The Mustang Rides again.

**PLEASE READ THIS** for anyone looking at this model displayed in my showroom and wondering if I will sell it? PLEASE DON’T ASK!!! I get numerous requests from TC members wanting to buy cars displayed in my Tamiyaclub showroom, and to be honest I get very annoyed when people ask to buy something that is clearly NOT FOR SALE!! This car is part of MY COLLECTION and as such I want to KEEP IT!! So please don’t Email on the off chance that I might sell it to you, if I want to sell any of my cars I will put them up for sale in my TRADE ROOM, so look there to see what cars I am prepared to sell otherwise don’t bother asking cos the only answer you will get is NO!!! thanks for reading this disclaimer. Regards wldnas.

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I’ve been putting this write-up off for far too long now :S and it’s been thanks mostly to this car and it’s delayed showroom description that I’ve been so sloppy with my write ups of late, and for that I’m really sorry, but as the work piled up the task of clearing the backlog became more and more daunting with each new car that I bought and I had no idea where to start and with every full write up that I do, it can take over 2 hours to do each one, and in order to get started in the first place I had to have the motivation which has been lacking somewhat of recent times, so now you know the main reason why I have gotten so behind in my work :S

OK now what about this car? Well it’s a real rarity these days, but back in late 1986 the car was launched by PB racing and it proved to be an immediate success out on the tracks, however the Mini-Mustang came out about the same time as the original Schumacher CAT and the two cars were destined to be bitter rivals from the off, but in the early days the Mustang could more than hold it’s own against the CAT at club level competition, but as time went on the CAT would make clawback as it’s early teething problems were gradually ironed out as successive updated models were introduced like the XL and XLS versions which made what was already a great car into a fantastic car and it soon became the preferred choice for all top races both locally and internationally.

But the Mini-Mustang had by this time achieved something of a Cult following and for the next couple of years it remained a force to be reckoned with and it was quite well supported by the hop-up spares manufacturers during this time, another novel feature which was then unique was the application of a two speed transmission and innovation for which the Mini-Mustang became legendary, PB had long utilised this transmission system in their original 1:8th scale Motorcross petrol Mustang series cars which where ripping up the tracks all over, PB simply grafted over this system to their first 1:10th Electric Off-road car and the results were quite startling in the day when modified motors were not as potent as they are today, the 2 speed version was of course an option they also did a single speed 4WD and 2WD version as well of the same car design.

But as time went on it was obvious that the Mustang was getting a bit long in the tooth so PB heavily modified the basic chassis design to take into account many of the accepted design ideals of the time and bought out the Maxima which was slightly more upto date version of the Mustang that looked a bit more like a CAT (I have one of these cars in my showroom as well) but PB never really managed to catch up with the likes of the CAT and their last 1:10 EP buggy (The ACE) looked suitably heroic but was a bit of a botch job which quickly sank without trace, after which PB turned their back on the 1:10th electric off-road scene to concentrate on the other areas of RC racing that they were still competitive in, which is really quite sad, the Mini-Mustang allong with many other un-popular Competition car designs were simply disgarded in favour of the more popular and competative machines of the day which explains why they are so few of them around today 

Now about the design of the car, it’s actually quite straight forward, the materials used are mostly plastic of a crude yet durable type, the chassis plate is a tapered piece of FRP onto which the semi-sealed backbone chassis is bolted, inside this a quite advanced transmission design for its day, Mid motored, onto the single or Twin speed spur gear which drives through a ball raced shaft the main pulley on the single belt drive with ball raced tensioner roller, that goes around the full gear differentials at either end which are supported by large ball races, drive went from the integral drive cups to spring loaded plastic dogbones which transmit the power to the suspension uprights and in turn the wheels, the wheels are single piece 2 inch diameter with a similar design to the wheels on the Tamiya Hotshot (in fact the two types are fully compatible) the tire tread design is of a multi sized pin spike pattern which was a similar design to one by Dynamite tires.

