Tip from Kevin Riggs

This month's tip comes from Kevin Riggs out of the North Alabama Slotcar Association (N.A.S.A.).  Kevin began racing Aurora T-jets in 1970.  After a break for college, career, and family building, he unpacked his old boxes of track and began racing again in 2010.  He has raced at the Fray in Ferndale, the Ohio Cup, the Quarrel, the Akron/Canton Stock T-jet Challenge, the TRACK Summer Clash in Lexington, and he's the reining Stock champion in the North Alabama Slotcar Association (NASA).  He is passionate about collecting, restoring, and racing the vintage Aurora T-Jets of the '60s and early '70s. It is a tip on HO cars and deals with making the motors last longer and perform better.

 Tip: clean the spaces between the armature commutator plates to avoid "smoking" the motor.

How many times have you seen a slot car go up in smoke?  If you don't mind destroying perfectly good parts, it's sort of spectacular to watch.  Put power to the motor, and suddenly smoke pours out.  Take it apart, and discover that the brushes have melted the chassis, wires have burned in the armature, and perhaps the commutator plates themselves have delaminated from the backing board.

While there are some avoidable causes for this, the most frequent problem is actually very simple to fix - clean the small gaps between the commutator plates.  In motors that have been over-oiled and allowed to run without cleaning for too long, bits of thickened oil and particles of carbon and copper from the brushes and the com plates themselves accumulate in the small gaps.  Once enough conductive material has accumulated, a short between plates is created, and in a remarkably short period of time, this short causes heat to build up and destroy the arm, perhaps the chassis as well.

I use the smallest flat-bladed screwdriver in my jewelers set to clean this gap whenever I open the motor of a slot car.  You can use a toothpick.  You can use a toothbrush and gentle solvent, such as ronsonol or Zippo lighter fluid, or CRC.  Clean any accumulated oil and carbon/copper dust out of the chassis pan as well to inhibit gunk from building up on the arm again.

If you ever put power to a car and it seems slow to spin up, stop immediately and check to see if a short between the plates has built up.  It's a common problem and it only takes a couple of minutes to resolve it.