# Recently retired, building a home track just for fun



## Tourmax

I retired approx 1.5 years ago. I was military, Search and rescue, helicopters, Ch113 and CH149 (Canada, equivalent airframes: H46 and EH101). 30 years of that tends to beat a body (and mind) up pretty good and they finally decided I was too broken up to carry on and gave me the "golden parachute". I've got lots of physical problems and scars (inside and out), but no regrets. It was a life well worth the sacrifice. Not many people can say the have lost track of how many lives they've saved (and how many things they never want to see again).

While I've no shortage of projects (new house build, C4 Corvette, Fox Mustang, Fj1200, 8x8 Argo, touring bike, etc), I'm just starting to turn the loft over the garage into "my space". As you can see by my "toys list", I'm a car guy, from way back. I've always wanted to build a model track, because, well, I'm a car guy. Trains just won't cut it.

When my FIL passed away, he left a lot of Nascar stuff behind. Specifically, he was a super sized Petty fan. One of the things that arrived in our house was a Life Like Richard Petty Daytona Nascar HO slot set. Complete, in it's original box. Stickers, warranty paperwork, poster, LL catalog, etc...all of it in mint condition. He pulled it out once to try it and then it went back into the box. For him, it was a collectable to sit on a shelf, not a slot car set to be run and banged up. But being HO, it's pretty small, reminded me more of the toy sets I used to play with as a child.

So I looked around at 1:24, 1:32, 1: 43, etc. The digital stuff all looked pretty good to me, with all the options it gives you over the old analog sets. But then came price. Ye-ow! That stuff ain't cheap! Even more so of a shock was a basic kit was pretty expensive, and I'd still have to add a lot to it (IE: $$$) to get to where I want to be. I've got lots of things to spend money on and a slot car set isn't one of them. At least not a "full boat" set with all the fancy options. Analog will do just fine thank you!

Scale also started to become a problem. I've got lots of room and could make a monstrous track if I wanted (room is 22x28) and the larger scales sure looked great with all their clearly visible detail! But all I really want is something I can build up to be somewhat realistic, have a little fun with and not consume the entire room. The room is multipurpose and it has to stay that way. It holds computer setups, 3d printers,industrial sewing machines (Leather upholstery), etc, etc. So I pulled my expectations down to HO size, mainly to keep it on a single sheet of 4x8 and have enough of a layout to still be interesting.

So now I can use the old LL Petty Nascar set and save even more bucks! I set it up, cleaned it up, fixed a few electrical bug a boo's and had a go:

I retired approx 1.5 years ago. I was military, Search and rescue, helicopters, Ch113 and CH149 (Canada, equivalent airframes: H46 and EH101). 30 years of that tends to beat a body (and mind) up pretty good and they finally decided I was too broken up to carry on and gave me the "golden parachute". I've got lots of physical problems and scars (inside and out), but no regrets. It was a life well worth the sacrifice. Not many people can say the have lost track of how many lives they've saved (and how many things they never want to see again).

While I've no shortage of projects (new house build, C4 Corvette, Fox Mustang, Fj1200, 8x8 Argo, touring bike, etc), I'm just starting to turn the loft over the garage into "my space". As you can see by my "toys list", I'm a car guy, from way back. I've always wanted to build a model track, because, well, I'm a car guy. Trains just won't cut it.

When my FIL passed away, he left a lot of Nascar stuff behind. Specifically, he was a super sized Petty fan. One of the things that arrived in our house was a Life Like Richard Petty Daytona Nascar HO slot set. Complete, in it's original box. Stickers, warranty paperwork, poster, LL catalog, etc...all of it in mint condition. He pulled it out once to try it and then it went back into the box. For him, it was a collectable to sit on a shelf, not a slot car set to be run and banged up. But being HO, it's pretty small, reminded me more of the toy sets I used to play with as a child.

So I looked around at 1:24, 1:32, 1: 43, etc. The digital stuff all looked pretty good to me, with all the options it gives you over the old analog sets. But then came price. Ye-ow! That stuff ain't cheap! Even more so of a shock was a basic kit was pretty expensive, and I'd still have to add a lot to it (IE: $$$) to get to where I want to be. I've got lots of things to spend money on and a slot car set isn't one of them. At least not a "full boat" set with all the fancy options. Analog will do just fine thank you!

Scale also started to become a problem. I've got lots of room and could make a monstrous track if I wanted (room is 22x28) and the larger scales sure looked great with all their clearly visible detail! But all I really want is something I can build up to be somewhat realistic, have a little fun with and not consume the entire room. The room is multipurpose and it has to stay that way. It holds computer setups, 3d printers,industrial sewing machines (Leather upholstery), etc, etc. So I pulled my expectations down to HO size, mainly to keep it on a single sheet of 4x8 and have enough of a layout to still be interesting.

So now I can use the old LL Petty Nascar set and save even more bucks! I set it up, cleaned it up, fixed a few electrical bug a boo's and had a go:










Pardon the mess, still setting up the room. Had to change up the layout slightly to fit the table. It's only around 3x6 feet.

The 42 and 43 Pontiacs (Richard and Kyle) are the only slot cars there, the rest are hot wheels and such. The ones in the set are "Fast Trackers".

Was fun ripping them around, but I need more to hold my interest. And what is it with old controllers getting hot and stinking?!? Yeah right, pure, 100% resistance driven speed control.....ugh. After I get rolling, I'll have to look in to a different option for controllers other than straight resistance driven.

Off to ebay I grab a two more track sets, both Life Like stuff. One is "pole position challenge", but missing cars. I got it because it was cheap and there is a boatload of track in it. The other set was 40 bucks and it was a "Nascar truck challenge" set. Comes complete (and with an extra truck), but it's only a figure 8 track.

Then I grabbed a 77-79 Thunderbird AFX nascar. I paid waaaay too much for it, but one of my first cars was a 78 T-Bird and I wanted it. Grabbed four 440x2 chassis while I was there. That just about sets me up to build whatever I want and 10 chassis' to chose from to mount bodies. Bodies I will either 3d print, or use Hot Wheels or maybe scan the hot wheels and 3d print them. That way, I can scale up and down as needed.

Plan is to give each lane it's own power supply. Build it into the table (IE: MDF) and a full track setting around it. I want elevation changes, so some of the track will have to be "mountainous" I guess. Thinking I'll do a 4 lane track as I certainly have enough.

I grabbed a set of 4 turn out sections from a tyco (or AFX maybe) set. Plan is to build some solenoid "flippers" into the track to give drivers a chance to pit if they want. That's not going to be overly hard, but not simple either. I grabbed a couple NOS adapter pieces (LL to Tyco) to hook the turn outs to the LL track, but then realized since I am attaching the track to the table, I can just snip off the lugs, snug the tracks together, connect the electrical terminals from each set and we're off and running. I don't ever plan to break it down, so having it permanent isn't a big deal.

For pit lane I looked at the AFX hologram unit, but soon discovered that it is (for the most part) just a piece of glass to reflect your iPhone screen. The "hologram" is just an iPhone app. I downloaded the app and held it over a piece of glass and bingo! Holograms. The rest is just printed cardboard. I can do better than that and will make something up on the 3d printer. At least it will have a "real" 3d texture to it (ie: wood, brick, etc) instead of just printed cardboard. I also have several old iPhones laying around (we get a new one every time you re-up your plan) so I can make a couple pits with the holograms in it if I want. I don't need lap counting and such, I just want those neat little holograms.

Since it's all HO, some train stuff should work for some bits of scenery. Like trees, bushes and such. I've got one of those thick "HO train track building" books that will provide lots of useful hints and ideas about that.

Whatever else I need will be the 3d printer's job. Buildings, people, even car bodies. I've already downloaded quite a bit from the free 3d print sites and it's not overly hard to custom make whatever I may want. For anything mechanical, well....I've got a metal lathe, small knee mill, MIG and TIG out in the shop. I can TIG razor blades together, so I think I can handle anything I need for a slot car set.

Electronics? Yeah, this is all pretty basic stuff after working on helicopters, supersonic aircraft, heavy transports, etc my whole career. No challenges there. 

Pardon the mess, still setting up the room. Had to change up the layout slightly to fit the table. It's only around 3x6 feet.

The 42 and 43 Pontiacs (Richard and Kyle) are the only slot cars there, the rest are hot wheels and such. The ones in the set are "Fast Trackers".

Was fun ripping them around, but I need more to hold my interest. And what is it with old controllers getting hot and stinking?!? Yeah right, pure, 100% resistance driven speed control.....ugh. After I get rolling, I'll have to look in to a different option for controllers other than straight resistance driven.

Off to ebay I grab a two more track sets, both Life Like stuff. One is "pole position challenge", but missing cars. I got it because it was cheap and there is a boatload of track in it. The other set was 40 bucks and it was a "Nascar truck challenge" set. Comes complete (and with an extra truck), but it's only a figure 8 track.

Then I grabbed a 77-79 Thunderbird AFX nascar. I paid waaaay too much for it, but one of my first cars was a 78 T-Bird and I wanted it. Grabbed four 440x2 chassis while I was there. That just about sets me up to build whatever I want and 10 chassis' to chose from to mount bodies. Bodies I will either 3d print, or use Hot Wheels or maybe scan the hot wheels and 3d print them. That way, I can scale up and down as needed.

Plan is to give each lane it's own power supply. Build it into the table (IE: MDF) and a full track setting around it. I want elevation changes, so some of the track will have to be "mountainous" I guess. Thinking I'll do a 4 lane track as I certainly have enough.

I grabbed a set of 4 turn out sections from a tyco (or AFX maybe) set. Plan is to build some solenoid "flippers" into the track to give drivers a chance to pit if they want. That's not going to be overly hard, but not simple either. I grabbed a couple NOS adapter pieces (LL to Tyco) to hook the turn outs to the LL track, but then realized since I am attaching the track to the table, I can just snip off the lugs, snug the tracks together, connect the electrical terminals from each set and we're off and running. I don't ever plan to break it down, so having it permanent isn't a big deal.

For pit lane I looked at the AFX hologram unit, but soon discovered that it is (for the most part) just a piece of glass to reflect your iPhone screen. The "hologram" is just an iPhone app. I downloaded the app and held it over a piece of glass and bingo! Holograms. The rest is just printed cardboard. I can do better than that and will make something up on the 3d printer. At least it will have a "real" 3d texture to it (ie: wood, brick, etc) instead of just printed cardboard. I also have several old iPhones laying around (we get a new one every time you re-up your plan) so I can make a couple pits with the holograms in it if I want. I don't need lap counting and such, I just want those neat little holograms.

Since it's all HO, some train stuff should work for some bits of scenery. Like trees, bushes and such. I've got one of those thick "HO train track building" books that will provide lots of useful hints and ideas about that.

Whatever else I need will be the 3d printer's job. Buildings, people, even car bodies. I've already downloaded quite a bit from the free 3d print sites and it's not overly hard to custom make whatever I may want. For anything mechanical, well....I've got a metal lathe, small knee mill, MIG and TIG out in the shop. I can TIG razor blades together, so I think I can handle anything I need for a slot car set.

Electronics? Yeah, this is all pretty basic stuff after working on helicopters, supersonic aircraft, heavy transports, etc my whole career. No challenges there.