The Suspension is rather novel in that the front suspension is duplicated from the front to the rear, in other words steering components like the uprights and tie rods are used on the rear as well as the front, this obviously was to keep tooling costs down but as an added bonus allowed for tracking adjustment on the rear wheels, the uprights are fully ballraced (as is the whole car) the wishbone come off the uprights through integrated kingpin ball ends, the wishbone them selves are triangular in shape and attached to the pivot blocks which are directly fitted to the backbone chassis, there are some crude single bar anti-roll bar that work off the lower wishbones and the shock absorbers are of a large diameter, full volume, made of plastic with metal inserts, the soft springs are controlled with adjustment collars and the shocks are inturn mounted on tower brackets that again mount directly upon the backbone chassis.

The steering mechanism is a duel pivot crank affair working on the ackerman priciple, the servo saver is integrated into one of the pivot cranks and the servo it self fits into a recess in the backbone chassis, the battery also runs through a recess in the chassis further back, but it is supported by a novel quick release bracket, that encompasses a battery clamp, the rest of chassis spares little room for the radio gear and speed controller, the receiver is supposed to fit to the top of the rear chassis behind the rear shock tower, attached with rubber bands??? When this car came out ESC had not long been about but this car was designed with one in mind, but as it goes there is hardly any room for a MSC anyway, though a simple stepless wiper blade type was recommended, finally the body design was not decided upon until quite near the time of release, many designs were tested and eventually PB plumped for the Parma Chenowth design, which actually suits the car really well, they did come up with some later alternative designs, the “SCALPEL” being one?

OK so that’s the low down on the cars basic design features, what about the car that I’ve got? Well actually that’s one of the reasons why this description was delayed for so long, cos a had a bit of bother with it that was partially due to the actions of the previous owner, and I damaged some rather vital parts of the car as result and got rather angry, so had I written this description then, my temper would have clouded my judgement of the seller and I would have slagged him off something rotten, but as time went by I realised that it was simple mistake that anyone could have made and as I have now calmed down I can look at the problem objectively and see that I was as much to blame in rushing through my radio installation on the car without thoroughly checking it (had I done so I would have found that a part was incorrectly installed), and the result of which was parts got damaged and I got extremely cross with the car.

But the story goes like this, after I knew about the Mini-Mustang and wanted one, even more so after I had acquired my rather beaten up old Maxima which I have since restored, I then found that a Prominent TC member BARRYPOPS had a Mini-Mustang for sale in his TC trade room, it had been semi-restored and looked to be in good condition, Barry already had another better Mustang so this other one was surplus to his requirements, it was a little on the expensive side (as I had made a number of other recent purchases and could ill-afford it) but I could not resist and contacted Barry and made the deal, he had mentioned that he recently done a through restoration of the car which involved a complete strip and clean of the chassis and when the car finally arrived I can see that this was so as it was in very clean condition.

There were a few things about that car that needed work, and there were a few bits missing but on the whole the car was mostly complete, I was very keen to try it out and the real fun came when I tried to get the car running, I had some spare radio components lying around, and I tried to bodge them onto the car which wasn’t easy, as I mentioned before these cars are really meant for ESC, there is little room for anything else, but I did not have one spare so I had to modify a standard Tamiya 3 step controller to fit and had to bodge it onto the side of the Backbone chassis, the servo was mounted along side and strange contorted link rod had to be formed between the two, the wiring was a bit of a mess but eventually all was set for the first test run, so I took it outside, applied the power, it moved about two yards then ground to a screaming halt with a high pitched whining sound, I had a quick look to see what was up and could see that the main drive shaft for the Belt pullet was spinning on its shaft.

So I simply assumed that it was loose grub screw, so I took it inside and went to tighten it up…. This is where the problems started :( the allen key grub screws on this car are smaller than the standard grub screws used on pinion gears? This frustrated me at first as I had nothing small enough to fit, eventually I ended up grinding off a small screw driver so I could ram it into the grub screw and get a purchase on it, I tried tightening it at first and it seemed to do the job but as soon as I tired to drive the car the same thing happened again, so I decided to try and remove the screw and after much toil and trouble I finally got it to bite and managed to unscrew it, but I had chewed up the grub as a result, I thought that a regular grub would make a suitable substitute but they are of a different thread size and it would not fit, so I would have to remove the belt pulley to drill it out and make the new grub fit.

