The photo above is to show where you place the pure tungsten plates. BUT- this car will drag on the track unless you adjust it as shown in the design help area.
All stick on and screw on weights are not the same. The Density of the alloy and the size of the plate will obviously contribute to plates with different weights.
The present tungsten plates all run around 0.5 oz. and are close to the same dimensions. These dimensions do not take advantage of all the space available on the bottom of the car.
The Zinc and Steel plates are so light they can not compete with real tungsten plates for speed.
When you are limited on tools and need to just put plates on the bottom of the car, you quickly will see how inefficient it is to use undersized plates or low density plates to control the center of gravity.
Let’s look at what differences there are between an ordinary tungsten alloy plate and the new 99.95% W plate from TxW.
First we have the size.
A solid 99.95% pure tungsten plate 2.4 mm * 12.7 mm * 43.5 mm or in inches-0.095″x 0.5″x 1.718″. Engineered to cover the full length of the pinewood body and allow two plates to be places behind the back axle on standard wheelbase cars.
NOTE: on finished car we show sanding a slope on the very back so the end plate will not rub on the track
If you want a fast car, you must put the biggest engine available behind the back axle. That means pure 99.95% tungsten from TxChemist. Bigger engine, better center of gravity, higher speed.
You can go overboard with too much weight if you use the standard axle spacing, so unless you are an experienced rail runner, or have a test track, stay on the plus side of 1/2″ in front of the back axle for your Center of Gravity.
Here we compare size to an ordinary alloy plate.
So the TxW plate is longer, wider than some vendors, less wide than others, and thicker than all. It also is denser. How much denser depends on what alloy the vendor of the ordinary plates uses. Whatever alloy is used will not be as dense as pure tungsten plate.
So is there a weight difference? Yes, quite a bit. Two plates of the new TxW tungsten weigh substantially more than 3 plates of ordinary tungsten.
Why does this matter? Let’s take a real life problem and look at it. Suppose you are ready to add weights to your car and the total weight of the wood and wheels etc. is 1.41 oz. So 5 oz. minus 1.41 oz. equal 3.59 oz. of weights need to be securely fixed to the bottom of your car. You go online and find one vendor selling individual 0.5 plates for only $2.95 ea. That looks like a bargain, but the shipping is $4.87. That still looks OK because you can bundle up other things with that shipment for no additional charge. So we need to buy 7*0.5 oz.=3.5 oz. plus some tungsten putty we have around that we will not use in the calculation. So 7*$2.95 + $4.87 = $25.52. That is a lot of money, but tungsten is expensive and you will not get a better center of gravity with any other material. Let’s look at the most popular tungsten plates sold as a kit. Wow, sometimes a toy store has a lot of inventory and dumps a few on the market. Then you see many for sale all very close together, and then a few at really high prices trying to get someone not paying attention. The only way to do this comparison is to stick with the MSRP and the typical shipping charge.
We have 2 oz. kits running about $16, and we have a 3 oz. kit running about $19.
So you might go for the “good” deal, but where will you get the other plates to get up to 3.59 oz. ? You were better off getting two 2 oz. kits so you would have enough plates. Cost will run you $32 to $34 and you will have a few left over for next year. You also find the new TxW massive pure tungsten plates that weigh over 0.84 oz. and up to 0.9 oz.
We now have a test car shown with both TxW 99.95% plates and the same car with ordinary tungsten plates In both cases we added weights of 3.59 oz. to bring the car up to 5 oz. You can tell by eye that the center of gravity is way better with the heavy pure tungsten weights.
When the car was run on an Aluminum test track, we recorded the speeds for both weights. It was an astounding 1/2 MPH faster for the TxW system. It was almost a full MPH faster than another vendor.
To summarize, Why buy the slower, more expensive ordinary tungsten alloy when the faster, lower cost pure tungsten plate is now available? See below for the improvement in speed on the same car the TxW weights made.
We then tried the stick on Zinc ( which is even lighter than Zinc because they add Aluminum to it.) That is super slow because you can not move the center of gravity back very far at all. Then we tested a new TxW High % W Alloy.
The finished data is shown below.
The photo above shows two important things to consider when you use weights on the bottom of the car. The back right rear wheel has been removed to show how the weights will now clear the track. The red rectangle shows what would drag if you did not sand the back of the car down.
