Tifosi Racing

That track looks awesome!
Too bad I don't have facebook to see the second video.

At sometime in the early 2000's, one of my local slot car heroes had a dream. He wanted to develop and manufacture a bolt together slot car chassis that could compete with the scratchbuilt brass chassis being built and raced in the Pacific Northwest. That is a tall order but Dave Naylor felt he could achieve that goal. The chassis design he came up with was a piece of art in my opinion. They always fascinated me with their precise and intricate machining work and parts design. One of the drawbacks for me at that period in time was cost. I just couldn't afford the cost of one of Dave's chassis.

Unfortunately the Tifosi Chassis never became popular. They were complicated and difficult to set up. Very few of the local racers were able to get one of the chassis up to speed. It's too bad, especially considering the time, effort, and expense Dave put into the project. But my lust and love for those chassis never ended, and as luck would have it over the last few years I have been able to pick up a few. I now consider myself an official Tifosi Chassis collector, so if you have any you want to unload, let me know.

So that brings us up to yesterday. For some reason, while I was working on my Porsche 962 Scholer chassis I decided to pull out one of my Tifosi chassis. This particular one was kind of a mess with a lot of the plates glued together. Luckily Zack had stopped by to do some testing and he gave me some great advise for tearing this particular chassis down. Out came the propane torch! Not the little one, the big one connected to map gas! After some serious heat applied I was able to separate all the different plates. Today I cleaned all the plates up using extensive amounts of Goof Off!

Here's what one of the plates/pieces looked like after I got them all separated.

These are all the plates  and pieces that were used in the construction of this one chassis.

David was always super nice to AJ and me. Very helpful with advice. Where is Dave these days?

These are very interesting indeed. I think there are some really good ideas here, and some things are too complicated or overlooked.

Sounds like a fun project to play with! My suggestion is to go with a lexan Bluegroove body, only because I think that will give you the best shot at having it work well!

Zack

Good thing you do have some that are already put together looks complicated.
Did he outsource the manufacture of the chassis parts?
What type of metal is the motor bracket made out of? It looks indestructible.

TWO THINGS!

1. I've learned more about these Tifosi chassis than I ever needed to know!

2. I have spent WAY too much time messing with it!

The Tifosi website appears to be long gone. I don't know of anyplace that has any information on them. So just in case anyone (like me) has a Tifosi chassis that needs assembly here are some photos of the chassis and its construction (if anybody even cares).......

The chassis basically consists of four layers of stacked plates and parts. Kind of like making a sandwich.

This is the bottom or first layer which is laminated to the bottom side of the next or second layer. I don't know what was used for adhesive to assemble this particular chassis but, it took a LOT of heat to get the first two layers of plates separated!

This bottom layer of plates seems to be used to keep the screw heads from hanging down below the bottom of the chassis. The screw heads are positioned in the cut-outs of the plate pieces. I guess that is much easier than trying to counter sink the screws in a piece of spring steel! I'm sure this layer also serves to add some desired overall weight.

These are the pieces that make up the third layer. They are secured to the lower (second layer) using screw, washers, and nuts.

Some of the pieces are captured rather than screw tightened, which allows those pieces to free float to some degree.

Great documentation of the build!

Zack

I gave mine away. I had more words to say, but I better stop now. LOL.