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## Tourmax

> I'm still short on track for what I want, so I went on a bit of an ebay "tear".
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> First up, track. Not doing anything without track. And since my FIL left me a lifelike set, I went with that. So I grabbed a couple assorted lots:
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> Nice bit of rokar stuff, same as Lifelike.













> Nice batch of LIfe like.
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> And another big lot.
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> I wanted a pit lane turn out, and since lifelike doesn't have that option, I grabbed some afx stuff :
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> I plan to build some solenoid driven flippers in the slots to enter/bypass pit lane. Just a simple button press at your driver station and into pit lane you go. But that's certainly not enough track length to make a pit lane, so I needed more AFX stuff:
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> That will make for a pit lane that can pit both cars to the inside and there will be a lane change on the front straight in front of the grandstands. A couple AFX to lifelike adapters were also ordered up.
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> That about sets me up to build the track I want, with a fair bit left over.
> 
> Got maybe 200 bucks Cdn in all of that


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## Tourmax

Next up: cars.

Some of these came with some of the sets, others I bought separately.

With the truck set:





With the daytona set:





I needed the track, but I also really wanted the 70's oldsmobile cutlass (had one of those too). Liked the "aero" regal as well.

I bought this set for the Peugot and the VW:



I want to eventually add a rally track somewhere, so I bought this mostly for the cars.

A 77-79 tbird:





Paid a bit too much for this one, mainly because one of my first (and most loved) cars was a 78 TBird



(to be cont)


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## Tourmax

Cars (con't)





Had to have a hot wheels Twin mill!

Needed something to run against the twin mill, so this fit the bill:



It's just a body, but I've got what I need to fix that on the way.

These are a bit ratty, I bought them for the two bodies (I've got an 88 c4 corvette convertible in the garage) and any usable parts. They were cheap, really cheap....





Then some nos 440's
Gray wheels:



Glow in dark wheels:



 

Ran across this while digging:





I'd planned to make a scale 1/4 mile track, now I have a start on it!

That's about it for now, except for the couple doesn't 3d body files I've already downloaded and a dozen or so hot wheels I bought at the store. Plan is to 3d scan them and scale the bodies to fit the chassis. Or, I may 3d print a couple chassis to fit the hot wheels body dimensions. It will all depend on what looks decent/proper in HO scale.


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## Tourmax

Assorted "gew gaws".

Power:



Bought two, one to power each lane.

Ran across this:



Thought it was neat and will look cool at the drivers station I plan to build. Got it for 10 bucks because it's very ratty and one side is broken inside. Broken little plastic bits. Not a problem if you have a 3d scanner and 3d printer! I'll just scan the working side and print off a new piece for the broken side.

Heck, I can re-print the whole thing if I want. Nothing complicated inside except for one simple solenoid.....









Wanted a little better controllers, but didn't want to spend big bucks on them. Ended up with a reasonable compromise:







Little bit better quality (so I read) but they also give me "brakes", so that's a step up. Not a big thing on HO, but still nice. Especially when on pit row. It's still resistive, so it's still going to get hot after a lot of use. I'm considering adding a small fan to it and a couple other "mods". Lots you can do with a simple DC circuit....... Thinking

So that's right about where I sit. I've got he 4x8 table built, now it's just a matter of waiting for all this stuff to drop on my doorstep and start building. Should be fun.

Looking at a bevy of timers, sensor and programs right now for lap timing and such.

I've also got somewhere around 100 files for people, buildings and track paraphernalia. 3d printer will be working overtime for a while once we get going. Nice thing is I don't have to print something off until I know where I want to put it. That's a nice change from having to buy a bunch of something and end up not using most of it....

I'm still on the hunt for 20-30 feet of straight track though. Got a couple I'm keeping and eye on that will set me up the way I want.


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## Tourmax

Well, decided I wanted that drag track and threw caution to the wind:



Had to drop nearly 200 CAd (shipping to Canada from the US is just nuts!).

29 25" pieces, that's 36-ish feet. There's also 3 15" squeeze tracks. Can't use them on a drag strip, but I have other ideas for those......


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## Tourmax

Surfin' the big auction site again this morning and ran across another AFX "dynomite" dragster:



















It's pretty good from the pics. Fairly clean at least. It was on auction (I prefer buy it now) with an opening bid of 24 bucks. I bit up to 35 bucks, but thew guy obviously wasn't watching his auction and I got it for 26 bucks. Not bad at all!

Now I've got two "fuelers" I can race against each other.

Also grabbed a "cheapy" for 4 bucks:










Location said "poland" and it looks to be some kind of lane changer, kind of like the TCR/speed steer stuff:









Meh, I'm only after the body, so the chassis can go in the parts bin...


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## alpink

welcome, you have been assimilated.
I like that you put the wiggle track on the overpass.
you certainly aren't faint hearted about acquiring.
I mostly drag race and I might tap you for 3-D stuff if you are available.
for power, I suggest you find a variable 30 volt, 10 (or 20) amp power supply.
switching are OK, Linear are best but expensive.
check Nitro Slots for drag race help (mention alpink) and maybe you will become a proxy drag race host.
there you can get ideas about affordable timing systems for your drag track too.
you may not think you need or want a timing system, but I have a feeling you will change your mind.
PM me if you would like to set up email communication or have specific questions.
this is a great source, however a little slow right now because of summer activities.
let me take the time to thank you on behalf of all members for your dedication in your career.


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## Tourmax

alpink said:


> welcome, you have been assimilated.
> I like that you put the wiggle track on the overpass.
> you certainly aren't faint hearted about acquiring.
> I mostly drag race and I might tap you for 3-D stuff if you are available.
> for power, I suggest you find a variable 30 volt, 10 (or 20) amp power supply.
> switching are OK, Linear are best but expensive.
> check Nitro Slots for drag race help (mention alpink) and maybe you will become a proxy drag race host.
> there you can get ideas about affordable timing systems for your drag track too.
> you may not think you need or want a timing system, but I have a feeling you will change your mind.
> PM me if you would like to set up email communication or have specific questions.
> this is a great source, however a little slow right now because of summer activities.
> let me take the time to thank you on behalf of all members for your dedication in your career.



Well, I'm the kind of guy that if I'm going to go in, I'm going to point my toes because I'm going in deep!

Truthfully, it just made more sense to me to buy what i needed right off the bat and be done with it. Or at least, what i think I need,.....

Timing system is in the works already. Mostly just researching my options right now.

3d printing isn't a big deal for me, but I'm also still learning so I get a lot of "duds" mixed in with my prints right now. As we speak, my printer is making a Space 1999 Eagle shuttle.....


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## Tourmax

had a seller offer a reduced price on these:





































Listed as "NOS in box, Screechers". Looks to be early Mangasteer stuff (IE: no slot pin). Not that it matters. Since they've got the "funny car" look, I plan to pull the guts out and make them straight up drag cars. Might try to reuse the chassis with a pin and locking the front wheels. If it doesn't work, I can always drop the body on a diff chassis.

Should be cool.


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## samace22

Welcome to hobbytalk and awesome stuff you have congrats. 👍


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## Milton Fox Racing

Welcome to HobbyTalk and thanks for your service! 🤙


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## Tourmax

So, more ebay grabs.

Grabbed a big lot of tomy track:










That, along with the Tomy stuff I've already picked up, should be enough to build the offroad rally track I have in mind. Since rally is run individually and timed, I plan to use both sides of the track for one car. Basically, the car will race up an elevation track that twists and hairpins. Then, a custom one lane track will loop it back on to the other rails and it will come back down the same track, effectively doubling the length of the track..

Ran across a couple trucks going cheap:



















The white one is a TCR/changer, but I'll just swap out the chassis or rework the TCR chassis to work on slots. Racing them isn't the plan, I just wanted a couple to build trailers for to place in the pits. Well, I will probably get them out on the track from time to time too.....

Then, a drag strip item popped up:




























Autoworld christmas tree and win light. No times, but you get a timed start (with jump light) and a light at the other end indicating which car went through first. This is just a home track for fun, so that fits the bill. I did see a post somewhere on the 'net where a guy used a standard electronic stop watch, hacked into the buttons and used it to time a road course. I'll either "hack" into the IR signal from the autoworld sensors or install a couple reed switches under the track and use those to trigger the start/stop button on the stopwatch. I'll either find a stopwatch with dual timer capability or just use two separate ones. I'll incorporate them into a board at the end of the track so it looks like timing lights. I'm planning a return lane as well. I'm going to take one of these:










at the end of the run, just after the "win" lights. There will be a dead section so the cars will stop after the run. Then, once stopped, I will flip a switch that reverses the current and will also power the "run off" lane. That will allow me to back the car up to the return lane turn off. Then return the polarity to forward and a set of solenoid flippers will force the car onto the return road. Then it's just drive the car back to where the start point is. It won't be a loop, just a return lane. I suppose a simple turn at the end of the run off lane might be easier, but no where near as "trick"and this is about building it as much as using it. 

And with that, I'm pretty much done with buying stuff off ebay. Well, that's a bit of a "half truth". I'm also running out of disposable cash for the next month or two! LOL!

Now I just have to wait for it to show up so I can start the construction.


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## Milton Fox Racing

Glad you are having fun with the plans! Keep us updated on the construction along the way....


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## Milton Fox Racing

Not sure if Autoworld has the software to record times but I know some people have their tracks connected to a pc or lap top to record and display all kinds of different track times, reaction times and elapsed times for bracket racing.


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## Tourmax

Was trying to figure out how to squeeze an offroad rally onto my 4x8 HO table and it was just giving me fits. Not enough room. 

Then, I ran across this:










Nice track, but the construction pics are what gave me an idea:










The slanted mounting board makes for a lot of surface area (in climb) and keeps it pretty compact. So I can make one that's roughly 3 feet high and still be able to roll it under the main roadrace table. 

I'm not a fan of having it down on the floor though. My age/injuries make it difficult to get down to the floor. So I think I might make the table and incorporate a way to lift the whole thing roughly 2 feet. 

Something simple like a screw/scissor jack (like a car jack) and an electric motor. I've got lots of that lying around, it's just a matter of building it.


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## alpink

great solution and that one looks real nice.
keep us posted.


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## Tourmax

ran across this for 20 bucks and couldn't resist:



















It's just a body, but I'm going to have lots of options for a chassis.

Also grabbed another big track lot for a reasonable price:



















Cars are not original and it's missing a controller and the power track, but the rest seems to be there. I was after the track itself(lots of different turn sizes) so no worries on a few missing items.


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## Tourmax

Alright, had enough track arrive to trial my first road course layout:








































Obviously, that's still really raw and mostly only for first proof of concept. The elevation changes and track surface will get reworked so the track (mostly) lays flat. 

But, the cars will run on it as is:






Runs pretty good. My M chassis can go nearly flat out for most of it (that's what I was running on it in the video), but my T chassis cars will launch clear across the room on the second big hill if you're not paying attention!

LOL!


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## Tourmax

I'm not sure how many people have seen the movie "Rush", but I've seen it so many times I've lost track. It's just as good every time I watch it. If you're not familiar with it, it's a dramatization (Lauda has commented they got about 80% of the story accurate) of the 1976 F1 championship battle between Niki Lauda and James Hunt.
When Niki passed on last year, I thought I would like to build something, or buy some type of memorabilia as a keepsake to the 1976 F1 season.

