Post by txchemist on Oct 28, 2017 14:36:27 GMT -5
1980 BSA State Jamboree 1st Place.
A few things that I considered the type of thing that anyone with any physics would discover right away. I did not read about these ideas and I do not think much info was out there. Notice I cut the back 1/4" off and glued to front to make my F1 nose. Years ago I posted this photo on Derby Talk and made the claim
"First pinewood car with tungsten" and expected to get all kinds of flack. It was not challenged by anyone. Back then, tungsten in this form add just become commercially available. I'll come back to that...
Other sneaky tricks.
I had no good way to remove flash from axle so I coated the end in epoxy and sprinkled graphite on it as it hardened and a perfect meniscus formed covering the metal flash and bumps and I by hand set the angle to about 5 degrees so the wheel would ride on the smooth epoxy surface near the head.
I picked the best old wheels that had a big flash seam in the middle and sanded lightly by hand to leave a round protrusion the wheel would ride on. Years later Hodges Hobby Shop came out with the first commercial wheels with the V sticking out in the middle of the tread as one of the speed wheels they sold.
I think on one or two old wheels you can still see the seam, other got busted and replaced with new wheels without the flash. I did have a drill so we covered the surface with slanted holes and set up an old double track hot wheels race set that a pinewood car could run down by putting two wheels on one track and the other two wheels on the other track. We let the car run onto a rug and marked with pennies how far the car would roll. We played around with moving the weights until we maximized roll distance and had that one slug way up front.
Max-V was a few years away from getting the first tungsten weights for sale.
I was a Process Engineer running metal evaporators at Texas Instruments. In the early days you put whatever metal you were going to evaporate in a small tungsten filiment- see below.
early Tungsten filament. Because tungsten has the highest melting point, you can put slugs of what metal you want in this filament, pull vacuum, pass current through it and evaporate gold, silver, nickel, titanium whatever. We had a complicated metalization on power semiconductors. Aluminum,Titanium,Nickel,Silver. This produced a surface you could furnace melt solderable contacts into. I came up with both a cost reduction to eliminate the silver, and a reliability improvement to change the system to do Aluminum, Titanium, Tungsten, Nickel. BUT you can not use a filament of tungsten to evaporate tungsten- it all goes to a gas including the filament. So I had one of the worlds first E-beam evaporators up and running.
E-beam
And the material for e-beam evaporation was 1/4"*1/2" cylinders. And if something contaminated the pellets before you evaporated, you just had to toss them away. I fished out many a handfull from the trash and took home for pinewood. And That is how I think I was the first to use tungsten on a pinewood car
A few things that I considered the type of thing that anyone with any physics would discover right away. I did not read about these ideas and I do not think much info was out there. Notice I cut the back 1/4" off and glued to front to make my F1 nose. Years ago I posted this photo on Derby Talk and made the claim
"First pinewood car with tungsten" and expected to get all kinds of flack. It was not challenged by anyone. Back then, tungsten in this form add just become commercially available. I'll come back to that...
Other sneaky tricks.
I had no good way to remove flash from axle so I coated the end in epoxy and sprinkled graphite on it as it hardened and a perfect meniscus formed covering the metal flash and bumps and I by hand set the angle to about 5 degrees so the wheel would ride on the smooth epoxy surface near the head.
I picked the best old wheels that had a big flash seam in the middle and sanded lightly by hand to leave a round protrusion the wheel would ride on. Years later Hodges Hobby Shop came out with the first commercial wheels with the V sticking out in the middle of the tread as one of the speed wheels they sold.
I think on one or two old wheels you can still see the seam, other got busted and replaced with new wheels without the flash. I did have a drill so we covered the surface with slanted holes and set up an old double track hot wheels race set that a pinewood car could run down by putting two wheels on one track and the other two wheels on the other track. We let the car run onto a rug and marked with pennies how far the car would roll. We played around with moving the weights until we maximized roll distance and had that one slug way up front.
Max-V was a few years away from getting the first tungsten weights for sale.
I was a Process Engineer running metal evaporators at Texas Instruments. In the early days you put whatever metal you were going to evaporate in a small tungsten filiment- see below.
early Tungsten filament. Because tungsten has the highest melting point, you can put slugs of what metal you want in this filament, pull vacuum, pass current through it and evaporate gold, silver, nickel, titanium whatever. We had a complicated metalization on power semiconductors. Aluminum,Titanium,Nickel,Silver. This produced a surface you could furnace melt solderable contacts into. I came up with both a cost reduction to eliminate the silver, and a reliability improvement to change the system to do Aluminum, Titanium, Tungsten, Nickel. BUT you can not use a filament of tungsten to evaporate tungsten- it all goes to a gas including the filament. So I had one of the worlds first E-beam evaporators up and running.
E-beam
And the material for e-beam evaporation was 1/4"*1/2" cylinders. And if something contaminated the pellets before you evaporated, you just had to toss them away. I fished out many a handfull from the trash and took home for pinewood. And That is how I think I was the first to use tungsten on a pinewood car
