Brass Wars Reproduction #7

This car represents the first major step in the transformation of the brass pan car to magnet cars. There was an old guy in the club named Russ Beal, he had to have been in his mid 60's back in the early 70s, he passed many years ago. He built gobs of pan cars, wound his own motors and of course he was older and had plenty of money, well at least compared to my 5.00 a week, to race with. His cars were really on the crude side but he always did well and came up with a lot of good ideas. He also had a heart as big as the world and would loan out cars to the less fortunate even though he knew he would probably get beat by his own car. This is what we all called the lowered magnet car, the name speaks for itself. The first club race where he had these I think his cars swept the top 3 spots. Of course back then all the talk was about lowering the center of gravity, and we just thought that by lowering those big heavy magnets down to the pan is why it worked better, we just weren't on the magnetism track, no pun intended. So basically it's a standard Afx pan car that the magnets are lowered to the pan. Little did we know that if we would have just thrown the pan away we would have went faster! This car does not have the soldered up front end, as you can see in the picture but it has all the other goodies, bearings, plastic idler, #37 rewind, brush tubes, reproduction TCPs front and rear. The body of course as you can see is a Parma Ferrari GTO, the white stripes are vinyl. I tested this car along with your cars and it's unbelievable how much better it is over the "stock" pan car. This was without a doubt the first magnet car, we just didn't know it at the time. You can actually feel some pull to the rails with this car. The pan is based on the TCP Open Class Pan but without the little 45 degree cut offs at the back and it has a couple of notches up front for the wire. The center plastic has been cut to allow room for the wire. Of course from here on out all of the cars had to have brush tubes because as soon as you lowered the magnets it removed the stock brush springs. This was also the beginning of having to make everything shorter. On the next generation car after this we cut the whole chassis down so the armature would line up with the magnets but the magnets were on the brass. They began to get more difficult to build, brushes and springs had to be half size.