Well, now that I have a slot track in construction, I thought a couple F1 cars would be nice to have. But not any F1 cars. They had to be Hunt's M23 Mclaren and Niki's 312 Ferrari. And not just any M23 and 312, the _*specific *_configuration from their last race in Japan, where Hunt clinched the Championship.

I'd already ordered a couple 1:43 Diecast models:


















They're actually pretty close as far as comparisons to pictures from the time. But the challenge is finding slot car bodies that fit that very specific design/shape. Making it even harder is the fact that 1976 started out with both cars looking one way and ended with the cars shaped a little different. The biggest visual change was the big air intake scoop on both cars when the season started:










and the lower profile scoops incorporated into the bodies at the end of the season:










When I started looking, not much was out there. I was beginning to think I'd have to scan the scale models and 3d print something. Then I ran across some of the old Matchbox "speedtrack" bodies. Turns out, they have the exact bodies I'm looking for in HO scale! Well, as close as you can get with HO scale that is. The only problem is they are "speedtrack" cars. Meaning, they have close set shoes and typically run on 6V. Well, I was after the bodies, so that's not that big of a deal. I can either rework the chassis that they already have, or slip in a new one that works.

But, all the ones I found for sale in NA were pretty expensive. Mostly NOS still on cards. It woudl have been around $250-300 just to get them to my door and they *STILL *would have been 6V cars! They were just too dear a price for me. Overseas searching turned up lots of used ones, but in pretty sad repair. I'll need to paint them anyways, so a little "distressed" isn't that big a deal. First, the Ferrari:











Then, the Mclaren:










Then, a pair of the same cars:

















And here you can see the shoe spacing issue:










It looks like there might be an issue getting another chassis under then to fit wider shoes, just because of the body size/shape) so I may recycle the chassis and find a way to make the shoe contact area wider at the front. I've got a couple ideas and I've seen a couple other guys solutions to that. The main issue with the 6V cars seem to be the motor brushes. Seems that the brush "wire" on the 6V cars simply "melt" on higher voltages, but it also seems you can swap in the higher voltage brushes and they work fine. If they're a little slow compared to other cars, that's fine. These two are about hte visuals more than the speed and slower just means you see the car instead of a red/white streak.

For cosmetics, well, you can see the pictures. Not a big deal, I would have to have had painted and detailed them the way I want them anyways. The Mclarens are both missing the rear wing, seems a common problem on used F1 cars. I will just fab up a new one, either hand working some plastic or 3D printing something. Oddly enough, I could find Hunt's number (ie:11) on the proper body, but I had to get a #2 Ferrari, which was Clay Rigazzoni's car (Lauda's teammate).

They certainly will have to be taken apart and refurbed. Not the least of which will be tires, a given on anything used for me.

I may use these as my first trial of making aluminum rims and casting silicone tires.....perhaps even a custom chassis.


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## Milton Fox Racing

Glad you were able to find the parts you need for a start. 

Can you fabricate the intake so that you can switch them out to be the early cars when you want and the final version if you want that point in the season? 

have seen RUSH I think twice maybe 3 times now. Has been awhile since the last time.

Good luck with the builds and keep us updated.

If you have the time and are interested we have a thread that follows the F1 season over in the 1:1 cars section each year. Next race is Spa, 28-30 August.


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## Tourmax

I've started building the "pit lane" sections:










It's two sections of "turn out" track, from an old US1 set IIRC. I then grafted a LL turn section to each end. The plastic is "plastic welded" together and just for good measure, I made some steel clips to reinforce it. The rails are soldered together underneath to keep continuity high.

That's still a little short for a pit lane, so I have two 9" sections on order that will connect to the older "model motoring" track. I'll use one straight (for the front straight) and a cross over section in pit row. That will allow me to move the two cars that are running over to the pit side and leave me enough room to have two "fake" pitted cars. So it will look like 4 cars can be in the pits at once, but only two of them will be "live". Something like this:










It's not perfect, but its the best I can do without going to some sort of lane changer track and I'm not changing direction at this point. 

There's still lots of issues to work out (like the difference in track slot positions and the solenoid powered "flippers"), but at least physically connecting the track is worked out. The flippers is just sitting down and doing some tedious work and the slot differences are close enough that a little melt/rework will fix up the lane differences.

Tomorrow, I'm off to get a thin sheet of MDF/Masonite to build the roadway bed...


----------



## Tourmax

Just sorting out the road bed:










Still fine tuning it, but that's pretty close to how it will end up. 

*LOTS* of landscaping to do when the time comes......


----------



## Tourmax

So, with just the standard Life Like track pieces, you're pretty limited on track layouts. I had a few sections I wanted to add, but LL never made the pieces I need:










So, time to alter some track. First. mark where you need it to stop then cut with a hacksaw (rails are steel):










Now, we want to be able to join it like a normal piece. So, take your "new" piece, cut it a little shorter and cut the other end off the track you don't need to make up the amount you cut off the first piece:










Now you have an end that will connect to any LL track, same as any stock piece. I have lots of plastic welding equipment, but this plastic track is about as cheap as it gets. I ended up having to switch to a wood-burning iron so it didn't turn to just a big pile of goo. Take your (whatever heating tool works for you) and "weld" your two pieces together. You're just lightly melting the plastic so it flows togther and bonds. You're basically doing what they did when they made the track, you're just not puring the melted plastic into a mold. You can use the leftover scrap pieces like filled rod to take up the gaps and fill any holes that unexpectedly happen while melting the track (again, this stuff is *VERY *cheap and *VERY * thin, go *VERY *slow and be *VERY* careful) :










Yup, pretty ugly looking. But that's just cosmetic and can be made "pretty" later down the road. You want it good and solid, aesthetics we worry about later.

And here we are:










Custom piece of track that snaps together like a stock LL piece.

As to electrical continuity, that's easily handled. You just solder jumpers underneath the track or you can directly solder the cut rails back together.

You could also use this method if you need to go from one type of track to another. Say, something like new AFX to the old AFX track, etc (assuming you can't find one of the OEM track adapters or they're just crazy expensive). As long as your lane spacing is the same (or close) you're good. You can even join track with different lane spacing, but that involves more melting, forming and reworking....


----------



## hojoe

Like I always say, if you can't find what you need, make it. Nice MacGyvering.


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## Tourmax

My 440 "driver center" showed up yesterday. Or rather, a box showed up. When I opened it, it had a battery charger for a dewalt something in it. I contacted the seller and he totally effed up. He refunded my money right away, because the item I had ordered went out to someone else. Shipping all these items would have put him in the negative, so I understand just doing a refund.

So my $15 tach and fuel gauge idea was out the window. Luckily, there were a few more on ebay. I found one in a set, offer the seller 50 bucks (was asking 60) and he took it. So I've got a more intact driver center on the way, along with more track and a couple cars:



















So for another 35 bucks, I got two (I assume) 440 cars (missing rear wings, but that's an easy fix) a handful of afx track and assorted misc bits. I didn't really need more track, but you can always use a few more cars. Overall, was just shy of 100 bucks shipped to my door. That's not too bad, considering what I'm getting.

then, I started looking around for "scenery" items. First up was a trio of transporters:




























We all know that every track always have semi/transporters on race day. Those are "jhot wheels" sized, so they will be in scale on my HO setup. Three are enough for now, until I figure out how much space I have to work with. If I need more, the guy has several other types.

Every track needs service and emergency vehicles, so some hot wheels provided those visuals:


















What I was really after was the "street sweeper". I plan to turn it into a track cleaner, something like the old AJ's track cleaner" that you used to be able to buy:



















They're absolutely stupid priced these days (if you can find one) so i'm going to make my own. The body will stay the same, but I will slip a chassis under it and rather than track power, I'll rig it to something like a 9v battery. Then, a hone or scratch pad on the front and a felt wiper on the back. I'll be able to drop it on a lane and let it do a few circles, then the other lane. I'm always po'd when I have to nurse my cars around one or two circuits before they run reliably (humidity is always a problem here). A track cleaner can get it all "warmed up" while I get myself ready to run my cars.

Then I ran across this:










Scratched, beat up and missing parts. I offered the guy 10 bucks and he took it. It's 9" long, which is out of scale for HO. But hte real one is roughly 60 meters long and 1/64 of that is still around 3 feet long. That's just too much to hang over the track. It wouldn't look right unless it was up by the ceiling and that wouldn't look right at all. 9" works out to more like 1/150 scale, but hanging it over the track will allow me to bring it down lower and perspective will mean it should look right. At least in size. I believe I will paint it like the Goodyear blimp and I may even add an LED message board to it, so I can have it displaying slogans or what not. One way or another, I have to do something about it's paint job, so I might as well make it the most recognizable blimp out there. Seems appropriate for a race course too.

Today, time for multiple power taps around the track. I'm thinking I'm going to end up with around 5-6 power tap points, based on the track size....


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## Milton Fox Racing

What a mix up! Did you ask him to put you in contact with whomever receives your stuff? Maybe they were supposed to get the dewalt charger and you two could exchange them....


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## Tourmax

Milton Fox Racing said:


> What a mix up! Did you ask him to put you in contact with whomever receives your stuff? Maybe they were supposed to get the dewalt charger and you two could exchange them....


Nah, it's a done deal now. I'd certainly be willing to drop it in the mail for someone, but I'm not paying a dime to do it.....if they ever ask that is....


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## Milton Fox Racing

Understandable....


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## Tourmax

Thinking about grafting one of these into the blimp:

















It's just a cheap little led name tag. But it will fit into the 9" blimp diecast just about right (ie: size), it's programmable and it's rechargeable. Be kinda neat to have the blimp over the track spelling out welcome race fans or something along those lines.....


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## alpink

that would be really cool.
go for it


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## Tourmax

Well, I was done buying track, but an old "min bid" came back to bite me. I threw a minimum bid on a track lot a week ago, expecting to be outbid in short order so I didn't even watch the auction. Truthfully, I forgot all about it. Sure enough, no one else bid. So, 60 bucks (CDN):










Came with a decent car lot:



















Couple with chassis, couple without and a couple TCR F1 cars. Not too bad for the price.

Then, I saw a blurry little picture at the bottom of the page while I was logged on to pay for my unexpected "win":










I thought I recognized the yellow car, so i clicked on the auction and:




























Holy carp! It's a Mustang II IMSA car! 6 bucks! Grab! Sure, it's die cast, but I can either drop it on a chassis or scan it and print off a plastic body.You can find IMSA M II's on the 'Bay, but they're all "drag-i-fied" with intake stacks sticking out of the hood. This one is pretty accurate to what the IMSA M II's looked like. Awesome! This car could have dominated IMSA in the late 70's, if the IMSA officials hadn't made life so hard on the builder/Driver. 600-650 hp, that's plenty! 

Now all I need is to find one of the IMSA Monza bodies and I can fling IMSA cars around the track. Cool. The truck that comes with it is an old stude:










Kinda cool. Not sure if I'll do anything with it besides make it a parking lot "filler" though....


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## Milton Fox Racing

Nice find on the IMSA racer and the Studebaker is awesome looking! 🤙


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## Tourmax

SO, the Autoworld drag strip pieces showed up today. I thought they would have the Tomy afx style connectors, but this seems more like the older Aurora AFX track. Meaning, the connectors are different and the lanes are pretty close together. 

