| February 11, 2006 Review |
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 Artin 'American Thunder' Stockers By Shawn Smith Appearance:  Colors, colors every where! Introducing the 'American Thunder Stocker' series of cars from Artin including eight different colored cars to choose from. Talk about choices! Typically most manufactures resist doing something like this, offering simple white-only releases to be used for custom paint jobs yet Artin has decided to take it one step further and make it even easier for us 'painting-impaired' guys to create colorful and fun looking slot cars.  Checking out the nice Artin marketing poster gives a bit of insight as to why Artin decided to make so many different colors of their car. Knowing that prototype stock car racing tends to be pretty Artin's concept behind their new line is to offer buyers a chance to instantly create a colorful field of cars without the need to open up the model paints. Simple and easy prepainted slot cars... what could be better?  Lets get a closer look at the cars themselves. Coming in red, orange, yellow, white, silver, green, blue and black you have a nice amount of options when picking your field of cars. Each body style is identical to the others so its just the colors that make them different.   At first glance it might be easy to dismiss these new undecorated Artin Stockers as lacking details but a closer look will show you something entirely different.  From the front its easy to see the outlined hood area, the simulated round hood pins. the upper and lower grill areas and the lower front air dam. If you aren't a fan of stock car racing you might not notice this however styling wise the Artin Stockers do a great job of pulling off the stock car look without the need to be an accurate recreation of any one particular brand of car.  Thinking back on the Artin poster that came with our test cars it was pretty easy to see a heavy Dodge representation of the car yet several aspects of the car show influences of the other makes as well. From the back end the Artin Stocker wears distinct recesses in place of where the road cars tailights would go, noticable styling lines on the rear bumper and a split rear spoiler with simulated adjusting rivet details.   Other details to check out include the roof ridge lines, molded in roof flaps, the front and back windsheild support beams and of course a driver side mounted racing net. Also note in this shot that the driver figure is molded in yellow plastic while the driver in the blue car below is molded in blue.  While I can't say for certain how all of the Artin cars are equipped five out of my eight test cars came with yellow drivers in them, two came with a blue driver and one car came with a red driver. If it matters to you, which I know depending on your modeling interests it will, the interior comes out easily so that you can repaint your driver figure, interior pan and roll bars in any color that you choose.    Time to talk about dressing these cars up a little. To those of you who have the modeling skills to recreate fabulous repaints of real life NASCAR drivers and their cars I admire much of your work. I however consider myself to be anything but an accomplished painter and detailer so in this case I am thankful that Artin is here to help me out.  Included with my eight test cars were eight corresponding sticker sheets to aid in decorating each of the cars. These are not water-slide decals and are instead 'peel and stick' sheets of graphics and numbers to quickly and easily create Artin's own idea of fantasy liveries.  On one edge of each sheet the sticker card has information telling you which sheet goes with which color car to essentially decorate your cars like they are artistically decorated on the Artin American Thunder poster. One of the really nice advantages of these sticker sheets is that you are given more than enough numbers to make any number that you wish and even after applying numbers to both doors and the roof you end up with many remaining number stickers that can be used on future slor car projects.  Taking one of the more difficult colors to mold a body in I decided to tackle decorating the first of my Artin stockers by choosing the yellow car out of the group. I also thought that since the yellow car was one of the two in the foreground of the poster it would be easy for me to reference what Artin meant for it to look like.  There are no included instructions that show where each of the stickers is meant to go yet by looking at each sheet its pretty easy to figure out what fits where in relation to the shape of the body. Each sticker sheet contains a graphic that gets placed ahead of the front wheels and behind both of the rear wheel, some cars have a solid sticker for between the wheels while others require you use a two-piece approach then there are numerous other stickers that are to be placed on the nose, hood, trunk deck and rear bumper of the car. Of course after all of that you need to pick a number for your car and apply that over top of the graphics already in place.  