To do this I had to dismatle the whole shaft assembly that meant destrying another two grubs, one of the spur gear boss and another on the end stopper, as this was going on I was slowly getting more and more annoyed with each little failure, finally I managed to get the shaft off and it was at this point that I noticed something odd, the grub on the belt pulley did not line up with the corresponding flat on the shaft, to confirm this finding I checked up on the photocopied manual that I had got with the car and found that the shaft had been assembled back to front, well that just about punched my ticket right then, and I came close to throwing the car against the wall as I flew into a rage, for now I had someone else to blame for my failings and impatience, after a short while I tried to continue by drilling out the grub screw threads to accept the standard size screws but all I ended up doing was damaging the parts beyond repair as the drill bits I had were the wrong size and when I tried to cut some new threads they simply striped out as soon as I applied pressure, the parts were ruined and the car was now useless and irreparable 

Later that evening (after I had calmed down a bit) I sent a slightly grumpy Email to Barrypops to which he was quite rightly surprized and pleaded innocence, but it took me a few days for me to realise that what he had done was an easy mistake to make, the shaft was nearly symetrical is design with only a slight difference in the positioning of the flats on one side, it would be easy for someone who wasn’t totally concetrating on the job to assemble the shaft the wrong way round, the result would be that the Pulley grub would be unable to grip on the shaft and drive would be lost, as was happened with my car, but I was as much to blame for not waiting to buy the correct sized allen key for the job, had I got the right tools then fixing the shaft would have been a simple task, but I was so pigheaded and impatient that I could not wait and ended up damaging the car and making it undrivable, needless to say that this little episode has soured my friendship with Barrypops somewhat and to this day it hasn’t quite been right since, but it just goes to show what trouble a simple little error can make.

Anyway, I did manage to fix the car evetually, and part of this was due to Barry who did feel a little guilty and offered me some of is used PB spares as a form of compemsation which did help me to fix the problem with the shaft, but later still I managed to get hold of a guy in the states who loves PB Mini-Mustangs and has loads of them, I managed to negociate with him for a spares package deal which included a number of very useful spares including new wheels and tires, anti-rollbars, front bumpers and underguards, battery clamp, some decals and best of all a two speed kit and lexan cover, after I had used these parts the car is now back to running condition, but how does it go….?

Well firstly I need to say a few things about the two speed set up, it uses a duel pinion with two different sized gears on it, and the Two speed itself has two different sized spurgears fitted to a boss with a one was bearing and a centrifugal clutch bell inbetween, the theory is that the lower ratio drives first while the other ration spins on the disengaged clutch, when the revs reach a certail point the clutch then engages the second higher ratio and the first gear then spins on the one way bearing… confuesed well at least I think that’s how it works? It could be the other was round, but anyway it’s more simple than it appears, but it has no reverese cos of the one way bearing and when the reves get so high the second gear engages and locks the transmission solid, if fact when I test driving the car this happened to me as the MSC I fitted has reverse and I have the habit of jamming the car into reverse to use as a brake, and when I tird it on the Mustang, there was a loud “POP” noise and the cars stopped dead, with a small whisp of smoke rising up, the buss bar on the back of the battery had blown out when the battery fuesed due to the huge trauma of the trasnmission lock :(

I managed to fix it and try driving the car again (more carefully this time) as I was using a stepped speedo the gear change wasn’t very smooth, and it seemed to change at too low a speed, I tried to adjust the tension on the clutch springs a little and managed to rise it up a bit more, but to me the two speed seems more like a gimmick than a practical performance hop-up, still the rest of the car seem to perform fairly well, the motor fitted is quite a basic one and the speed wasn’t that special even with the twin speed, but the handling on tarmac was pretty good, it scrabbled around quite nicely as it struggled for grip, it’s probably a little better than a Hotshot in that respect.

As with any car I test drive, it not really a true representation of a cars handling merits as I only try them on a tramac surface, off-road in the dirt I imagine these cars are far better suited and their true colous shine through, but I’m still happy to have one none the less, as I like unusual designs in cars more than most the Mini-Mustang is a treasure trove of such wonders the 2 speed set up especailly, I might do a slight cosmetic restoration of the body sometime in the future, but for now the car is just another prized addition for my collection :)