So I think I'm going to do what I had in the back of my mind already: take apart the Autoworld drag strip parts and graft them into the newer Tomy afx track that I already have 40 odd feet of. 

Plan is to take two pieces of the Tomy track, side by side them for 20 feet or drag strip and then graft the Autoworld sensors into the Tomy track. I'll reuse the xmas tree, but change it to one that is on a stand rather than hanging from a gantry. Sort of like this:



















The other end will get a similar treatment, except the "win" light above the track will be moved to a display board like the real thing. Maybe even have the board eventually display ET. Dunno, as this will have to wait until I get the road track built. Then on to the rally course and drag strip...


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## samace22

That is cool. 👍


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## alpink

ummm, the AW track IS compatible with TOMY AFX track.
I have replaced all the AW 15" straights with TOMY AFX 15" straights.
I take this to various slot car shows to set up for demonstrations and for kids to play on.


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## Tourmax

alpink said:


> ummm, the AW track IS compatible with TOMY AFX track.
> I have replaced all the AW 15" straights with TOMY AFX 15" straights.
> I take this to various slot car shows to set up for demonstrations and for kids to play on.


Whoops, looks like I flipped that one around. I mixed up "Tomy" and "Tyco" in my brain. PTSD does funny things to the gray matter sometimes.

Tomy:










Tyco:










Still, I'm going to use the Tyco stuff and adapt the AW guts to the track for a more realistic look. Also, I've got a "metric S-ton" of the TYCO track....


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## Tourmax

40-ish feet of track, 6 power taps. 

That should get it done.....


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## Tourmax

I know a lot of guys have trouble soldering to steel so I thought I'd throw up a short illustration of how I do it. I'm recently retired, but I used to work in the Airforce (Canada). I used to wire everything from bug smashers up to Helicopters, heavy transport and supersonic fighters. I've got a fair bit of training under my belt.

But, that's mostly copper or Kapton wire, which is meant to take solder easily. And while you _*CAN *_solder steel, it's not easy or as structurally sound as copper. So here goes.

You need good equipment. I use a Weller WESD51 unit:










You don't really need something this extravagant, but if you can swing the price, it's worth it. I used to use large "all in one" solder stations at work for high reliability soldering. This one is also capable of those types of joining that the mega buck stations are, but as long as you have one that keeps it's heat when soldering, you should be good. This model has a sensor in the tip that measures the heat and the heat is adjustable in increments of 1 F. When you add solder to the iron or touch it to something, it senses the heat drop and pumps more current in to keep it hot. That's really key to reliable solder joints. But like I said, you can get away with lesser units, it's just not as easy to get in and get out before you melt the plastic track. I also prefer Weller because it's pretty common and parts/tips are easy to come buy at reasonable prices.

I used trailer wiring. Mostly because it's the most affordable way to get a good length of wire at good price. It's also a 4 wire setup, 4 different colors and "bundled" by design. Perfect in this application.

I used 16 gauge, but you can drop down to 14 gauge if you want some "headroom". It's not really necessary though, we're only talking 1-2 amps here, unless you're running a "mega-fast zapfire 1000" something or other and then maybe 3-5 amps in a worst case scenario. 16 AWG is good up to 13 amps, so no real worries there. Especially since you will now be running only one car per track circuit.

I then label each rail with the appropriate color so I can keep it all straight when connecting the wires.










It's actually pretty important to do this step, especially if you have lane change sections anywhere in your track as that will "flip" the inside and outside lanes. you can see in the pic above, I actually have a lane sw piece between these two section and the wire colors are "flipped".

To get the solder to "bond" to the steel rails, you need to get them *SUPER *clean.
And I really do mean *SUPER* clean!
Any corrosion at all will make the solder not bond, or bond weakly. Even then, you're not going to get as good a bond as you would on copper or brass, so you really need to pay atteniton to the cleaning to get the best bond you can get. Since the rails are so small and the area you get to solder is difficult to get on to clean, I use a razor blade to scrape it down to the parent material:










You'll see the difference once it's clean, it will look shiny silver instead of dull silver. You should also see littel shavings come off the rails.

There's no pictures for the next couple steps, too hard to solder and hold a camera.

Then, you need to "tin" the rails. This is a crucial step and you need to get a solid bond. I use acid flux on steel, I find it gives a better bond than rosin flux. I know right now guys are out there spitting coffee on thier monitor and firing up the hateful keyboard talk because I used acid flux, but it's just not a big deal as most of it burns off in the process and the rest is easily cleaned. If I was working on sensitive electronics, I would absolutely use rosin core (actually, I woudl use self cleaning flux, got a couple bottles here). But those components are meant to take solder (and hard to aggressively clean without damaging them), so you don't need something as aggressive in the flux cleaning process. Since this is just plastic "toy play track", I'm not overly worried if a little acid flux hangs around after a thorough cleaning. It's just not worth stressing over, but a weak solder bond sure is worth worrying about.....

For the solder application, you want to do this "kind of" in a way that's really not the best soldering practices, but it works. You don't want to melt the plastic track, so put you flux on the rail sections you just cleaned. Not much, just a small spec will do. It will flow when you heat it, so you don't need a lot.

Then load your tip with solder. Not a lot, but make a small ball on the tip. I use 600 F to solder steel. It's hot and quick so I can get in and get out before damaging the track plastic. Take that solder ball and touch it to the rails you just cleaned. Pause briefly before firmly touching the rail to let the solder heat burn the flux off a bit and provide some cleaning action. Then touch the solder to the rail and you should see the ball transfer from the tip to the rail. This is not a long process, it all happens in a second or less. Once you see the ball transfer, get your iron off it! Let it cool and repeat the process until you have a decent amount of solder over the whole exposed part of rail. If you've done it right, you should have a nice "blob" of solder securely adhered to the rail and no melted plastic.

Then take your wire and strip some insulation back. You don't need much, maybe 1/4 inch. Remember that the more insulation you strip away, the more you are going to have to cover up again with heat shrink or vinyl tape. Give the wire end a little twist with your fingers, just to keep it from fraying on you. Give the bare copper a little bit of rosin flux and then tin it with your iron. You can use rosin flux here because the wire is copper. You want to make sure the solder is all through the wire and through to the other side. This is critically important to making a solid joint.

Once your wires are tinned, you can move to attaching them to the rails. Pay attention to your colors and where they should go. Line the wire up over the appropriate rail. Now load your tip again with a ball of solder. First, heat the wire until the solder flows again. If it sucks up your ball of solder in the process, load the tip again. With the wire end still molten, touch it to the track rail solder. You'll see the rail solder soften and the wire should push into it a bit. Then run your iron down the wire and touch the tip solder ball to the rail solder ball. It should go molten immediately. When that happens, run your iron back up the wire again. We don't want to effect the solder bond on the rail, but we want to make sure the wire is firmly joined to the rail. You should see the end of the wire flare out into a "cone" shape as gravity pulls the solder down the wire a bit and some transfers off your iron tip.

If you don't have your wire tinned enough, you may see the rail solder ball suck up into the wire under capillary action. You have to go back to tinning the rail if that happens. If it works out right though, take your iron off the wire and hold everything steady until you see the solder on the wire and rail go from a super shiny silver (looks like mercury) to a slightly dulled silver. Once you see that, hold it for another 10 secs or so.

_*IT IS CRITICAL THAT YOU*_* DO NOT MOVE!!!!! NOT EVEN A MICROSCOPIC AMOUNT!!!*

Your finger will be uncomfortably hot if you are doing this bare handed. You either need to wear some kind of glove or take the pain, because if you move the wire while the solder is cooling you will form what we call a "cold joint". Even if it looks cooled, it's not. Only the outer surface has cooled, it's still hot inside. Cold joints are mechanically very weak because if you disturb the solder before fully cooled, it crystallizes and looses some of the bond with the materials. It also forms cracks in the solder and looseness in the whole joint if you move it too soon. You should have something like this when done:










Soldering steel is never going to be "pretty" and it's never going to be easy, at least not as easy as copper or brass. But with enough prep and attention to the process, you can make it acceptably strong and electrically viable.

My method also means minimal to no melting/warping of the track sections. The trick is to get it hot enough, quick enough, that you get a good bond and get off it quick enough to not melt the plastic. If you're new to this stuff, I suggest you practice on some scrap sections first as you *WILL *make lots of holes and plastic blobs before you get the hang of it.

Most guys I've seen seem to like to make 4 individual holes in the table, but that's just too fiddly for me. I just cut a slot under my new power tap sections:



















If it's a raised section, I can get away with just a hole in the table:










Then feed the wire through. If the section is flat on the table, I cut the slot through the table. For my build, the slot means no pressure on the wires anywhere. If I were to do 4 individual holes, I'd have to get them perfectly lined up with the soldered wire. While it's possible, it's mostly just a big PITA fopr no real gain. No contact on the wires is an important consideration with this type of solder joint (IE: relatively weak for a solder joint), and a nice big slot makes that a surety.

The rest of the wiring is just following any of the diagrams you can find on the internet.

It may not be how everyone does it, but this way works for me.


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## alpink

very good tutorial on soldering to steel.
I too use acid flux and it works well.
I keep a can of spray cleaner that RC guys use on their electric cars to clean the acid flux away.
further, placing a damp cloth or paper towel under the track as you are tinning the rail and completing the solder joint helps in keeping the plastic from melting.
as has been said, using quickness is ultimately important and an extra layer of insurance never hurts.
I also like to clean a little more plastic off the bottom of the steel rail to give more room to solder the copper wire to.
using a rotary tool (dremel or such) with a burr bit can allow careful, gradual removal of just a little bit of plastic from beside the rail too.
this will give a larger area to solder too and will allow a parallel arrangement of the wire with the rail. 

following all the directions just given and my two cents will allow you to become a master soldering agent in no time.
you might want to practice on a spare piece of track before you get down to the real thing.
practice makes for better end results.

again, the previous post/tutorial completely described the best process to achieve outstanding results and I could have never explained it in that thorough of a manner or so concisely.

carry on


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## Tourmax

alpink said:


> very good tutorial on soldering to steel.....and I could have never explained it in that thorough of a manner or so concisely.
> 
> carry on


Thanks.

But I’ve got a little bit of an inside line on getting something across quickly, detailed and yet still simply.

I was Chief instructor in our flight school for 4 years. 

When you have to teach students who range from high school drop outs to University Undergrads, you figure out a pretty wide variety of instructional skills pretty quickly.....or the “higher ups” will find someone who can....


----------



## Tourmax

Been doing wiring and Styrofoam shaping for a couple days now. Decided to take a little break from that and make the "reversing" piece for the eventual rally track build:










That's just the first go at it. It;s ugly as heck, but the basics are there. A little more shaping and filling and it will make a nice "turn around" at the top of the track to send the car back down the opposing lane of "normal" 2 lane track. 

The top part of the turn is pretty sharp as it is. I may cut a small pie wedge" out of it and add a small straight piece, just to ease over the transition. That sharp angle (even if plastic re-worked) has a high probability of de-slotting a car, so I'm pretty sure I'll have to add one last small piece.....