Here again we find that the decals are as non-specific as much of the cars styling influences. The headlight stickers can be mounted any way you like and really look less like Dodge headlights than the Artin poster depicts. Main sponsorships of each car are names like 'Max News Sports News Channel', 'ARL Turbo Engine Expert'and 'CKMobile' all of which are fictional companies yet however fake they pull off their intended purposes very well. Oh, and something I found funny, all of the cars will carry unique sponsors with the exception of the orange and red cars as both the orange and red sticker sheets are for the same 'Max News' and other graphics only printed in different colors.    Of course you don't have to use the sticker sheets as they are labeled and here on the red body I opted not to use the 'Max News' graphics. Using the red, yellow and black stickers meant for the green car I decided I wanted something on the red car that was a little less contrasting than the colors that are meant to go on it. Also please ignore the color of the wheels as I was trying to see if I liked the look of yellow rims or red painted rims better.    Performance:  All right, enough playing around with the sticker sheets and time to take a look at the really important stuff. Flipping each car over on to its roof you'll need to remove a total of three screws to take the body off of the chassis.  Now with the screws removed we can get a better view of the chassis as well as the two additional chassis pieces that give the bottom of the car a much more 'full' look when installed. Even though these cars feel very light as it is you can choose to not reinstall these two separate sections for some additional weight savings, or, you could use just the front or just the back for weight placement needs depending on your driving and tuning preferences.  Getting our first look at the motor I was expecting to find capacitors wired to the motor, as a review done by HomeRacingWorld.com showed their test cars to have capacitors wired in yet as you can see in the picture above this motor doesn't have any.  The Artin motor spins the tires through a plastic gearing combination of 9/27 and the axle is mounted in matching white plastic bushings.  Up front the Artin Stocker is equipped with a solid axle that is allowed a certain amount of up and down play as well as an abundant amount of side to side movement that some will no doubt look to cure. It's more of a 'looks' issue than a performance issue yet be that as it is I know many will look to shorten the front axles on this car because of how much of the tires it allows to stick out of the body.    Taking a quick look at the wheels they look great and were found to be very true on the axles. The tires are undecorated from a looks perspective however offer surprisingly good grip which is a good thing for these cars. In fact, the tires might be a little too soft of a rubber for how tall/thick they are as I've noticed they can produce a bit of 'bounce' through hard turns. Most were found to provide an adequate contact patch, after making certain they were seated on the rim correctly, and most were so good in fact I didn't sand a single tire before sending the cars out on the track for testing.   Magnetically speaking the Artin Stockers might send many magnet fans scrambling to find more downforce. Magnet strength is some of the lightest on the market and if you've never driven a slot car non-magnet this is about as close as you can come with a magnet in a car. While the Artin motor doesn't provide the highest RPM ratings or greatest torque when compared to most other brands of cars the light magnetic downforce will easily allow you to overpower the grip of the tires and slide the tail end around each and every turn. Driving too hard in to a corner sent the back end around on several occasions and you quickly realize you can't drive these cars like similar stock cars on the market.  The Final Verdict:  The end of another fun review and its time to share some ending impressions. First and foremost I think its great to see a manufacturer do something like offering eight different colors of model bodies all at once. Far too often we see only one car of a line released and enthusiasts find themselves anxious for competitive models to arrive. The added bonus of Artin throwing in sticker sheets that allow you to customize your cars is especially nice for those individuals who aren't comfortable with painting. The amount of numbers included is yet another nice touch as it allows users to number their cars for a unique look. In the performance arena the Artin Stockers won't set any speed records but its obvious Artin isn't trying to make a product for that purpose. What they have made is a nice running, sturdy slot car that requires you to do more than pull the trigger and watch it speed around. Sure some tuning might make them run a little better, and things like magnetic downforce is easy to fix for those who prefer it, but there is little debating their value when you learn that the price of one of these will only set you back a whopping $22.95. A nice and inexpensive alternative for those looking to create some great stock car action. Be sure to check out SlotCarWorld for Artin Stocker pricing, parts and ordering information. Special thanks go to SlotCarWorld.com for providing the new Artin 'American Thunder' Stockers for review. As always, feel free to contact me if you have any additional questions and I will be happy to answer anything that I can. Happy Slotting! Shawn Smith SJSlots@hotmail.com |
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