Smoky Mountain Spring Nationals May 21st-23rd 2021 SIGN UP

That's awesome. A few of the bodies that I run I have had since I was a kid. I like the nostalgia and look forward to seeing that body.
Dave what kind of times should I be looking for with a 3g Unlimited? Just looking for an idea. Made my first real passes today. Best was a mid .4 to start out and it fell off from there. That was my initial blind setup. I think I cooked the brush springs and lost tension. Not sure how I'm going to get around that yet??

I use a dual alligator clamp stand to hold both shoes at the same time. I tin the roughed up tip of the shoe, first I use soldering paste
then tin. Like you say I clamp the braid close to the work, dress the braid to fit the curve of the shoe, then heat before finally applying solder.
For the pure stocks I would be sure the drive wheels are nice and true, your rear tires are nice new ones, pay close attention to your brush springs and your pickup springs. Too much tension or to little will kill performance. Make sure the pickups are hitting flat on the rails. I use a black marker pen
to mark the pickup area then run the cars to see where the pickup is hitting, see photo. The second photo is 2 dead stock Tyco's, a narrow and a wide.
Both have new rear Super tires, trued rims and flat riding pickups. Both were just pulled out of the box spun a little and run. Note both are well into the .7s.
I must also say the Tyco wide picked up about .03 from sitting in the box and the narrow lost the same amount, that I cannot explain!!!
Looking forward to seeing what all you guys come up with for this class. 

Tyco 440 bottom view

Tyco 440 times

  Cars are running mid to low 4s but not consistently. Don't know what to do about that. Hit 46 MPH on one pass but that same car is running 37 MPH now. Just ran it again and it ran 40 MPH.
ETs are all over the place. Just cleaning tires on these cars can be worth .03. Have not had any trouble with brush springs but I am using the T jet chassis. Use a squished down AFX pickup spring to help with frying the small spring in the later AFX chassis if you are having trouble with that. They are a larger spring, .007-.008 I think, and can hold the current better.

Yes I would always fry the brush spring in those chassis if I put a hot arm in them. The old T Jet style are more durable but they can fry to.
One of the cars just went off kilter and is down to 32 MPH in the low 5s, they are hard to figure.

shunted brush is the answer.
drill a hole in the brush to insert tiny shunt wire in .....
or
design a piece to fit between the spring and the brush that the shunt wire attaches to.
Wizzard body pins for lexan bodies come to mind. there are probably other solutions.
in my experience, running high AMPs through spring material is not sufficient and causes a lot of heat.
in addition, when possible, insulating springs from the electrical path is a good idea.

Yes Al great tip !!! Gave me some ideas ? I need to get started on building. I took my 4G unlimited apart that only made it to half track with sparks at Jeff’s last race and put it back together with all the same parts and tested it. It ran a .527 @ 28 mph at 26V it make 5 consistent runs, only thing I can think happened at Jeff’s race is maybe his rails are a little higher than mine and it bogged down and got hot ? It sat pretty low with .510 silly foams on it. I was having the same issues with the springs collapsing with to much heat and wound up with putting a 4.5 arm in it. It seemed anything hotter than a 3.5 had the heat issues. 1st run would be good then after about 4 runs it was gone. Going to experiment on the 4G since that’s the one I was collapsing the springs on, then go from there ? If it works then I can apply it to the 3 Gear I haven’t started yet.

Rick