Sunday, September 16, 2007

Ninco 911 (997) mods

The Ninco 911 (997) has intrigued me because not only am I a Porsche-phile but Ninco has selected this car as the Ninco World Cup car. If you follow the rules you cannot do any cutting of the body or parts to allow use of replacement wheels/gears/parts for the World Cup. With those limits in mind I wanted to see if you could do to the car if you could do just a bit of "work"...
The car sure doesn't have any room to allow the 18" ProRace wheels. Here you can see the wheels and tires on the car before any modifications have been done. The stock axle and gears have been retained.
You can see the hub for the spur gear is quite large. And if you put the replacement ProRace wheels on the car they hit the body on the gear-side of the car. On the other side of the car there is enough room for the wheel/tire with no issues.
So I pulled the stock plastic wheels and got out the razor saw. I cut as closely to the gear as I could without the saw teeth touching the edges of the teeth themselves. In the end it was about 2mm of plastic I removed. It was just the perfect amount because I slipped the replacement wheels on and they fit perfectly.
I put the body back on and the ride height may have just slightly changed but not really much. The stance of the car is quite aggressive and now with those nice (and very round) ProRace wheels the car is closer to where it should be as a "serious" racer.Another issue was the noise suppressor pushed against the body of the car.

Below you can see the gap formed by the suppressor pushing out, on the body.
A few seconds with the solder gun and it's now fixed...no problem.

Neither of these mods really are critical to the performance of the car. Out of the box the Ninco 911 Cup Car is a really solid car. It is too bad that Ninco apparently didn't check the fit of the ProRace parts on the car when they chose it as the car for the World Cup. IMO if you're going to offer up a model for a serious competition and go to the trouble of making rules stating what can and can't be done to a car, you (Ninco) should have done their homework to see if any of what they say you can (or more to the point "can't") do should be relevant... In this case most of the rules that have been made really don't apply to their own car because the parts just don't fit without at least some modifications.

DaveK

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