Good source for sponge tires

[matic]

http://www.ncphobbies.com/164slotcar.html

Here you can buy some quality sponge tires. yestetday I got:

-AUR-8913 – Aurora – Super G Plus Rear Wheel & Ground Sponge Tires – Price: $3.98
-TYC6554 – Tyco – Sponge Rear Tires & Grey Hub Wheels-pair – Price: $2.98
-WIZZARD – LAW Black Rear Tires-LAW440B – Price: $7.00

Both Tyco and Aurora are both very good (by “very good” I mean 10 times better that all tires you have at home),
maybe Tyco is a little better, but Wizzards are OUTSTANDING !!!!
Tyco and Aurora can be removed from rims and can be used with German alloys or pullbacks – they fit perfectly,
you just have to cut off the “middle ring” on pullbacks) but Wizzards seems to be unremovable …

They have also a huge selection of standard silicone tres variable colors, ball bearings (1.2mm!!!),
bodies and other slot-car stuff which can be used with a little imagination

If I put this ia one sentence: Once you try them , you will NEVER go back to normal tires or whatever you are using now.

I`m sure that other brands are good also, just make sure that you order SPONGE tires, and size beetween 0.440 and 0.480

[canabits]

The Wizzard LAW’s are actually silicone coated sponge and are used as a high performance HO slot car racing tire. They come in various size from around .420″ to .500″ in .002 increments. They come in a variety of colours (each colour represents a different foam density) and different rim diameters to give you more or less sidewall depending on which combination you choose.

You can easily coat the Tyco and AFX sponge tires you have with silicone and improve their performance dramatically.

All you need is a little bit of silicone (flowable windscreen silicone if it’s available works well if not, cut some clear general purpose silicone with mineral spirits) , a dremel (dill also works) and something to use as an axle to set the wheel/tire onto so you can chuck it into the above mentioned dremel.

Once you’ve got all that…

-Place the wheel/tire onto the axle and chuck it into the dremel/drill.

-Take some silicone and spread it onto the tire (be sure to cover the entire surface and sidewall)

– Take the dremel and holding it into a plastic bag, turn it on briefly. The bag catches any extra silicone as it leaves the tire.

-Set the whole thing aside to dry.

Repeat at least one more time (3 seems to work best) and let dry. Once it’s fully dried, add the wheel/tire to your car and your racing 🙂

HO slot car stuff is great for bits 🙂

[z-beam]

matic, could you show me a direct link to the bearings?

[betty.k]

canabits, that’s brilliant man! i wanna make a set for my monster, just need to clarify a couple of things. by mineral spirits do you mean metholated spirits or mineral turpentine? and at the end of this process can you remove the tyres from the wheels? can’t wait to try these out:p:8ball:

[matic]

Actually you can write “ball bearings” into the local search but here is the link to ball bearings:

http://www.ncphobbies.com/cgi-bin/vcat/CatalogMgr.pl?cartID=b-2753&SearchField=all&SearchFor=ball%20bearings&offset=11&displayNumber=10&template=Htx/search.htx&displayNumber=1

Canabits: Wouldn`t be easier to spread silicone on the tire then wrap it with tape, let it dry and remove the tape? I didn`t try it it is just a guess….

[canabits]

betty.k,

I’ve never tried having the foam tyres removeable. When building foam HO tyres for use with silicone coating you usually attach them to the rim being used with contact cement. I modded a car a while back with a pair of delrin HO slot car rims and used a piece of 1.5mm titanium rod for the axle. Of course I needed to drill out the axle gear to fit on the new axle. I also reamed the rear axle holes to accept the new larger axle but otherwise it’s easy to do.

The above bearings are quite expensive. If you look around online you can find sources for others made for use with 1mm, 1.5mm and 2mm shafts/axles. I don’t have the link handy but I was able to find the three sizes above in both flanged and unflanged for $4US each. No minimum order and shipping is reasonable.

Regarding taping the tires. I’m not sure if that would work or not. In making HO slot car tires you want them to be as true as possible. If tape were used you would have to make sure it was applied evenly around the entire OD of the tire otherwise it wouldn’t be concentric. That said, I’m not even sure how easy it would be to remove tape once the silicone dried.

With a little effort you could also use stock Bit rims, make a mold and cast your own soft compound slip on tire to replace the stock ones. In doing so you could add any texture you wanted to.

[matic]

Canabits:I was thinking pressing the tape firmly, so only very thin layer of silicone would remain on the tire and it still be centric. But you are right, removing the tape would probably tear it off …
How about this: You take one original tire, press it into plaster, clay or something,let it dry , remove the tire, fill the hole with silicone, let it dry and voila: 1 silicon tire made, 99 more to go….

Where did you get the titanium rod?

[matic]

Canabits look at this:

http://www.oldweirdherald.com/scalestuff/silongies/

[canabits]

I’ve coated tyres Larry’s way. It works well. There are a couple other ways to do it as well, all provide satisfactory results.

The OWH ScaleStuff pages provide a couple good introductory “How To” articles that get quite decent results and could be used, more or less without any changes, in Bit tire making…

How to make you own wheels….

http://www.oldweirdherald.com/scalestuff/onethreetwo/wheels/wheels.html

and how to make solid silicone tyres for those wheels….

http://www.oldweirdherald.com/scalestuff/onethreetwo/silicones/silicones.html

Edited by – canabits on 23 March 2004 04:42:32

[canabits]

“Where did you get the titanium rod?”

There are a couple sources for titanium HO slot car axles. The ones I get are from James (Jim) Walters and are available from a couple sources including directly from Jim or from JAG Hobbies (where I get mine).
JAG’s website is http://www.jaghobbies.com (JW’s axles can be found here… http://www.jaghobbies.com/ho_slot_cars/jws-axles.htm).

The one I used was A05T. (1.200 is the axles length in inches)

[matic]

After testing couple of different sponge tyres from site above I can reccomend 2 types.

AJS2000 $2.98 2 AJs – Ground Rounds Sponge Black Donuts
TYC6554 $2.98 2 Tyco – Sponge Rear Tires & Grey Hub Wheels

I preffer AJS a little better because they came without rims (no pulling-off needed)

WIZZARDs are still the best grip, actually the grip is so good that picks up every piece of dust and the car became undrivable few seconds after… So I can`t reccomend them except if you have very very clean floor.

[HACHI-RYOKU]

Dudes, thanx for all the helpful info. This is good stuff. I’m definately going to pick up some foam tires. Do they make slick tires for 1/64 slot cars? What about motors? What kind of motors do they use?

[matic]

Motors are like 5 times bigger than BCG motors (they occupie half of the slot car) and the are 12V, so not much use of them…. But you can use front axle for BCG rear axle, diameter is the same, only they are a bit longer than BCG

[Author]

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