What more can I do?

Ken Koziol

Lurking
Mar 13, 2018
4
0
1
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I (I mean my son) has been successful with his cars the first 3 years. Last month, he won his den for the 3rd year, won the Pack for the 2nd year, and going to District next month. He won the den for District each year and last year was 3rd overall. But I am trying to find out what more we can do to get better.

1) Our car is thin with only 7 grams for the wood alone.
2) Weight at the back, less than 1" fwd of axle. Tungsten disc with epoxy putty dome above encasing smaller tungsten weights.
3) Wheels and axles are sanded/bored/polished pretty intensely.
4) Runs on 3 wheels (front, right is raised).
5) Rear wheels angled out at their base.
6) Front left wheel angled out on top.
7) Wheels rotated to get just a couple inches steer to the right as a rail rider.
8) The axle holes are drilled so that the wheels are right out to the full 7" length of the car.

We don't use fenders. We have virtually no weight in the front. All weight is evenly set left-right. So what am I missing? Is there a next step I can take? I did notice at the Pack race this year we got faster with every race, so I think the graphite and wheel bore polishing was working well.

Thanks!
 
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For me they are very nearly the same. The car is only 7g before weights and wheels.
As I try to perfect this, then maybe there is some fine tuning to do but the COM is within 1” fwd of the rear axle.
 
Most experienced racers are going to tell you to forget about cog/com idea, its useless. Use two or three scales to weigh the load on your rears and dfw, split the weight between your rears or get close and weight on dfw depends on your car, what kind of track you are racing on, your tuning abilities and so on. Set your car on a block if you wanna know where it is balanced.
 
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Alot of this crap is based on theory but the truth is some things work on some cars and not others, some cars are built exactly the same but run completely different, alot of tracks run different. The only proof is running your car down a track and seeing what it wants, some cars never slow down some cars never cooperate. We are only trying to manipulate them into doing what we want them to do.
 
Just a question.....are you saying the weight is located 1" in front of the rear axle or your COM/COG is at 1", two very different things in my world

When speaking of COG/COM in Pinewood speak, they're usually referring to "inches in front of the rear axle."

A lot of pro racers don't set an explicit COM, but rather focus on weight on the wheels, as per what SuperSlow said. That said, this usually assumes you're running a "standard" tungsten loadout with 12 cubes behind the rear axle. At that point, you're already getting a pretty low COM, and the rest is just tuning. If you're weighting in some other fashion, you may wish to consider your final COM.
 
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That is why i was wondering....the post said weight at an 1" so i wanted to make sure he wasn't speaking in terms of weight placement in error of cog/com vs. Location of weight....which could be disasterous for a car....just how i read it
 
Ok so i have picked up three digital scales....dominant side.....about 15% total wt. Front, 30% rear and 50% total wt. Rear non dom.....is that how to start a tune? Super slow, vitamin k where to start?