to see where I had left this topic and which topics I did get to post: " ...We lost a mirror, one wiper and a sideskirt..." 
Funny how one tends to remember good things and bad things immediately shift to the background. Cause in all honesty we lost a bit more than that 


Best laid plans...
Here's one of the things I did not get to post during our road to Le Mans: Obviously the achilles heel of the Ford GTE was going to be that big rear wing sticking out the back.
So one of the first things I did during the build was to add small blocks of foam rubber in the rear of the body to create a flexible structure to mount the rear wing supports.
I simply cut a slit in the top of the foam so the wing supports would slide in. Over time however the wing supports started to cut through the foam (see picture left).
So I reinforced the bottom of the foam with some thin sheet plastic (see centre pictures).
This set up worked very well during all our test runs, the foam was tight enough to keep the rear wing fin place while driving, allowed for some flexibility during crashes...
...and should the wing come off..it was very easy to slide it back in...or replace it with one of the spares we got from Scalextric. Or so at least that was the plan.



..and then just winging it
Well the plan did not work entirely to our satisfaction. During the first hour of practice a Marshall that wasn't paying attention to oncoming traffic, ripped the first wing off as he lowered a car on the track...right on top of ours.
Unfortunately this would happen many more times during the weekend. Sometimes the wing would come clean off and then it was a simple remount.
Sometimes the top wing would be ripped from the supports and in a few cases the wing supports themselves would break.
Even with what I thought would be an ample supply of spare rear wings, Wayne and Stephen spend quite some time repairing wings during the 24hr event.
 
 
Rock Bull Rubber
So while giving the Ford some much needed TLC in preparation for the Rockingham WEC event, finding a better solution to prevent the wing being ripped off was high on the priority list.
I gave casting the wing supports in rubber a try, but could not get the thick rubber mix to flow into the mould cavities so in the end I used the same solution as on the GT3 Bentley.
Drawing a template of the wing supports, printed them on label sticker paper, stuck the label on some NBR 1mm thick rubber and cut the rubber with a sharp X-acto knive.


Filed two slots in the bottom of the rear wing and used a drop of Zapp medium thick superglue to secure the supports to the wing and a small drop at the base of the support where the enter the body.
The result, a fully flexible mounted wing. As a added security I put some shoe goo (neoprene glue) over the top connection so that even if the superglue would fail..the more flexible shoe goo would keep the wing in place.
 
 
Worked like a dream, did the whole Saturday practice and 6hrs Sunday race with the same wing. And although the car came of several times..the wing did not  
For those that would like to modify their Scalex rear wings in a similar way. Attached to this post is a PDF with some wing support  templates.
For the 1mm NBR rubber try you local industrial rubber supplier. A few quid will get you more rubber then you'll need for a lifetime.

 
With kind regards
Tamar

[attachment=3033]

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RE: Ford GT LM - Tamar - 13th-Aug-19

Posted Yesterday, 11:23 PM
Had a bit of free time so I've been sorting through my backlog of posts and pictures of the Ford GT LM.
Will try to work through them...even though other projects are already beginning to demand my attention 
So here's an other follow up on a post I promised to do but never got round to on our road to Le Mans.


Vacformed clear parts...
Some love, some hate them. Main reason racers use them is to reduce weight high up in the body, although I'd say the added flexibility they give the body is just as important. And with Ford not having that much "high" in the body, for this car the most important reason.
So its a performance part..but that does not mean you can't make them look good.
I.m.o a badly executed set of vacformed windows can totally ruin the look of a car. Unfortunately not an uncommon sight on "performance slotcars. Clear windows, no window frame, no window streamer, the Dutch have a nice word for it "Blote billen gezicht" Google it, you'll have a laugh.

Ok let us dail back the clock to somewhere mid March when Marc brought his Vacform machine to the club and used the bucks I'd perpared to pull a couple of windows and headlight lenses.
The copies were perfectly clear and had good shape definition, but...when we cut some of them and did a test fit...
...the big one piece front and rear window was too big, it would not fit inside the body.
I knew this was going to happen, because the buck I'd cast was an exact copy of the Original Scalex window.

For Vacforming the most used material is 0,2 mm thick PET sheet. During the vacforming process the sheet is drawn over the buck.
As a result of the material thickness the size of your Vacformed copy will be bigger than the original. 
There are ways to make exact sized vacformed copies... but there was just no time to make a second positive silicone cast and pour a negative buck.

