Taking a stance

I enjoy going to the dentist.  No, it’s not the Novocain or playing with his pneumatic tools while sitting in the chair waiting for him.  My dentist is an avid model car collector, and his reception room is literally festooned with pieces ranging from 1/72 to 1/4 scale.  He has never built a model himself.  He explained to me it was too much like dentistry, so he took up billiards.

 

At my last visit to his office, he showed me the latest addition to his growing museum.  There on a gleaming polished stainless steel stand was a 1/8 scale model of a 1963 Corvette split window coupe painted in silver and adorned with racing livery.  The paint, chrome, glass, racing interior and engine were world class.  Some of the finest work I’ve ever seen in this scale.  And he paid dearly for it.

 

As we scrutinized every detail, he admitted to me that he wasn’t completely happy with this model.  Although it was built like a Swiss watch, he thought it had a toylike quality although he couldn’t figure why.  He had hypothesized the roof was too high or the wheelbase was slightly off.  It was my turn to admit something to him.

 

The first thing I saw when I approached this model was that the stance was incorrect.  In fact, I saw that before I noticed it was an extraordinarily detailed and otherwise museum quality model.  And the problem didn’t involve the body or the chassis.  The problem was the same problem that has plagued model car builders for as long as I can remember (no senior jokes please) … the tires are round.

 

When a car is sitting on the ground as most cars do the tires are not round.  There is a flat spot on the bottom… that’s why tires work.  Round tires would be useless for anything except setting world speed records on a dry salt lake bed as they have very little friction… or traction!  That flat on the bottom of a car tire results in the body and chassis becoming lower to the ground by an inch or more.  Think about it… that’s a 1/8^” difference in 1/8 scale. 

 

This is why Model Motorcars took on the task of providing modelers with tires that compress slightly under load and provide a realistic stance that is difficult to achieve otherwise.  Yes, you can grind a flat on your hard rubber kit tires, but you still won’t get that slight bulge in the sidewall like our tires will.  Producing these tires is more difficult and costly than the 1:1 scale version.  Five different manufacturing processes are used to create these gems.

 

So, after this impromptu lecture my Dentist asked me the obvious question… “Can you make a set of tires to replace the ones on this Vette?”  I thought about it and told him I would investigate it.  He gave me a yellow lollipop on the way out.

 

Bob Breslauer