Saturday February 26, 2005

Quick Fly Wheel & Tire Fix

Sometimes our models come with less than perfect wheels and tires. This recent hot rod by Fly had just these problems. After looking at the model, I noticed that the tire had a bulge to one edge. After removing the tire I saw the excess flash molding around the tire and knew this was one of the problems.

The best fix we have for this is grabbing your trusty Exacto knife and simply trimming this away. It is not that hard to do but be careful as always using this sharp an object. Just run the blade around the inside of the tire where you see the seam of the flash and scrape it away.

This was the major flaw but inspecting the wheels showed another issue. There was some flash molding on the wheel itself that needed to be removed so that the inside of the tire sat true on the wheel.

We use the same method for quick tire sanding to cure this. Using a standard household 9 volt battery, we place it over the threads as shown and then take a Dremel or other moto-tool sanding barrel and hold it against the wheel center hub to sand away and clean up the flash. You only need a few seconds of this to get the wheel true and clean. You might notice that the outer edges of the inner rib of the wheel is also higher than the rest, but with a few bursts of this, things will be even in no time.

Now we put the tire back on the wheel and all was well. After a quick sanding, our Gulf GT-40 was running just fine. Sometimes we get things like this in our hobby and although we shouldn't, the fix is really quite easy. Hopefully this helps you in tuning or repairing some of your models in the future.

- Harry

For questions or comments, just Email us at harry@homeracingworld.vom