Remco Automobile Lab Kit

This is a true record of this amazingly detailed, functional automobile kit; How it affected my life since I was 11; My decades-long search for this kit when I had kids of my own; The final find, and its current assembly!

[rtrautman]

I received my Remco Auto Lab kit just two days after Christmas! I did a quick inventory of the enclosed parts. There are 77 orange-red plastic parts, 10 light-gray plastic parts, 6 clear enclosures (transmission, differential and brakes), a few metal shafts with metal shift lever, 4 orthodontic rubber bands (will need replacement, due to rubber fatigue over the decades), a length of thread, and 15 screws, a washer, and a bushing. On first glance, the obvious missing piece is the front crank, used to turn the whole system.

I'm still trying to figure out how I'll accommodate this. Possibly fashion a wooden dowel or something.

I also found that all of the clear plastic pieces have experienced some amount of shrinkage, and even some warping over the decades. This has required me to sand down the parts that are supposed to turn freely in the transmission and differential. Otherwise, they bind severely!

[rtrautman]

This is the actual listing for the Remco Auto Lab Kit, in the 1969 Allied Electronics Catalogue.

[rtrautman]

Tracking Down A Complete Kit

For a few weeks, I left it at that. I finally had many, somewhat detailed pictures of various parts of the car kit, and felt this would be sufficient to provide reasonable detail for my memoir...but it'd been 44 years since I'd had the unimaginable joy of assembling this fantastic kit. I HAD to track down a complete kit and build it again!

A week before Christmas I found a complete kit that appeared to be in like-new condition, on eBay! The original kit sold for $4.99 in 1969. I paid $155 for it this past December, but I feel that it's worth every penny!

The rest of this blog will chronicle the assembly of this kit.

[rtrautman]

Effect Of A Memoir - End Of The Search!

This past November (2013), I decided to begin writing a humorous version of my memoirs. I'm not a celebrity, but my early years were, according to many of my friends, rather exceptional, and worthy of sharing them in a humorous context.

Anyway, I made a list of my 75 most memorable, fun, interesting, strange, unusual, unexpected and significant activities, projects, experiments and creative explorations from age 5 to 21 as a basis for "the early years" in this memoir. Within this list, of course, I'd included the functional car kit with the orange gears.

Once again, I did a number of Google searches with what little I could recall about this fantastic kit, but still came up with nothing. I moved on to look for more detail about another kit that my twin brother and I had played with when we were 11 in 1969. We'd always called it a "Knight Kit". It had been passed down from our older brother.

Putting "Knight Kit" into a Google search turned up some interesting hits. I learned that "Knight Kit" was not the name of a specific kit. Rather, it was a line of products sold by Allied Electronics. This led me to pull up an archived version of a 1969 Allied catalogue. I started thumbing through the pages of its electronic equivalent, but soon realized that I might have better luck if I could find the index. Not noticing at first that it gave the page of the index, I went to the back and started thumbing backward from page 542!

Just nine pages into my search for the index I stopped, dumbfounded! I couldn't believe what I saw! There, on the bottom-right corner of page 533, was a tiny, crude, B&W, newsprint picture of a box featuring that incredible functional car kit on it!!!

Continuing to thumb backward to resume my initial search intent, I found the Knight Kit Electronic Science Lab Kit just 21 pages beyond this, but suddenly that wasn't as important any more. I'd just found KEY information about the car kit! It was made by Remco (aka Remcraft), and it was called the "Automobile Lab Kit"!

Entering this combination of terms into Google turned up lots of pictures of my coveted kit from so very many decades prior!

Finally, I had irrefutable proof that I hadn't simply imagined this great functional car kit!

[rtrautman]

The Search.

In 1995, Internet search tools weren't very well developed. Add to that the fact that the only things I could remember about this kit were orange gears, and functional transmission, differential and brakes. I had no idea who manufactured or sold it in 1969 when i got it as a Christmas gift. I didn't even have any idea what it was called.

I really had VERY little to go by. Needless to say, with so little information, and the immaturity of the Internet at that time, such searches turned up nothing useful. Still, about every year or so thereafter I'd try a new search, hoping to hit upon just the right combination of terms, or a more helpful search engine. Still nothing!

[rtrautman]

Remco Automobile Lab - The Kit; The Influence; The Search!

Who recognizes this amazing kit? It has a fully functional 3-speed transmission, with reverse, all in a see-through plastic case, an accurate universal-jointed drive shaft, to a functional differential, also inside a clear plastic housing, driving the rear wheels which also have functional drum brakes! I first built it when I was 11.

I can say with great confidence that this kit was substantially responsible for my choosing an engineering career!

It made such an impression upon me, that I desperately wanted to find it, or another kit of similar capability, for my own kids when they were old enough to appreciate it. I wasn't too surprised not to find this kit in the stores, but I was quite surprised and saddened to find that NO similar kits even exist anymore! Thus, 1995 began an 18-year quest to locate this greatly detailed and influential kit!

[rtrautman]

The Remco Automobile Lab Kit, originally sold in 1969.