----------



## Milton Fox Racing

I remember you mentioning 3d printers - would it be a workable project to print the 'turn around' piece you need with the properly spaced channels for the slot and the track leads in a smooth curve?


----------



## Tourmax

Milton Fox Racing said:


> I remember you mentioning 3d printers - would it be a workable project to print the 'turn around' piece you need with the properly spaced channels for the slot and the track leads in a smooth curve?


Yes, that is certainly a possibility. But what I would do is get this piece nearly finished as a prototype, 3d scan it, then rework it in a graphics program and then 3D print it. That's a lot of work, especially if the "prototype" is very close to the finished project. In that case, you have to seriously ask yourself if the added work is worth it for (at that point) a small improvement.

If you were looking to sell it though, the work is worthwhile.

But I have no intention of _*ever*_ trying to sell *anything*, so the work/time would only be to satisfy my OCD.......lol!


----------



## Tourmax

quick snap of the landscaping starting to evolve:










Very much at the beginning (ie: this is day one), but I'm liking what I'm starting to see,,,,,


----------



## XracerHO

Really like you enthusiasm & appreciate your knowledge, enjoy following along your progress so keep posting! Suggestion: Parma controllers will eliminate the heat problem & allow continuous use plus different ohm cartridges can be purchased & installed. Thanks for your service.


----------



## Tourmax

So, I've been cutting and shaping a lot of foam board lately. I bought one of these little jobbies at Michael's:










While is does work, it's seriously under-powered. It just can't keep up with the 2 inch thick foam and the length of cuts I need it to do. Like I said, it will work, it's just really slow and it cools off really fast once buried in the foam board.

Time to whip out some scrap and build a hot wire foam cutter. First, I made a larger bow style cutter:










Worked great! It's just coat hanger, some oak scraps, some Nichrome wire from a dead hair dryer, a rocker switch and wiring.

But, it was only a matter of time before the "wall wart" I was using died. You see, a heated wire cutter is almost a dead short and wall warts don't survive long under dead short conditions.

So I needed a way to make a power supply/control panel that isolates the wall wart (if you want to use those) from the wire element and still have a way to adjust the power level. A dig through my scrap bins turns up an old PWM controller (12v, 8 A), a house switch and a house receptacle. A little wiring and wood work and voila!










PWM power supply/controller. The PWM circuitry isolates the wall wart from the "dead short" element and also allows me to turn the amperage up and down as needed. Adjustable is a great thing and allows me to plug in different cutters that have different length (ie: resistance) elements.

Tried out some long, heavy cuts and the wall wart and PWM controller stayed dead cold. Success!

Now my bow cutter works great. But there are also some very large pieces of foam I need to cut, not to mention cutting the larger sheets down to usable sizes. So, time for a larger "bench style" cutter:










Pretty simple looking up top. Pretty much the same as the bow cutter, except instead of moving the cutter through the foam you move the foam through the cutter. It's some scrap MDF, a wire/plug/cord off a long ago scrapped appliance, a bit more Nichrome wire from the same dead hair dryer, the top bow is a piece of steel rod and then just some wiring and a switch.

It's basically a band saw for foam board, there's just no mess all over the place after a cut like there would be with a saw blade. Underneath is just wiring to make it work. Plugged into my new power supply, adjusted the amperage up to make the wire just the right heat and cuts 2" thick foam board like butta!

So, not a lot done on the track today, but it was a productive day none the less!


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## Tourmax

XracerHO said:


> Really like you enthusiasm & appreciate your knowledge, enjoy following along your progress so keep posting! Suggestion: Parma controllers will eliminate the heat problem & allow continuous use plus different ohm cartridges can be purchased & installed. Thanks for your service.


Parma controller probably would be the ticket, but its an expense I can’t put out for right now.

my 1970’s vintage adjustable controllers will do for the immediate future.

I’m just doing this for fun, so higher grade controllers aren’t really a necessity here.

Besides, my current controllers don’t get very hot at all. I can zip cars around for an hour or so and they just get slightly warm. Can’t feel it in my hands until I place them over the vents at the top and only then do I feel any heat...


----------



## Tourmax

couple preview pics of the mountain section:



















still a long way to go, but I like the way it looks so far!

If you look to the left side of the second picture, you will see a large flat area. I was thinking to make another peak on that side, but I think I'm going to leave it flat, put a chalet there and have people watching the track. I may do the same on the flat portion on the rh side of the pic and possibly have a gondola from the pit/spectator area up to the flat plateau. But that I might make into a second "grandstand" area for figures to watch the races. 

Dunno for sure, it's all up for grabs right now.....


----------



## Tourmax

well, the bulk of the foam work is done:




























Not too shabby, not too shabby at all!

There is still a little foam to be mounted and shaped, but I'm pretty close to done. It is a little hard to see the cars from the planned driver station, the "mountains" are just high enough to block your view. I may build a 12" box for drivers to stand on. I also plan to have a couple controller plug in locations, but behind the grandstands will be the main position.

Right now, I need a repair part for my 3d printer so I'm pretty much at a stand still until it gets here. I need the printer to make the tunnel entrances, grandstands, people, trees, etc.

Once I get at it again, I plan to cover the foam in a layer of plaster of paris and then start creating rock striations, coloration, ground covers, etc.

I'll probably just work more on the wiring until I get my repair part.

One nice thing is that with the foam up under the road bed, the road is as solid as a rock. As an added bonus, the Styrofoam even dampens the rattling/clicking car noise.


----------



## Tourmax

Working on the wiring and decided to "switch up" the wire on the controllers:










That's a 6 foot lead coiled to about 1-1.5 feet. I know some people don't like retractile cords, but I do. Much neater when stowed and I don't notice the "pull" when stretching it out at all.

The three wire bundle is actually RCA cables. Normally, RCA is too light for a couple amps of power, but I stripped both wires in the sheth, soldered them together and it comes out somewhere around 18-20 AWG (stranded). At least as thick as the wire that came with the controller, maybe a touch thicker.

Also scored at thrift store (where I bought the used RCA cables). Bunch of hot wheels bodies I've been wanting to pick up as slot cars:










All that was just a tick under 16 bucks. And while they are die cast, I'll just 3d scan them and print them off in PLA or ABS. Some of the ones I've been wanting to buy (but prices are just absolutely stupid lately) is the 70's Torino, a 60's Cougar, a Plymouth Satellite/Charger, IMSA Vette, IMSA BMW, couple drag cars and many more.....


----------



## samace22

Awesome stuff you got congrats. 👍


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## Tourmax

Hmmm....

After "converting" a speed track car I ran it on 12v on my track. Spoiler: pretty crappy, needs more work.

But just for LOL's, I dropped one of my 440 cars and one of my LL fastrackers on the course and gave it a go. Keep in mind; I've only been using the adjustable power supply for a day or two now.

Sure enough, running the car was much more enjoyable that the 18v I had been running them on. 18V was the rating on the LL wall wart. The car will still slide, it will still de-slot and it will still fly across the room if you're not paying attention. But I had a much more progressive lever pull and it was much easier to keep the cars going on my tight, twisty track. 

18V will certainly get them moving faster, but at the expense of control and just general all around fun. 

Time to start playing with my voltages it seems.....


----------



## Tourmax

So, had to build another track section. Turn one was de-slotting cars more often than not. The problem was it turned left/right/left/right and that was just too much for cars to hold the corner. My highest mag cars could hold with about 3/4 throttle, but any more and they're rolling across the table. Anything without magnets or a bit taller body; forget it. You were crawling around turn one slower than a Yugo.

I also don't like that you had to let off" while running down the front straight. That just didn't seem right to me.

So I needed to make a turn that was straight off the front stretch and one sweeper up into the mountainous section.

Before:










It wasn't helping that the transition from the Aurora track to the LL track wasn't as smooth as it could be.

Problem is, they never made a mirror image of the turn out track. No matter what I would do, I'd always have turn one messed up and too hard to drive to just have fun.

So, out comes the plastic welder and solder iron:










Looks a little messy right now, but like the other altered track pieces it will get cleaned up for the final install.

Now, it works great! I can hit turn one with at least as much speed as any other corner on the track (maybe a touch more). You can still get the car to de-slot, but it's no where near as inconsistent/touchy as it was before. You just never knew if it was going to go around turn one or if it was going to launch itself across the room. Now, if it de-slots, you have actually done something wrong. Like taking the corner too fast, etc.

Hung the blimp while I was at it:










Kind of a neat touch. Will go with the track much better once all the terrain is grassed/treed in...


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## samace22

That is cool congrats. 👍


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## Tourmax

The "infield" somehow got a little smaller than I intended along the way. So I moved the front straight back another 3 inches. There's still enough room to put the grandstands in, but now I can do a more detailed infield. On one side making the track was an easy fix, just swap a couple pieces that made another 3" length.

The other side was a different story. It was two curve sections so no swapping things around was going to accomplish what I wanted. I needed a 3" LL piece to slip between the two curve pieces. Problem was, LL never made (or I couldn't find one) a 3" piece. Well, out comes the plastic welder and solder iron again. A little bit of work and new 3" piece ready to go:










All that work gave me another 3" in the infield. The may not sound like much, but in HO scale, it's quite a bit.

Then, I pulled all the track off the table and lined the back with this:










It's a roofing starter strip. Basically, it's a roofing shingle but with one side "sticky" and one big continuous roll. Guys in the USA might know it more by the name "peel and stick". If you're confused as to why I would line the underside, here's the answer: It makes the track super quiet. What it does is add mass to the thin plastic track. Now when the cars hit the joints, there is only a very faint "click" noise. The rest of the track is now dead quiet. All you can hear is the car. For the "click", I've already started eliminating that. I've already started soldering/leveling the rails together on the top of the track and shortly I'll be looking for a way to fill and straighten the widening at the slot joints to allow for excess production tolerances.

Soon, I should have a super quiet plastic track....


----------



## Tourmax

I'm toying with the idea of making a third lane. I certainly have the track to make it and the table can actually hold a third lane no problem. The only thing is I would have to make every section of track for the table, cutting a two lane apart and grafting it on to the existing track. 


Thoughts?


----------



## Milton Fox Racing

You have the skills! And the time.....


----------



## Tourmax

So, I was sitting here trying to lay out the drivers stations. Lots of examples on the "net, lots of ideas in my head. 

But everything just kept coming out like a square (or triangular) box. Not really how I want it to go. 

So I dug through my parts bins and turned up two instrument binnacles for my XVZ1200 Venture. NIcely shaped an just taking up space in my parts garage. So:



















That looks pretty good! The inside panel is just some plastic cut from a long ago discarded cordless drill kit. 

Plan is to disassemble the Tyco 440 Pro Racing Center and add the gauges to the binnacle. I'm a little tossed up on whether or not to [put the controller plug ins in the binnacle or outside the binnacle. Same story with the reverse switch and the power supply display. 

Anyways, that's a good start. Now I have to sit down and think about where I want to put what.....


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## Tourmax

Just ran across AC2CAR. Very interesting, 2 cars per lane, 4 cars total on a 2 lane track, all independently controlled. But I'm not sure it will work the way I would want it to on my track.

Need to think about it more.....


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## Milton Fox Racing

Could you use the 3rd lane for one car and have lane 1 or 2 for 2 cars and the other for just one car as well?


