Saturday, December 22, 2007

Revell 320 BMW's - review

Publishers note:
Frank's review of the BMW's will be the weekend update.

Huge fat fenders, we love 'em around here! And when a box with some Revell DRM BMW 320's modeled after cars raced in 1977 arrived it was a good day to be a fan of that ample-fendered genre.


Overall fit and finish on my Revell BMW 320's was spot on. All the Tampo printing was very clean and had very crisp edges. The orange Jagermeister car has a nice saturated color as does the blue BMW. There's a lack of branding on the blue BMW that is obviously due to some issue with use of the Fruit of the Loom branding. Overall this doesn't take much away from the look of the car, though once you notice the bar codes it does look a bit odd come to think of it.

The half-tray interior is just bad form, with a front motored car there is more than enough room for a full tray. There is enough room under the back deck of the car to have these slot car be either an inline or a sidewinder configuration. If either of these motor positions were done it would improve the car for possible use in non magnet racing.

The wheels on the car were very well done and very good copies of the real cars. The tires were cupped, It would take a lot of truing to fix this problem, it would be easier to replace them. The tires also fit very loosely on the wheels and if you look closely you can see the tires are really designed for a wheel with a deeper rib. These wheels have a rib that's quite shallow and the cupping is due to that problem.

This car is a front-motor configured chassis, the drive shaft had quite a bit of wobble to it, this I feel would cause problems down the line, it would need to be trued and rear bushing adhered in a fashion to insure proper gear mesh. The rear axle was very true, with variances not only from side to side, but up and down as well. If you use these cars as they are with a magnet you'll never notice the fact there is a quite a bit of movement in the axle bearings. The vast majority of slot car racers will use these car with the magnets, if you want to go mag-less you'll have to change this to get those rear axles under control.


On my Carrera track the cars were both very fast and lots of fun to drive. I can see that both cars will become a valuable addition to my collection and I'm hoping to tune them more to my track's liking.

regards Frank

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