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I was looking at some old pictures of the Kyosho Lazer that I used to race back in the day when I noticed something that I'd completely forgotten about...fibre spur gears..I think I got them from the UK and they were very very quite..they had an oily sort of feel to them..almost self lubricating..anybody know anything about them?..you can just make it out in the attached pictures..
Pete

It wasn't Wasp Racing by any chance? They did lots of spur gears and slipper conversion for Kyosho, Schumacher, Tamiya, etc. Including a slipper spur for the Super Astute which seems to have disappeared off the face of the planet!

fakiee wrote:It wasn't Wasp Racing by any chance? They did lots of spur gears and slipper conversion for Kyosho, Schumacher, Tamiya, etc. Including a slipper spur for the Super Astute which seems to have disappeared off the face of the planet!

Yeah that sounds like them..they were bloody expensive when I bought them..but they worked very well..

I still have some of these: for my ultimas and optima mid. Over time I've seen a couple variation for the ultima which suggests there are different companies/individuals who made those.
Mine didn't come new, so I never knew who and where they came from.

The 64 pitch ones broke down very quickly but the others last forever. It's as if the fibers in the resin hold the lubricator.
The (commercial) name of the material is tufnol or tuffnol if I remeber correctly.

like this?? I have a new one in the package somewhere, but I can't remember the name

Yep that's them..even down to the teeth numbers written by hand...

Those Spur gears were from a company called RW in England (they might have gone under a few names like MMS or SRM). The material is called tufnol a type of bakelite based material. You use to spray WD40 on them to soften them up abit so they are abit more pliable (less likely to chip) and also for lubricating properties. Hope this helps

RW it is and they do come up on the bay...

mvh Isobarik

In the US, they were sold under the SRM name. I first heard about them during the 91 hobby show here in Chicago. There was a gentleman from the UK that was telling me about them. Becasue of his accent, I thought that he was saying teflon (instead of tufnol)...so he corrected me when I made the assumption.

He had all kinds of gear sets including ones for the optima / ultima series.

I still have their catalog somewhere. The also marketed a gold aluminum box chassis for the Tamiya Hotshot. Looked pretty neat, but I thought it was a few years too late.

Regards,
highwayracer

I've got one of those Ultima/Optima gears with the steel counter gear. I thought I had an Optima Mid spur as well but I'll have to check on that...

Yes RW! I got a whole bundle of these Tuffnel spurs (64 & 48 d.p) Along with some pinions with the Worlds car I brought a while ago.... not sure if they fit the RC10 though

Not sure if they actually were any good? - My memory of them, was that they 'whistled' rather distinctively, which in my mind 'Noise = wasted energy'? Either way RW are still very much in business - most of the spurs & pinions I use in my current touring cars are RW, the spurs are now the usual engineering plastic - nylon type material..... so the Tuffnel material obviously lost favour at some point?

-have also 2x RW Tufnol 48dp with 81 on a 88 Optima Mid
-and also the OT-85 great stuff, looking for these old OT-85 in Tufnol