I wanted to offer some tips for the tyco funny car bodies, that is driving me up a wall.
first you always find them molested and broken.
usually the main body is in good shape along with the window, but due to the construction of the complete car things get broken very easy.
So both the bodies are made up of a number of pieces.
1) rear bumper, this doubles as the interior chassis holder for the hinge.
2) 2x parachutes
3) window
4) front bumper
5) black plastic front locking clip, and pop rod holder
6) prop rod
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interior
the interior is made up of 3 pieces that are chromed and then painted over with white and black paint.
1) main interior
2) motor
3) rollcage.
the problem is the hinge can be broken very easily. in a crash the body will snap off the interior breaking the hinge or breaking the front plastic locking clip.
alternatively the body can be broken when removing it from the chassis incorrectly.
the correct way to separate the body from the interior is the rear bumper must be pulled out from the body. of course nobody would do this as the body was designed to never come apart after construction.
the correct way to separate the body and interior from the chassis is another matter, you carefully pry the interior and body as one piece on the side near the exhaust pipe and pop it free, most people grabbed the body and popped it off, snapping the hinge or snapping the front lock off.
the front locking clip also doubles to hold the pop rod hinge.
so you can see how nuts this can get attempting to find a good one that has barely been run or the original owner really took care of the set.
most bodies are therefore
1) missing the rear bumper
2) have broken interior hinge
3) have snapped or missing front locking clip
4) which usually means the pop rod is missing, bent or broken.
if the front locking clip is broken then the body will not stay down and will flip up as you drive and maybe snap the hinge at the rear.
So if one of these pops up on Evil Bay and looks good, you may want to have the seller take more photos because 99% out of 100% even the seller doesn't know something is broken on these.
So far i've bought about 4 of these and only have enough parts to make one good one.
if you are interested i can take photos of me restoring them, so far its been a real Pain in the neck trying to piece these back together in my neck of the woods
i figured this thread is perfect for a heads up if you go out and try to find these.
For display the body is meant to pop open to show the interior, you have to be SUPER careful when you push the front clip in slightly to release the lock, use a micro screw driver to "fart in the wind" pop it open. VERY carefully fold out the pop rod it may hang on the front hinge try to jiggle it a little so it won't catch, that is why they are always bent or broken or missing. you may need to use a xacto and trim the plastic at the hinge point to make it butter smooth.
if you dare race these STAY on the floor track, if you have these on a table and it launches off 4 feet to the floor you are going to be sick to your stomach.
racer9 got a hell of a set
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I guess i'll add tips for the AFX cars as well.
basically there are 2 versions of these made from 71-72 and then in 73-74
the 71-72 cars are Non-magnatraction, and use the older style 4 gear chassis without the rear Screw to hold the top plate down, so they suffer even worse from the dreaded "skip" where the crown gear skips the idler gear and teeth can break off.
There is a hack to install a normal AFX crown gear into the rear of the 4 gear chassis but the gear ratio will change and it only works with the low profile tires used on the afx funny car bodies like the '"rolling rolls".
the 73-74 versions used the newer magna-traction chassis with the rear chassis screw and it also suffers from the skip issue but less so.
the bodies and motor armature remained the same during the 71-74 run. they used the Blue armature drag motor. i have seen some variation with the magnets used. i've seen green and red and white and red, and black and red.
the bodies had 2 styles with 2 paint jobs. making 4 total. you had the closed cockpit and open cockpit.
The most broken part on all 4 bodies is the Wheelie bars. they are very delicate. The wheelie bar is non-functional and never touches the track surface ever, they are pure decoration, on the closed cockpit body they are 1 piece part of the rear bumper. On the open cockpit the wheelie bar is a separate piece from the parachute rear bumper. you can swap out the part on either body just careful cutting the stud to release it.
the second most missing or broken part is the front chrome bumper on the closed cockpit body.
the third most broken part is the front clear plastic tires.
The original decals were clear vinyl not water slide. the decals had white used on them making it difficult to replicate. I used a mixture of Clear and white decal material with clean cuts to splice in a mixture of decals on the cars and retain the original look as close as possible.
the chassis is pretty easy to get parts for, you can build one with NOS parts pretty cheaply.
the issue is just with the bodies finding a nice decent one to start working with.
the bodies paint tolerance is all over the place, looks like they sprayed them by hand so its hit or miss on getting a good one.
otherwise its straight forward in rebuilding them.
one tip i can offer when i reassemble the top plate, i put a line of hot glue right on the back of the chassis so when i squeeze down the top plate on the back of the chassis the hot glue keeps the back of the top plate from lifting up and skipping gears. so far it seems to work REALLY well in addition to all the other tuning you can do with these making them into rockets. the hot glue comes off when you take things apart, you can also use Shoe goo to hold the chassis together. DO NOT use GLUE you will never be able to make repairs.
Tyco funny cars.
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