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## Tourmax

Milton Fox Racing said:


> Could you use the 3rd lane for one car and have lane 1 or 2 for 2 cars and the other for just one car as well?


Being able to run two cars per lane seemed like a neat idea, but the more I think about it, the more I don’t think it will work for me. Each car has to be “attached” to a controller, meaning it won’t run on a different controller. Its because of the “diode power control” scheme that ac2car uses. Thats really more of an irritation than anything else, but who wants to be irritated when just flinging slot cars around for fun?

But it also means I need to build more lane change sections. Not an easy thing in plastic track that doesn’t already have them.

It also means there’s no swapping inner/outer lanes. At least not if you’re running more than two cars. Since ac2car controls each car seperately through diodes and (essentially) “rectifying” the ac pulse into two dc pulses, you can only have two cars in one lane, if tou run 4 cars, as soon as one of those 4 cars (or three cars) seitches over to the opposite lane, you are fighting the other car cobtroller that is on the same recrified pulse.
I think the best thing for me is to just leave it alone or maybe do the ac2car control scheme and stick with just two cars.

For right now, I’m just going to stick with the “stock” dc powered tracks but keep ac2car in the back of my mind....


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## Tourmax

Well, with the track up and running, I've got "proof of concept" confirmed. But the wiring setup was just prototyping, so it was pretty messy. Today, I pulled it all off and started cleaning it up. I plan to run each track power section back to a main terminal board and run them all nice, straight and clean. To give you a visual, I ran across this pic someone took of their setup:










Given my aerospace background, what you see in that pic is the min acceptable for me. But that's only a sample. Mine will have power split per lane and with 6 power tracks, I need a min of 24 terminals. 12 for the positive, 12 for the negative and each lane separate. So I ordered 4 of these from "overseas":









The jumpers are used to power each connector, the power line (or ground line) just goes to one of the jumper screws to power the bus bar. More pics to come as I get closer to finished.

I'm also experimenting with filling int he "flare" in the slots at the track joints. The lifelike track I'm using has pretty large flares to account for production tolerances, but it also end up banging and clicking the cars as they go past.

I've seen posts for everything from plastic wood to silicone to drywall compound. None of that sounds very smooth, doesn't sound like it would bond to the plastic track well or offer friction similar to the plastic track. So my first experiment is going to be with 5 min epoxy. my test pieces are drying as we speak:










The aluminum bits are nearly the width of the slot, so I fill the slot with epoxy and press the Al into it to make the basic size of the slot. Sanding afterwards will get it perfect. I tried adding some dye to the epoxy, but it just went a very light shade of grey so that's not going to work. Thankfully, There is very little epoxy in the joint so it's not really visible.


----------



## alpink

consider Testors 3502 liquid glue.
you make a paste that we call "goop"
shave or break down some extra track pieces very small and put into a bottle of the Testors 3502 glue.
there are reports that MEK can be used as well.
it will dissolve the plastic and you can adjust the consistency to your liking.
quite a few of us have been repairing old Aurora bodies with this technique and done right you cannot even tell there is a repair.
perhaps this is a bit tedious, but the plastic will return to it's former strength and will be chemically bonded to the track.
maybe search around HT slot car threads for more specifics.
there are a couple wizards that have been "gooping" for decades.
apparently Mike Vitale (sp) is credited with pioneering this venture.


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## Tourmax

alpink said:


> consider Testors 3502 liquid glue.
> you make a paste that we call "goop"
> shave or break down some extra track pieces very small and put into a bottle of the Testors 3502 glue.
> there are reports that MEK can be used as well.
> it will dissolve the plastic and you can adjust the consistency to your liking.
> quite a few of us have been repairing old Aurora bodies with this technique and done right you cannot even tell there is a repair.
> perhaps this is a bit tedious, but the plastic will return to it's former strength and will be chemically bonded to the track.
> maybe search around HT slot car threads for more specifics.
> there are a couple wizards that have been "gooping" for decades.
> apparently Mike Vitale (sp) is credited with pioneering this venture.


Yep, that's an old trick and certainly not limited to slot cars. I’ve used that method on everything from car interior pieces to motorcycle side panels. 

Basically, you're "re-flowing" the plastic and instead of using heat to keep it liquid, you're using a solvent. Instead of waiting for it to cool (like if it were formed in a mold) you wait for the solvent to "flash off". The problem starts when you get the mix ratio wrong and the "goop" can start attacking the parent material (IE: track") too aggressively and you can end up with a distorted mess. That's why plastic welding is a better option in most cases, not to mention faster....

It *is *an option, but I’m keeping it in my back pocket for now...


----------



## Tourmax

So, the Tyco 440 Pro Racing Center showed up today. 

I have to say: I'm underwhelmed. 

First, it arrived in not the best of shape. It was how it was pictured, but the pictures didn't tell the whole story. 

Cosmetically, it's OK. it's function that's the problem. 

One Tach was seized. that freed up with a little cleaning, some penetrating oil and lots of manual movement. 

Once hooked up, it became obvious that this actually was a "toy". The gauges do not move linearly to throttle, they often don't go to the same place for the same input, sometimes they don't move at all and sometimes they stick in an up position.

I plan to do some more work on it, but I think the problem is the internal components are just not high enough quality to work as expected. 

The main issue seems to be the solenoid that is meant to move the gauge needle. I have to investigate more but it may be just too "cheap" to work well, or the internal components may have just succumbed to "father time"..

Either way, I'm bummed......


----------



## Milton Fox Racing

Sorry to hear that! Sounds like you may already have a plan developing to make them better though.


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## Tourmax

Milton Fox Racing said:


> Sorry to hear that! Sounds like you may already have a plan developing to make them better though.


Possibly. I have to do a little reading on some electrical stuff (old brain looses bits of info now and then) and go through the racing center a bit more to get it all sorted.
I'll get it, it's just a matter of time (and irritation).

Sure looks neat though:


----------



## Tourmax

So, the track joints.

Here is the stock LL track joints:










You can see the flare in the track. This allows the cars to rattle around when being handed off from one section to the next.

First, 5 min epoxy:










Meh, so so at best. The epoxy doesn't seem to want to bond with the plastic very well and that means the transition can't be blended smoothly by sanding. The epoxy also stays a touch flexible, which also lets it "roll" when the edges are feathered down. Car posts actually hit the edge of the epoxy and that's just not good at all.

Next, JB Kwik:










Well, that grabs the plastic like it's life depends on it! sanded nicely, feathered well. Pushing the car through reveals no catch or "click" at all. Well, it does catch the rail joints, but that's a fix of a different color......;

JB also takes paint well, better than the plastic track would. I'd like to try a few more fillers, but JB sure is the front-runner at this stage.


----------



## Tourmax

Now I'm thinking about the AC2car setup again. 

What I'm rolling around in my brain is to make the track the AC2car AC power, but still only run two cars. Allow me to explain:

AC2car lets you run two cars per lane, because of the use of ac power and diodes. But the problem with that and plastic track is that if you're running 4 cars (2 per lane) you end up with one controller running two cars. Unless you keep the two lane separate, you can't race against the next lane car and change lanes. Changing lanes is important when running two cars in a plastic track lane, as you are stuck behind the other car if you're faster. 

But, my plan is to set up both lanes the same way with ac power. Then, build lane changing sections, something like this:










Obviously, the HO track builders never offered that piece so I'd have to make it. Not a hard thing for me. I would take these two pieces:



















And combine them into 1. So you would have the option to change lanes, or continue on in the lane you are already in.

So if I build that piece in the track, I can use the AC2car power scheme to run two cars per lane and then change lanes to pass the other car in the lane. With the inner and outer lanes powered the same way, the controller will continue to control the same car in the other lane. I would have to build more lane "flippers", but it should almost be like a digital course, but only able to run two cars. 

It would be a bit of work, but I'm certainly capable and I've got nothing but time on my hands.....


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## Tourmax

Alrighty then! 

New motherboard showed up today for my 3d printer. I also added a BLtouch kit to the printer (auto adjusts for bed to printer nozzle height). 

Right now, the printer is working on an HO scale Dunlop foot bridge:










Another 8 hours or so and I should have the first side printed.....


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## Tourmax

First piece, fresh off the printer:










A little clean up work and a dash of white paint on the lettering and it should be good to go!

It was 1/32 scale, but all I did was reduce it by 50% to get 1/64 scale. It was also in 4 pieces and my print bed is big enough to print the whole thing at once. I just dropped all 4 pieces into Cura and put them together on the print bed. Came out just right:










Thats probably where I will put it. Other than the front straight, my track either has no space on the margins for it, or its all on an elevation...


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## Tourmax

Well, minor progress on the racing center gauges. After tearing it all down to the smallest components and cleaning, adjusting and otherwise setting things to right, both gauges now read rpm with trigger pull. 

The RH side works better than the LH side, but it's just a matter of the RH side moving linearly and the LH side wants to jump up to just before the red zone with just a graze of the trigger. 

That's just a matter of frigging with it to get it right. But (technically) it's still just a "toy". So it's cheaply built and adjustments consist of adding/subtracting weights, and bending or distorting parts.

Still, that they working at all now is encouraging....


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## Tourmax

OK, so I'm still not totally sold on the AC2car thing yet. I'm only ever going to run two cars (could run 4 if I separated the lanes) on my track. I don't see the purpose of running 4 crs, but never able to run either pair in the same lane. But just in case I change my mind, I grabbed an AC transformer that popped up for 38 bucks:










The AC2 car site recommends a post war train transformer, min 100 watts of power.

Don't be fooled by the face plate though. The old transformers are listed by the INPUT watts. this Type V is closer to around 110-130 Watts output. But that's more than enough for my track as AC2Car's recommendation is for running up to 6 cars. This sucker will put out approx 5-6 amps at 26v, down around 12-18 it's 10-7 amps. More than enough for any cars I'll be running.

Supposedly, you loose some low end torque running rectified AC, but that's not a big deal for me as instant DC torque just blows the tires away. A little softer takeoff might make that a touch more realistic.

I'm also not completely sold on making my cars "tied" to one controller or the other. I've got a simple way to fix that in my head though: a little soldering, a little wiring and a couple moveable jumpers should allow me to to make a small cicuit board that will allow me to "program" each car to either controller with just the change of a jumper. Basically, just a small piece (has to fit in HO cars) with a diode and a couple pins. Move the jumper, change which brush the power goes to....


----------



## Tourmax

Well FDM printing may not be the fastest process in the world, but it's hard to argue with the results:



















"Good things come to those who wait" I guess.......lol!

Seriously though, the level of detail is pretty amazing. And that's all before I clean up the prints and do final painting.



For the curious, here's a snap of the printer starting the second inner panel:










Only another 9 hrs to go.........lol!


----------



## Tourmax

Dunlop bridge print is done! no pics yet, but it looks bitcin"!

Just finished slicing up the grandstands. Have to wait for the next day to print because it's going to take 10 hrs total. But, it will look like so:










Planning on printing out a Dunlop control tower next:


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## Tourmax

Figured I’d start with the control tower first. I pulled the large tower components out of the design, dropped them on the build plate and:










we’re off and running!

a quick check of the time to completion reveals....2 days and 21 hours?!?!??!

Time to walk away and let it do its thing.....


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## Tourmax

So, while waiting, I'd thought I'd do a quick overview of what is being built on the track. 

