Fiat S76 'The Beast of Turin' - Prescott 29 May

[David Mitcham]

As you may have seen from another post I went to Prescott hillclimb on Sunday to the La Vie en Bleu and La Vita Rossa meeting. It was a wonderful day from a car point of view and because the weather was perfect and the scenery magnificent. For those of you who have never been to Prescott its like going back to motor sport meetings of the '50s and 60's - you actually get within inches of the cars and drivers all for the price of entrance.

The star of the event was the Fiat S76, known as 'The Beast of Turin', land speed record contender built in 1910. With a 28.5 litre four cylinder(!), 300bhp, engine its easy to understand how it got its nickname - it actually spits flame from the exhausts! It was capable of 116mph and achieved the one mile land speed record in 1911. The sound it makes is quite shattering and, although intended for straight line motoring, it ascended the Prescott hill without difficulty. Below are some photographs.

Anyone up for making a slot car of the Beast?







I have quite a few other photographs from the event which I'll willingly post if anyone is interested - ERAs, Bugattis, a very pretty Austin 7 special and a Benetton B190.

Best Regards

David

[Aurora]

Thanks for posting your photos David. Invaluable for building these cars. The S76 would be an impressive sight thundering around a track.
I'd like to try and build a pre-war car, but have always shied away because of limitations I have related to tooling and materials. The two big challenges that always stump me are the wire wheels and the drive chain.
I think a machine tool with a dividing head could solve the wire wheel problem.
For the drive chain, the Tsubaki company makes an "ultra-miniature" roller chain that scales up to around 58 mm wide. The chains on this Fiat looks quite large - I wonder if the ultra miniature chain could be used to model this car's drive chains?
Matt

[David Mitcham]

Hi Matt

Here's a close up picture of the chain drive. I think the miniature chain you mention would work - the chain on the car looks to be around 50mm. The wheels are another matter though - if the wire wheels RS Slotracing had/have in development materialise maybe they would work.



Best Regards

David

[Andrew Rowland]

I love the idea of someone doing a chain drive. That REALLY excites me!
Andi

[Chris Wright]

try this place: catalog.nordex.com/cc1727

[Peter Seager-Thomas]

Nice pictures David. I think I posted some of a similar (same?) car in the early days of this forum.

Danny and I looked into chain drive for pre-WW1 stuff and found nothing really suitable.

The scale motorcycle chain actually works out a bit big. The Fiat chain looks to be a standard 2" pitch chain, which of course scale wise needs a 1/16" pitch chain for our models, that's 0.0625". Tiny.

The only stuff which came close was the stuff used on Fusee drive watches, which really is tiny but hardly up to the job.

I did start working on a chain drive where the solid chain/sprocket assembly was driven by a small eccentric to give the impression of movement.

Peter.

[Aurora]

Great zoom photo of the chain. It looks to be smaller than I initially judged from the wide shot. The smallest Tsubaki chain has a pitch of 0.148. That's big, but I wonder how it would look. it might still look pretty good.