The First Anglewinder...1968

[chrisguyw]

I could have started this thread in "Vintage" or "Scratchbuilding", but, I thought it would get more eyeballs here, and since the first angle winder was a 1/32 car, it is also appropriate here

The first anglewinder was generally believed to be be Built by Roy Moody for a Midwest NAMRA 1/32 race in Feb 1968, and while it did not win the race, its performance encouraged a few of the "pros" at that event to incorporate the design for 1/24 "PRO" racing.

The basic premise of the anglewinder was to position the motor at an angle in order that smaller pinions and Spur gears could be employed, to allow the use of much smaller dia. rear tires , which significantly lowered the Cg., and vastly improved handling. The ability to now use a smaller diameter/tooth count pinion also importantly allowed for higher numeric gear ratios, which the quickly developing 16d type motors really favoured.

This is a pic. of Roy Moody's car, taken from the March edition of the Model Car Journal......his car did use a 26D motor (bigger than the 16D's, so he needed a large motor angle, despite notching the back end of the corner of the can).
Also note that Roy still used a "pin" guide,.....most had gone "blades" at this stage.



While several of the "Pros" at this event were impressed with the performance of this car,.....it was Gene Husting who first incorporated its design for 1/24 racing

This is a pic. of Gene's car as it was entered (but apparently did not race) for an April 1968 event in California...........the clear handling benefits of this configuration, coupled with the pace of chassis development at the time, basically rendered the then popular "Inline" configuration obsolete with 3 to 4 months among 1/24 racers.

Over the years, motor case dimensions have become smaller and smaller, allowing far smaller motor angles to be used, with todays top end 1/24 commercial track cars, employing virtually no motor angle (pure sidewinders)

After seeing the results of the races in the last half of 1968, I attempted my first anglewinder later that year

Cheers
Chris Walker

The pic. below is Gene Hustings car........pinched from Electric Dreams

[ZackM]

Thanks for these posts Chris, I really enjoy the history lessons from people who were there to see it unfold!

Zack

[War Eagle River]

Will never forget the ruckus when the guys from Cali showed up in NY with AW’s. That was about 1970’ish. The whole joint came to a screeching halt! Funny how the consensus then was ‘these will never work’! After that day, we all wanted AW’s. And to this day it is my go to and preference. Great article Chris. Thanks for the flashbacks!

[noddaz]

Nice write up! Thank you for sharing this information!

[PetesLightKits]

Gene Husting... there's a name I haven't seen in a while, but not so far back that it was associated (no pun intended) with slot cars, but rather radio control cars in the guise of the Associated Electronics RC10 and RC12L back when I was doing that kind of racing - circa 1985 to 1990.

Thanks for another neat story Chris.

Peter

[Slotspeed]

I always wanted a Team Associated RC car. Drooled over them in the flashy RC magazines, they looked so simple yet elegant and very fast at the time.

[modernslots]

Great history lesson- thanks!
Rob

[Kevan]

Gene Husting... there's a name I haven't seen in a while, but not so far back that it was associated (no pun intended) with slot cars, but rather radio control cars in the guise of the Associated Electronics RC10 and RC12L back when I was doing that kind of racing - circa 1985 to 1990.

Thanks for another neat story Chris.

Peter

Plus a certain Mike Reedy and what a world beating combination that was for decades.

[PetesLightKits]

Yup. The hot combo was a Reedy modified in an Associated "anything".

[mattb]

The real positive I take away from Gene's car is that it makes my soldering not look so bad!!!

[SpeedyNH]

i think i at least tied him. in our club in Red Bank, NJ i made the first one.
mine looks to be either about a year earlier than the one above, or maybe we were just behind on the motors.
necessity being the mother of invention, i'd bent up one of those brass rectangular/ sidewinder motor/ circumferential rear axle carriers into a six- sided trapezoidal parallelogram (if there is such a thing) so that i could use a smaller spur and rear tires and still get the gears to mesh without having the motor interfere with the rear axle.. it looked pretty weird, but Man did it work! and there was no rule against it. who knew? we were all scratchbuilding our cars back then.

