I would like to share with you a mishap that happened to me. Some Carrera cars are pretty cool so rather than leaving them in a box (for 1/43) or a suitcase (for 1/32 -1/24), I put them in my little display case to enjoy them every day. With a few accessories around it’s nice on a shelf.
And time passes, days, weeks, seasons. And after a few months and after letting a summer pass, I put my car back on the track and there. The disaster, there’s something weird. The car makes a weird noise while driving on the track. Like a clack clack and it varies with the speed! Arf.
I hold the car with the rear wheels up and no noise. And that’s when I look at the tires and see the cause of my problems. There is a flat spot on each tire and at the same level. Oh dear, the tires must have softened, with the heat, humidity or something and then took on a bad non-cylindrical shape on my shelf.
Damn I’m going to have to change the tires. Fortunately Carrera offers this type of spare parts for cars. Not necessarily easy to find on the Carrera website here is the linkhttps://www.carrera-toys.com/fr/ersatzfinder-downloads .
As I write these words, the links of the French version of the pages are out of service, so switch to the English or German version to download them. Don’t worry, the file is the same.
Just download the file of the car range and find the reference of your car.
The reference of the tires is in the column “tires” which means tires in French.
The tire change will be done soon.
Quick glances at my other cars, phew, the others don’t seem to have this syndrome yet, or not yet. But the real subject is what to do to stop this from happening again.
Let’s think about it.
A good example is the storage of cars, sometimes very long in the store of cars that we buy in a box. Carrera cannot afford to have this problem. Let’s look at it more closely.
A quick look at a Carrera box to see how it’s done.
We see that the vehicle is fixed on a small riser.
And if we put the vehicle back and look at the side, indeed the tires do not touch the base support.
So we need to create a small riser to store the cars and preserve the tires.
Ok, but a simple board will not solve the problem so simply, because under the car we have the guide and also the braids.
For the guide, the support will have to be a little thicker than the height of the guide.
For the braids, in order not to damage them, we will have to provide a small space.
After opening my freecad 3D design software, I took some dimensions under a D132 car and made the following part:
A support wide enough for the car to be stable, for the guide to slide into it and for the braids to be at rest. The small ears on the side help increase stability.
And because the cars are more or less long depending on the model, I made a short version and a long one.
You can find the 2 .stl files for download in the 3D section of the menu.
I have quite a few GO vehicles too and I wouldn’t like to have the same problem so I created a derivative of this mount suitable for GO cars.
To best adapt to different vehicles, I made 3 sizes. You can also find them in the 3D section.
Under the Formula 1, the support fits perfectly and is barely visible.
From the side, the cars rest peacefully and the tires no longer touch the ground and are not at risk of being deformed.
