mitecars.com
email: [email protected]
Yonaites/Martin 29 Flash
Martin 29 Flash built by Constantine "Gus" Yonaites, Homewood, IL
Following the success of his .19-size Martin Flash, Tony Martin introduced a larger .29-size version which he called the Martin 29 Flash. The .29-size car was essentially a scaled-up version of the earlier .19-size car and was designed to be powered with either a McCoy 29 or a Dooling 29 model engine. Like its smaller brother, the Martin 29 Flash was sold as a kit which included almost all of the parts needed to complete the car. However, unlike the .19-size car, the Martin 29 Flash kit did not include a body.
As a result, most Martin 29 Flash cars were fitted with a hand-carved wood body of the owner's own design. An exception was the cheesecloth and wallpaper "composite" body produced by Gus Yonaites. The Yonaites body was styled after the second design woven fiber body which was eventually introduced for the .19-size Martin Flash.
Constantine "Gus" Yonaites was a member of the Chicago Mite Car Club who raced on the club's portable 1/80th mile track as well as National Mite Race Car Association (NMRCA) sanctioned events held on 1/80th mile mite car tracks across the Midwest.
Yonaites worked as an electrical engineer with American Can Company, but after finding a year of retirement to be too dull, he went back to work as a technician at the Olson Shipyards in Riverdale.
Yonaites designed and built his own cars, hand carving the patterns for several of his cast aluminum pans as well as the wood bucks which he used to make the bodies for his cars.
Yonaites made his race car bodies from 12 to 14 layers of cheesecloth which were stretched tightly over the wood buck and were then saturated with wallpaper paste. After the wallpaper paste had dried, the edges were trimmed and the bodies were sanded and spray painted. The result was a durable body with an excellent finish.