i'd go down and win all six heats and the feature with that car. lots of stubborn disbelief regarding the chassis configuration, but the resulting runaway club championship. i still have it.
the chassis was not piano wire. it's just a brass rod, jail door type drop-arm club car from the late 60's with a rewound garden-variety 16D, but it changed everything. i never found a corner or a set of esses that i couldn't punch once i got in it. i wish any modern slotcar handled as well (comparatively) as that one.
when i get home i'll post some pix. you guys will probably laugh at me, but i accidentally stumbled on the right answer 50-odd years ago before any of our other guys did.
the darn thing worked the b4lls. i still dream about how smooth and stuck that car was.

speedy

[strummer57]

I could have started this thread in "Vintage" or "Scratchbuilding", but, I thought it would get more eyeballs here, and since the first angle winder was a 1/32 car, it is also appropriate here

The basic premise of the anglewinder was to position the motor at an angle in order that smaller pinions and Spur gears could be employed, to allow the use of much smaller dia. rear tires , which significantly lowered the Cg., and vastly improved handling. ...........the clear handling benefits of this configuration, coupled with the pace of chassis development at the time, basically rendered the then popular "Inline" configuration obsolete with 3 to 4 months among 1/24 racers.

Over the years, motor case dimensions have become smaller and smaller, allowing far smaller motor angles to be used, with todays top end 1/24 commercial track cars, employing virtually no motor angle (pure sidewinders)

Cheers
Chris Walker

Interesting: I've wondered "why anglewinders": now I know, thanks! But...

My first 1/24 car, purchased early last month, is a Cox Chaparral 2A which shows this "sidewinder feature: with the instruction sheet dated "1965"...

...if indeed the shift has gone to today's "pure sidewinders" (as you say, and I'm certainly not doubting you! ) why did that design, which was available in the mid 60s, not just become the norm back then?

Mark in Oregon

[chrisguyw]

Interesting: I've wondered "why anglewinders": now I know, thanks! But...

My first 1/24 car, purchased early last month, is a Cox Chaparral 2A which shows this "sidewinder feature: with the instruction sheet dated "1965"...

...if indeed the shift has gone to today's "pure sidewinders" (as you say, and I'm certainly not doubting you! ) why did that design, which was available in the mid 60s, not just become the norm back then?

Mark in Oregon

Hi Mark, The problem was never the "sidewinder" configuration (it is the best)......the problem, was the relative size of the motors used in those days.

If you look at your Cox Chaparral (a sidewinder), the motor (a 36D) is so bulky, that it requires the motor shaft to sit quite a distance from the rear axle in order to clear the motor case.....this big distance needs big diameter gears to span the gap, and the big diameter spur requires big wheels/tires to provide ground clearance.

Most of the Cox sidewinders used a 48T spur (big !), in conjunction with a 16T pinion (also big) to span the gap, resulting in a 3:1 ratio,...which was OK, at best, but the motors of time wanted higher numeric ratios. In order to achieve this an even larger spur would have needed to be used...with even bigger rear tires.......NOT GOOD !!.........this was also quite typical of the sidewinder Kit/RTR cars of the era...........all used monster rear tyres to clear the monster spur gears, on the monster motored cars

This same issue was also to be found with the 26D (a bit smaller than the 36D), and with the 16D (a bit smaller that the 26D)......in a straight sidewinder configuration, they both required rather large dia, gears to be used, hence the need for big (ish) rear tires...........not the hot tip for good handling !!


The anglewinder remedied this (allowing smaller gears/rear tires/ higher gear ratios) and, even if far from perfect, it was a much better alternative at the time.......

The benefits of the resulting lower cg. , and , higher numeric ratios , more than offset the minuscule efficiency of the pure sidewinder gear orientation.

With the dimensionally much smaller motors of today these benefits have been erased.

Cheers
Chris Walker

[Audi1]

Very interesting info on the genesis of that particular motor configuration.

Allan

[WB2]

Didn’t most of the NAMRA 1/32 cars, at least the sports cars, use pin guides?

[chrisguyw]

Didn’t most of the NAMRA 1/32 cars, at least the sports cars, use pin guides?

While I would agree that the pin guides were very very popular (particularly in 1/32), I believe that by 1968, a lot had switched to blades..............I was just looking at a few pics of a 1968 NAMRA 1/32 race, and all the cars shown had blades, both F1 and sports.....that said, there were only pics. of a very few cars.

Cheers
Chris Walker

[HRW Chief Toiler]

Thank you for taking the time to post this Chris - interesting and informative.