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I cut up a perfectly mint Fly slot car, only to wedge a 30-year old chassis inside of it. Why? People who
know what a Carrera Universal slot car track is won't need the explanation and can skip to the next paragraph. Carrera Universal (the chassis type now inside this slot car) was a 1/32nd scale system that dominated the German market from the mid sixties to about 1983, when the company got into financial trouble. The system was unique in that it allows for full 360 degree rotation of the car. There was also a third conductor in the bottom of the slot.
That third conductor was a shared negative line, allowing for two independent cars to be operated on the same lane, or to have up to 4 cars on two lanes with the appropriate power terminal. Apart from these system differences, Carrera universal cars and track were ultra-high quality, with cars that were built to last. Everything about them was designed by people who wanted to build the best slot cars available. They are heavy,
their engines are big (you run them at 20 Volts 0.6 amps), while their chassis was sophisticated with adjustable
wheel base, a spring loaded drop arm for the guide piece, as well as optional headlight assemblies, available custom gear rations, etc. etc.
There is one problem with Carrera Universal: they stopped production in the early 1980s. The mechanical part of the cars seems to last forever (and after market parts help to keep them going), but car bodies, especially the older
foil ("Lexan") cars, are falling apart. The nice cars are too valuable to race with these days, and if you want anything more modern than a '81 Ferrari F1 car, you need to either run 2-conductor cars on the track (yikes! they sound like screaming plastic lawn mowers!), or adapt a new body to an old car.
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Bottom of the car with Carrera and Fly chassis combined, click on image for large scan
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Many conversions I have seen only put the 14-piece Universalguide piece (an engineering marvel!) into the Fly or Ninco car. That's an option, but you can't race them against your fleet of Carrera Universal cars, since they want to be operated at different voltage settings. So you need to get a Carrera Motor into the new car. I compared the two chassis and they had very little in common. The easiest way appeared to be to simply mount the body on the Carrera chassis. But after some analysis, I realized that the flat pan of the Fly car was something that could be glued to the Carrera Chassis, providing me with the original body mounts, as well as the original front axle and tires from Fly (they look too cool). The rear axle had to be Carrera, though. I hope to find a way to fit the Fly wheels as wheel covers on those rims one day, but without a nice micro lathe, this won't happen for a while.
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This is the hybrid chassis without motor; the front mounting location
for the body was moved to make room for the Carrera guide piece which is not mounted here
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So I took a Dremel tool and started cutting up the fly chassis. Then I cut the front axle off the Carrera body and started fitting these two chassis together. Some strong plastic epoxy glue combined the two into one. The ground clearance became a main issue, but with fresh tires in the back, the car does clear the conductors on the Carrera track pieces. The low ride height isn't too great for the banked turns, but the car does get through them, showing some wear on the bottom of the front air dam. But that's why I built the car - So I don't have to worry about my original cars losing parts of their bodies, which cannot be replaced.
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There isn't much space underneat the car. After a few hundred laps, the chassis already shows noticable wear from
track pieces that form a ridge at a bridge
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The Fly car is extremely low, leaving very little room for the large Bühler motor in the Carrera chassis. The
entire interior of the Fly car had to be removed to make room for the motor. I used the driver insert from the
old Carrera Chaparral that donated its chassis for this project, but the driver's head still sticks out of the car. I'll have to grind down the head in the future to get the driver inside the car. But being extremely low, the car has superb handling (without those dumb magnets that Fly and other manufacturers put into their models these days).
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This is a view of the car before the driver insert was fitted - it shows how big that motor is
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In the rear, the Ferrari V12 motor parts had to be cut down and moved backwards to make room for the Carrera gears and chassis parts behind the rear axle. One that Ferrari engine was glued in place, the car was ready for a road test. The new rear tires were broken in fast and then the car was pushed to the limit. In really tight sections of multiple tight radius turns (Carrera Universal had five different radius turns, and my track has them all), the car showed that low center of gravity is the key to good handling. Although the rear axle is very narrow compared to other Carrera cars I have, you almost cannot tip the Fly/Uni Ferrari out of the lane. It seems to float through edgy tight sections. Only top speed is lacking right now, and that's because the motor and gear parts are of a rather poor vintage (pre 1970). I will replace the gears on motor and axle in the future to reduce some obvious friction that keeps the thing from revving as high as some of my faster cars do. Or I'll swap in a nicer motor with a matching rear axle (update: I bought a never used "gold" race motor from Carrera, and will mount this motor with a new rear pinion in the coming weeks; a BEPFE computer timing system is also ordered, which will soon provide date for a complete performance chart of my now 20+ cars)
I still don't have my computer timing system set up yet, so no lap times are available to compare the vehicle directly to other Carrera slot cars (or Fly 2-conductor cars running at their 12V setting on my track).
As always - if you are a Carrera Universal fan and live in the United States, drop me a line (email is at the top of the page behind my name). I don't know of any other Carrera Universal sets that have made it across the Atlantic and are still in heavy use.
This web site will soon add more general information about the Carrera Universal system, mostly in English, since the German fans are doing a great job at putting their knowledge on the web themselves. A German version of this and other pages will also appear in fall/winter of 2000/2001.
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Here's a photo I got of the real car in 1998 at Laguna Seca, with Doc Bundy at the wheel - click on image for full screen version
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The next project is already started: it is a Visteon Panoz Fly car that will get a chassis transplant from an old
Carrera Jägermeister BMW 3.0 CSL, which has had a rough past in the hands of a German family where somebody forgot
to tell the kids that stepping on the roof a slot car, even if it is a German made quality slot car, will cause
severe damage. The resulting new Carrera Universal 132 slot car
will be the most modern model in my collection. There's a Fly Porsche 908 Spyder waiting for a chassis, but that may be put
into a Carrera Servo 132 Lancia Stratos. Once I get my hands on a few more good chassis, there will be additional
conversions.
To find more about Carrera Universal, visit some of these fine web sites (all in German, sorry):
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