Monogram Lola T70 - the continuing
saga
Long-time readers of our newsletter will recall when we did this
peoject...
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in which we lowered a Monogram Lola T70's body over the chassis
to get it down where it belongs, improving the car's looks and handling. We
also upgraded the car's magnet installation with a Professor Motor bar magnet
and replaced the rear tires with aftermarket silicones for even better
handling. That project yielded a big step forward in performance, but we always
thought the car should have had a better chassis design to begin
with.
Well, as it happens, one day we were tinkering with various
bodies and chassis we have lying around and noticed that the Monogram T70 body
was close to a perfect fit for a Fly Ferrari 512S chassis.
You can see in this photo of the Monogram body sitting on the
Fly 512 chassis, fitted with wheels and tires from a Fly BMW 3.5CSL, that the
fit is close enough that the rear tires are just slightly off-center in
the wheel openings. it's close enough that you could just leave it that way for
simplicity, but we thought it would be nice to have everything line up. The
obvious way to do that would be to shorten the chassis, but we really don't like
cutting up a chassis when we don't have to, so we decided to alter the body
slightly instead.
The Lola's rear wheel openings are more than large enough, so we
decided to simply reshape them as shown above. We CA glued some pieces of sheet
styrene to the front edge of each rear wheel opening and shaped them to the
proper contour. The result, after priming and painting, looks like
this...
The paint is Testor Boyd's True Blue Pearl Metallic over a very
light gray primer.
A top view of the body shows where we cut some material out of
the area where the carburetor detail goes to provide clearance for the FC130
motor's endbell, which is higher than the can.
This view of the chassis shows the rear body mount we fabricated
from sheet styrene. We drilled out the hole for the original self-tapping pod
mounting screw so it goes all the way through the chassis and then put in a
machine screw and nut to firmly attach both the pod and the rear body mount.
You can also see in this photo the new front body mounts made from styrene
tubing and located to match the original mounting posts at the front of the
body.In addition, you can see the upgraded magnet installation, the Pioneer 21K
motor, and the Slot It guide we are using. We also replaced the original Fly
gears with Scalextric ones. The gear swap costs all of $2 and give a much
better gear mesh, good enough in many cases to make it unnecessary to use
expensive aftermarket gears. Still to be added are lead wires and braid. Also
visible in this photo is the trimming we did on the front of the chassis to
conform to the shape of the body.
Here's a closeup of the motor pod modification that converts the
car from the standard Fly disc magnet to a Scalextric, Professor Motor, Pioneer,
or Slot It 2mm thick bar magnet. At left is the unmodified pod. The center
image shows the slot for the bar magnet, cut with a Moto-tool set up in a stand
to function as a vertical milling machine. At right is the modified pod with a
magnet in it. In this image the magnet is slightly crooked in its mount.
That's because the slot is cut to fit a Professor Motor magnet, which is
slightly wider than the other three but we are using a Pioneer magnet, for now
at least. In the top view of the chassis above you can see how we have used
tape on the magnet to make it a tight fit in the pod, align it properly, and
also shim it up or down slightly to fine-tune magnetic downforce. Note that the
hole for the original cylindrical magnet is on the assembled car's centerline,
so the bar magnet is centered on it rather than on the entire pod. We have done
this magnet mod on many Fly pod cars, and it makes a big difference in the car's
drivability.
So, here's where we are with the car right now, with decals, a
little detail painting, and some of the detail parts put back onto the body. At
the time the photo was taken we had put the original Monogram front wheels and
tires back on the car. We have not yet decided for certain which wheels and
tires we will ultimately use. "Mismatched" wheel fits like this were not at all
uncommon on these cars as they underwent constant development.
