Every once in a while something comes along that I just simply have to build. As soon as I laid eyes on this Airfix 1910 B-Type Omnibus I just knew that I needed to turn it into a slot car!
A quick look through the instructions shows that the bus is a perfect body for a slot car as the floor is single piece and the axles and wheels sit quite a long way below the floor so the actual slot car chassis will be able to be easily and solidly mounted to the floor of the bus and the wheels shouldn’t sit too far off where they would from factory. They are condemning words though and I’m sure I will have to do some modifications at a later date!
The chassis I will be using is a Penelope Pitlane F1RL, the same as my 1912 Rolls Royce, and wheels will be the Penelope Pitlane ‘vintage’ series wheels and tyres (big ones!). A Scalextric Mabuchi motor and rear axle will provide the drive.
Being a bus, it will obviously be a lot larger than a regular slot car. Completed it will be 67mm wide, which really isn’t much wider than a average 1/32 slot car but it will be 215mm long which is hugeeee! An inch longer than my Rolls Royce and about 1 and a half inched longer than a Ferrari 250GTO.
Once it is all laid out we can see that this will be quite an involved build for a slot car. There is a lot to go together rather than the usual 5 or 6 pieces that make up a complete slot car.
Oddly the figures were drawn to me as the place to start. There are 5 in total; a driver, a conductor and 3 passengers.
Then with the snap of my figures they are painted!
I don’t claim to be a scale modeller by any means so please feel free to hurl insults at my painting efforts haha! I went for purple, white and green with the lady as they were the colours of the suffragettes which was a political movement who were fighting to get women the vote in the early 1900s and during WW1.
Part two can be found here: https://motorsportformentalhealth.com/2016/08/08/1910-omnibus-slot-car-build-part-2/
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