A view from the drivers stations:










Control tower is going at the end of the front straight ( to the Rh side in pic). Grandstands will go up the same side of the front straight. Pits go on the infield section. There will alo be a gantry/foot bridge over the front straight. 

Planning a crash scene at the tunnel turn:










There will be a "depot" on the far end at the plateau:










The fire truck and ambulance will also be there with a turn out onto the track for them to get to accidents. 

There's a small building I'll place there along with a marshal's tower. Like these:



















Basically, the building is for the crews to relax in and the tower is to keep and eye on the mountain route. 

I want to put a Med-evac chopper on the diorama somewhere, and I'm thinking on top of the low peak:










So maybe a small helipad there along with a gondola system to get to it without flying the chopper. Perhaps a small shelter so the crews have a place to wait while the races are on. 

Now it's all about waiting for the 3d printer.......


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## Tourmax

A little more thinking has me wondering if I should put the cable car on the plateau up to the high peak and put the observation tower on the high peak.
Seems to make more sense to me...


----------



## Tourmax

well, I thought I'd screwed myself. I was cleaning up the room and the printer was just below 50% complete. I went to move some power cords and the printer shut off!!!!!!

Seems I had grazed the power switch on one of the power bars and turned the printer off. Well....EFF!!!

But fortunately, my printer is a Ver 2. Which means it has the newer functions Creality puts into their printer software. I scroll through the menus and there it is: "Resume print?"

YES PLEASE!!!!

After a couple seconds of the print head moving around and checking things, it goes right back to where it stopped and starts up printing and starts up printing again!

Whew! what a relief! It's been printing for 26 hrs and I would have been torqued if it was all lost.....


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## Milton Fox Racing

Glad it recovered! No glitch in the wall visible? If it would have stopped you could have had the under construction observation tower and added scaffolding! 👨‍🔧


----------



## Tourmax

Very early beginnings of the drag strip:










That's nearly 25 feet. Enough to make the start lanes, shut down lanes and return lanes. That yellow stuff is "squeeze track. Plan is to replace it once I have confirmed I have enough straight track to do the whole raceway.

Neat thing is 1320 feet (1/4 mile) works out to a smidge over 20 feet at 1/64 scale. That leaves me plenty of room to make the track to scale and still add what I want (IE: burn out box, start lights, run down area, etc) at the start and finish lines....


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## Tourmax

Milton Fox Racing said:


> Glad it recovered! No glitch in the wall visible? If it would have stopped you could have had the under construction observation tower and added scaffolding! 👨‍🔧


Nope, no glitch. Worked great! Well, there was a little "blob" from the filament reheating pause, but it was on one of the removable support pieces, so no worries. Even if it were on the wall, I was able to just grab it and snap the "blob" off clean.

So glad I popped a little more $$$ for the newer printer!

Here's what "50%" looks like:










Starting to recognize parts now. You can see the "P" forming on the main tower body...


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## alpink

" Neat thing is 1320 feet (1/4 mile) works out to a smidge over 20 feet at 1/64 scale. "

20.625 feet = 20 feet 7.5 inches.
are you planning on letting off the throttle early?
or negating the return lane by running them off the track?

if you look at some of my earlier threads and posts, I have a tad bit of experience with drag racing in many scales.
the cars are not just going to stop of their own volition, they carry some momentum (kinetic energy) and can be difficult to slow down in time to make a turn.

1000 feet is 15.625 feet 1/64 scale. 15 feet 7.5 inches which would leave ample space to slow the cars previous to the turn for the return lane.

I speak from a point of practicality, I have precisely 24 feet in which to place my 1/64 drag strip and it is currently 1/8 quarter mile.
I have enough room to make it 1000 feet 1/64 scale and I am going to extend it soon.

street racers run 1/8 mile most times.
PRO NHRA classes run 1000 feet.
most other classes in NHRA run 1/4 mile.

so, there is no wrong length, there is only practicality to use parameters that are logical.

looking forward to seeing your drag strip and the pit area you are sure to create.


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## Tourmax

alpink said:


> " Neat thing is 1320 feet (1/4 mile) works out to a smidge over 20 feet at 1/64 scale. "
> 
> 20.625 feet = 20 feet 7.5 inches.
> are you planning on letting off the throttle early?
> or negating the return lane by running them off the track?
> 
> if you look at some of my earlier threads and posts, I have a tad bit of experience with drag racing in many scales.
> the cars are not just going to stop of their own volition, they carry some momentum (kinetic energy) and can be difficult to slow down in time to make a turn.
> 
> 1000 feet is 15.625 feet 1/64 scale. 15 feet 7.5 inches which would leave ample space to slow the cars previous to the turn for the return lane.
> 
> I speak from a point of practicality, I have precisely 24 feet in which to place my 1/64 drag strip and it is currently 1/8 quarter mile.
> I have enough room to make it 1000 feet 1/64 scale and I am going to extend it soon.
> 
> street racers run 1/8 mile most times.
> PRO NHRA classes run 1000 feet.
> most other classes in NHRA run 1/4 mile.
> 
> so, there is no wrong length, there is only practicality to use parameters that are logical.
> 
> looking forward to seeing your drag strip and the pit area you are sure to create.


All good points. I used to run brackets in my younger years. Our track was 1320, so I’d like to stick to that. A lot of that is because it makes it easy to scale up the times to 1:1, even though there are far more variables to effect times on a 1:1 scale than 1/64.

I’d actually like to build a replica of the track I used to run, especially since its been out of commission since the mid 80’s. Personal nostalgia and all that. Not much left of it now besides a few pieces of cracked and broken asphalt deep in the woods and subdivisions encroaching on it from every direction. Here's a vid from its final years:






The vid is mostly all launches, but you get the idea. Just a small, middle of nowhere strip. But it was all ours.

I used to run 70’s/80’s cars there and for bikes, it was pretty much all 350/400 Yamaha 2 strokes for me. I also raced RD’s at Shubie (Atlantic Motorsports Park or AMP), which is road course stuff.

Here's what's left of "Drag city" from google earth:










As you can see, almost a subdivision now. One thing I will always remember about Drag City was the shut down area. You can't really tell in the aerial photo, but at the end of the pavement was about a 10-15 foot drop. I always had in the back of my mind that I better get it stopped or I was going to have to grow wings.....LOL!

Last I heard, someone had dragged trenches across the asphalt the whole length. Something about vehicles racing there and people with quads being stupid. Oh well, all good things come to an end I guess......

Pretty sure I recognize the name “Al Pink”. If you are who I think you are, you probably know (or at least know of) Allyn and John Armstrong. They live just up the way from me. I've had a "little work" done by them, from time to time...... you can even see Allyn's Opel in the vid above.

Of course, space limitations will dictate the final format. If it works out to more (or less) than a scale 1/4 mile, it doesn’t really matter to me.

I have a couple ideas for the shutdown lane. I need to get the track up in prototype form before I can work any of it out...


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## Tourmax

Hmmm, looks like I'm going to have to go to a scale 1000' track. I have 23 feet available and if it's a scale 1/4 (20.5') it's just not going to fit right. 

scale 1000' (approx 15') leave me with a little less than 8' for start and shut down areas. That will have to do.

Shut down area will be dead track, with the option to make it live after a run in order to use "return road". Probably do 2-3 feet at the start and 4-5 feet at shut down. 

May try some rare earth magnets under shut down area, to try and help bleed speed off faster. May also toy with a few ideas for an "arrester cable" or deploying parachutes. I'm not conforming to any governing bodies rules or regs, so I can build the track (and the cars) any way my heart desires!


----------



## alpink

I am not the Al Pink you refer to.
I am however known throughout the slot drag racing world (yes, internationally).
my moniker came about by my intense like for Pink Floyd (oh by the way _this one's PINK_) and my name, Allan.
nor am I related to the venerated Ed Pink as has many times been mistaken.
indeed, I have even been invited in some social circles just because I might have been related and no one asked! LOL
in any case, as Popeye says "I yam what I yam !" .


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## Tourmax

alpink said:


> I am not the Al Pink you refer to.
> I am however known throughout the slot drag racing world (yes, internationally).
> my moniker came about by my intense like for Pink Floyd (oh by the way _this one's PINK_) and my name, Allan.
> nor am I related to the venerated Ed Pink as has many times been mistaken.
> indeed, I have even been invited in some social circles just because I might have been related and no one asked! LOL
> in any case, as Popeye says "I yam what I yam !" .


Ah yes, it was Ed Pink I was thinking of....


----------



## Tourmax

Started "tree-ing" out the landscape:










It's still very early, but dang: that's going to look so....freaking.... *COOL*!

Looks a little bit too "wintery" right now though....LOL!



3D printer is still humming along. I now have an "NLOP" tower:










I kind of (and yet didn't) screwed up on the print. You can see on the back of the print bed where there is a observation deck and roof for that. But that big tall square at the front is the observation deck being printed off in one piece. So it seems I printed the top part twice. You see, there were multiple files int eh .STL folder and I printed off what I thought I needed for the race tower. So I printed off two of the same piece. 

All is not lost though, I'll just use the second observation deck to make the race tower for the Drag strip. You can actually see the start of the drag strip in the first picture, but it's just the support screwed into the wall right now. 

I'm still working on the layout for the drag strip. Looks like I'll have around 4-5 feet for the shutdown area and about 3 feet at the start area. That leaves about 15 1/2+ feet for the strip, just about right for a 1/64 scale 1000' strip (15.6'). 

I really would have liked to do a scale 1/4 mile, but I only have a total of 23.7 feet, so scale 1000' it is....


----------



## Tourmax

The beginnings of the drag strip:










Theres another 6’ of table left yet to build....


----------



## Tourmax

Well,drag strip is laid out and I've done a few initial test runs. 15 feet of timed track and 45 inches of shut down. So just a little less than 4 feet of shut down. I'd like to have a scale 1/8 of shut down, but that would be 7 feet and I just don't have that much room. 4-ish feet will have to do.

My "high" magnet cars stop super quick in the shutdown area, with a dead strip installed at the 15' mark. They take about half the available 45" to stop.

My "low" or "no" magnet cars shut down in time, but they need pretty much the full 45", sometimes entering inch or two of the turn around by the time they come to a complete stop.

That's plenty fine for my little HO cars and I don't plan to run anything much faster on my little home layout.

But for a little extra piece of mind, I'll add a soft pad to the wall at the end of the shut down area. Better safe than sorry...


----------



## Tourmax

Had a couple rebuild kits show up yesterday from the UK to rebuild my peugot and vw rally cars. They’re Tomy era cars:










they were bought with the set and were missing the rear axles:










I pullled them apart to the frames, cleaned, lubed and replaced everything that came in the kit.

Dropped ‘em on the drag strip and gave ‘em a couple runs. They’re acrually pretty quick!


----------



## Tourmax

Dunlop tower print "finished":










Still lots of cleanup to do and then paint, but the print itself is pretty close to the finished product.

Started printing out the tunnel entrances:










Can't wing cars through just plain old holes through the styrofoam "mountains"......


----------



## Tourmax

Looks good:



















Little bit of Styrofoam work and good to go!


----------



## Tourmax

Hmmmm...what could this possibly be?


----------



## Tourmax

Not too shabby:










Especially considering thats my first “from scratch” 3d rendering.