In this case it wasn't such a problem as all I had to do to make the windows fit was to cut the front and rear window loose and mount them seperately in the body. 
There was still a small gap at the rear of the side windows, but at the time I could live with that.


...how to trim and detail them...
The hardest thing with cutting clear parts is to see where exactly you need to cut (even with my reading glasses) because they are..clear parts.
Depending on the quality of the vacformed part finding the edges can be difficult.
So here's a tip: use a fine steadler (waterproof) feltpen, and outline the parts before you cut them. Here's how you do that.
Flip the vacformed part so the inside is facing up. Stick the tip of the pen in one of the corners push the tip to the outside wall and gently trace the outline.
Don't worry if you make a mistake or your pen slips, it happens, even to me. Just wait a bit for the marker ink to dry and use a toothpick to (carefully) scratch away any excess ink.

Tracing the oulines before you cut the clear parts makes life a lot easier as you'll have a better guide where to cut.

To make the cut I use a pair of small curved and straight scissors to cut out the rough shape. Then its a repetition of test fitting and trimming the part to get that perfect fit.
For the fine trimming of the edges I don't use the scissors but a small sanding block/stick. Allows for much fine adjustments and gives a nice and smooth edge.

The window frames on the side and rear window were lined on the inside with the same fine steadler felt pen.
Remember how I mentioned in that earlier post how the silicone would copy anything, even the tiniest surface details like lettering on the window streamer or the tiny raised window frames?
Well these sure helped here as I could use the small edges as a guide to ink the window frames.
So a thin marker for the outlines and then I used a broader pen to fill in the whole inside. You might have to do several passes with the marker for larger areas like the air intake.
Cherry on the cake were the decals I made for the window streamer . 

 
..and how to mount them
So now you have you vacformed clear parts trimmed, detailed and ready to mount. As I mentioned before adding more flexibility to the slot body was the main reason to do them.
So for that reason I prefer to not to glue them rock solid with glue, but mount them with as much flexibility as possible. In most cases that means (double sided) tape.
For most GT's the tape will be covered by the window frame(s). In general I add full width tape to the top of the windows and just small tabs to the sides and bottom. 
When its time to firmly secure the clear parts for a race I usually add a bit of UHU Schnellfest  to the corners. It is a two component glue that remains a bit flexible and dries totally clear.
From what I've heard its similar to the GS Hypo glue some UK members like to use.

But sometimes your clear parts have very thin window frames or like the headlight lenses, none at all. Here's where I use a black  1,0 mm wide and 0,2 mm thick doubble sided tape from 3M. 
Altough tape isn't the right word, its more like mini window kit on a roll. Not surprisingly as its main use is to glue LCD screens to smartphones. 


Simply mount the tape to the edges of the headlights and press it firmly in place with the backside of a brush or a toothpick.
Once you've removed the backing paper all that is left is a thin black edge that resembles scale window kit. Then press the part in place on top of the tape.
It is the only black colored tape that is strong yet flexible enough to mount clear parts on a slotcar body. As it vulcanizes the longer it stays on the stronger the bond gets. And it looks amazing.
 
Here is a link to a Dutch webshop that sells the tape, but you should also be able to source it from your local mobile phone repair shop.

Ok that's it for now, one more backlogged post sorted...more to follow


 
With kind regards
Tamar

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RE: Ford GT LM - Anthony B - 13th-Aug-19

Always been a huge admirer of you ability and work - thank you so much for sharing!!!

JUST AWESOME!!

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RE: Ford GT LM - Savage GT - 14th-Aug-19

Another post to say keep up the work :)
It is a long job detailing your steps, I am sure abie321 and myself are not the only ones who enjoy reading about it.
I thought Sideways were going to be doing a GT LM for those of us less inclined to get so deep into modifying, but I heard that a while back and have seen little about it since.

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RE: Ford GT LM - JasonB - 14th-Aug-19

Fantastic work Tamar.

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RE: Ford GT LM - CMOTD - 14th-Aug-19

I am almost lost for words. This amount of work is on a par with 1:1 car preparation let alone a slot car. Fantastic stuff Tamar, thanks for sharing.

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