I did use the “las vegas” sign as a rough template though:


----------



## Tourmax

Yup, I like it!










Nice little personal touch!


----------



## Milton Fox Racing

The needlenose pliers give a good perspective to the actual size.


----------



## Krab

I'm really impressed with the dedication to detail and craftsmanship you're putting into this racetrack. Shows what a great imagination, coupled with with the right resources and the skill to use them will produce. I'm grateful to be able to witness the creation of a work of art. Please Keep on posting, and thank you for sharing your vision.


----------



## XracerHO

WHAT Krab said Above: Agree & Repeat !! Avid follower so keep posting & thanks for sharing.


----------



## Tourmax

Printing out what will be a foot bridge from the plateau area to the adjacent peak:










The peak will have an OP on it, although I haven’t decided how that will look.

Couple possibilities:




























I'm leaning towards the last pic. Seems looking modern enough yet still has an enclosure so "observers" have a place to go to get out of the elements as well as keep things like radios and electronic safe.


----------



## Milton Fox Racing

Good choice. Size wise though will it look right in relation to the rest of the layout?


----------



## Tourmax

Milton Fox Racing said:


> Good choice. Size wise though will it look right in relation to the rest of the layout?


Yup.

I can scale it to whatever size I want in Cura. That watch tower is supposed to print at 16" tall. I'll just scale it down, watching to not loose too much detail in the process. 

I have a couple other 3d graphics programs that I can use to alter it if need be.

Scaling is the most useful tool though. I can take whatever model I find and scale it down (or up) to the size I need.

For example: the RC boys are big into making 3d "shell" bodies. Thingiverse is full of them. Cars, trucks, you name it. All I have to do is download the STL files, scale them to HO and I have a ready made HO slot car body. If the wheels or width doesn't fall out to the right size, Cura will even let you change scale in one axis only. You just have to be careful not to distort the model so much that it doesn't look like what you started with...


----------



## Tourmax

Foot bridge going in:


















Not too shabby!

It may look like its a little “tall”, but I wanted it high enough that “big rigs” would pass underneath it. At that height, the trailers just clear.

The bridge itself is actually a “train trestle” bridge, originally made for a scale train setup. It was actually quite large to start with, but I just scaled it down to foot bridge size and I think it turned out pretty good. I wanted a bridge structure that looked solid and permanent, and this one fits the bill nicely!

I still have to build up a transition on either side and make some steps up on each side, but its coming together nicely!


----------



## samace22

It looks great congrats. 👍


----------



## Tourmax

"Steps" made for the bridge and starting to build the OP:



















Currently printing out the platform railings and another two "leg" stand sections. I think I only need one more, but printing two just in case.


----------



## Milton Fox Racing

Is that a saxophone in front of the book shelf?


----------



## Tourmax

Milton Fox Racing said:


> Is that a saxophone in front of the book shelf?


yup. Trumpet too....


----------



## Tourmax

Printed off a second tower trellis:



















I think that's tall enough. I feel like another section will make it look too tall and out of scale. You can also see I've started filling in the space under the footbridge and steps. 

Next:










No, it's not the starship enterprise! LOL!

It's a rescue helo and landing pad. Only 21 hours to go.......


----------



## Milton Fox Racing




----------



## Tourmax

Chopper and pad:










That's just the rough print. Still needs filling and smoothing.The hole in the tail is where the tail rotor will go (have to print it first). I may have gotten the scale a little too small, but I'm not going to spend another couple days reprinting it. This is close enough!



While the printer was running, I started finalizing the wiring:










Still a long way to go, but I like the way it's shaping up so far!


----------



## XracerHO

Very interesting 3d printing, what is your model of print & material extruding? Very interested in checking into 3d printing after seeing your excellent results. Keep posting you are making great progress & very interesting posts. One dedicated follower.


----------



## Tourmax

XracerHO said:


> Very interesting 3d printing, what is your model of print & material extruding? Very interested in checking into 3d printing after seeing your excellent results. Keep posting you are making great progress & very interesting posts. One dedicated follower.


I use a Creality CR-10 V2, it's an FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling) printer. They range anywhere from a couple hundred to a grand or more. Mine is a bigger model (300x300x400 mm) and is higher up the price range. If you look it up online, you'll see it offered for around 499, but that's USD. I bought mine from a Cdn reseller, so it came out to closer to 800 Cdn, after taxes and shipping. But if you can make do with a smaller printer, you can get in somewhere around the 300-400 Cdn range.

I'm only using PLA right now (CR-10 will handle PLA/ABS/PETG/TPU), which is one of the easier filaments to print with. PLA breaks down in sunlight though (ie: goes brittle), so use printed stuff inside or at least paint it if exposed to sunlight.

There's also an SLA printer on the market, which essentially uses a big vat of resin. The printer "hardens" the resin layer by layer, which builds the model. Both FDm and SLA print n layers, just the process is different. My FDM printer has a spool of filament (just a roll of thermoplastic "thread") and it melts that and deposits it layer by layer to build up you item.

You can get better resolution (ie: brick walls, smaller parts, etc) with a resin printer, but they are also more expensive than an FDM printer. A 1kg spool of filament can be had for somewhere around 30 bucks (on sale), but I have no idea how much resin costs. I am under the impression that it costs more for resin than FDM, which makes sense to me because a gallon (approx 4 liters) of polyester resin for fiberglass is around 100-150 bucks a tin when I buy it from Napa for fiberglass work.

FDM isn't perfect though. It can be weak in thin parts (remember; it's just a bunch of hot plastic lines stuck together) and you can end up with random "blobs" and a rough surface that needs sanded and filled to be perfect. But for modeling, it works fine and is fairly economical for the home user. It is a pretty slow process though.

I bought the bigger printer so I can lay multiple items on the print bed and then just let it go for a couple days.

I bought mine from a place in Ontario called "mech solutions". They've been pretty good with after sales service also.

I probably would have spent much less if I had just gone out and ordered my track/model bits "pre-made", but then you have to settle for whats available and the scale that it comes in. I put in a little time and learned how to scale and alter models, so I can pretty much make whatever I want for my track.

You can also order 3d printed parts from many places, as long as you have the file to send to them. Those places have big "mega-buck" machines, so they can print much nicer finishes and in many different materials. But you end up paying pretty dearly for even small things. Something on the order of 20 bucks for an HO car body, but the body would be much stronger than an FDM print. You just have to make sure your file you send them is _exactly_ what you want (ie: size, shape, wheel openings, body mounts, etc), or you just wasted 20 bucks on a desk ornament.

Not to mention, my FDM printer can be used for a lot more than just modeling/toys. Just the other day, I printed off new keyboard feet for my broken ones. There's no end to what you can make with it, as long as you understand the limitations of it and the strength limitations of the different materials.

Here's a good read on the basics:









Resin vs Filament 3D Printer: The Differences


Easily learn the differences between resin 3D printers and 3D printers using filament, called SLA and FDM technologies.




all3dp.com


----------



## Milton Fox Racing

Whats the old saying.... "the future is now"


----------



## Tourmax

So, I don't want anyone to get the impression that "3D printing" is a walk in the park. Basically, I don't want someone spending hundreds of $$$, expecting to "go town" printing stuff based on my posts only to find out it's (sometimes, perhaps often) a bit of a PITA.

True, you can make some things you otherwise might not be able to buy, but it's not like setting up an inkjet printer, hitting "print" from the drop down menu and letting it go to it.

I struggled for nearly a month to get the bed leveling right. Bed leveling refers not to leveling the bed (at least not like you would with a spirit level), but making sure the bed is a certain distance away from the nozzle across it's entire travel. That's basically the thickness of a piece of paper (about 2 thou). I threw away a lot of plastic filament in that first month....

Compounding the issue is that the glass bed is not even across it's surface (most glass isn't) and the only adjustments you have is a screw jack at each corner. If your glass has a big low spot in the middle, you're going to have a nightmare of a time getting the nozzle clearance even across the whole plate and you usually end up with bed adhesion problems. Remember, we're talking about a 2 thou difference between success or failure! Get it wrong and either the brass nozzle crashes into the glass (and scratches it) or it extrudes plastic too high. Too high means it either makes a big squiggly ball of hot plastic or it starts printing and then the "ball" breaks loose from the hot nozzle and becomes a big mess somewhere else on your print. Worse case scenario is it "sort of" adheres to the bed and somewhere into the print it just breaks loose and all become a big hot mess. I had to buy a "BLTouch" sensor (the glowing red thing on the RH side of the print head) and set the offset super low before I was able to get good bed adhesion for printing.

A BLtouch is essentially a HALL effect sensor. It sticks out a probe and when the print head lowers enough to "pop" the probe back in, the firmware records the value and remembers how low the print head had to be before the sensor touched. Then, you have to determine the "offset" value you need in order to get the head the right height for printing. The sensor checks multiple points all across the bed (somewhere around 25-30 places) and applies the offset, in order to keep the print head "X" distance off the bed. This would be your 2 thou clearance. If one point is lower (or higher), the firmware lowers (or raises) the print head a little more in that spot, maintaining the print height from the bed, regardless of bed warp-age. You don't absolutely need one to 3D print, but for 50 bucks, it makes your life sooooo much easier.

But even when you get it all right, sometimes it will still mess up. Take the picture below for example:










That's the grandstands printing out. If you look in the center, you can see the "steps" that are part of the stands. They're messed up, even though they started out fine. What happened is that the nozzle went by once and "nicked" a piece of one of the steps. Sometimes the plastic will expand or contract once extruded and if it's not adhered to the bed properly (or it's a small part with not much structure) the nozzle will knock it loose on the next pass. What happened on this print is the nozzle knocked one step loose. So it was standing a little proud next time the print head came by. This not only knocked it a little looser (including a couple other adjacent steps), it also made the next layer laid down not contact the existing print. This meant it just squirted out of the nozzle and turned into a squiggly ball of hot, almost melted plastic.

The problem with that is now the print head was dragging a squiggly ball with it and when it got to the next piece, you get a big blob of plastic on the print. If you look at the top center piece, you can see the blob down between the lines. Luckily, it doesn't matter in that spot because it will be buried down inside the finished piece. But it just as easily could have ruined that print as well.

So what I had to do to save the remaining pieces was take some scrap pieces and glue them down to the parts that were missing pieces. Remember: you have to try and do that while the printer is still running, without negatively affecting it's freedom of movement. Not an easy thing to do.

I also had to try and cut the blob off the other piece before the nozzle came around again.

The reason I had to add scrap was that if I couldn't get the extruded filament to adhere to something, it was just going to keep making a big hot ball of plastic every time it went by that spot. Obviously, that would ruin the entire print. You could get around that by printing one piece at a time, thus being able to stop the printer and chuck the messed up part away and start again. I didn't want to waste the time (or plastic) so I kept adding scrap until the filament was able to grab it when extruded and thus prevent that big ball of hot plastic from growing every time it went over that spot.

If all this isn't enough to deal with, a 3D printer goes through a heat cycle every time you turn it off/on, so things like the bed leveling will move slightly. The BLtouch sensor helps with that, but sooner or later you will have to go through the set up process all over again.

You also have to clean the print bed after every print. Spotlessly clean. I use Windex a couple times until I can't see anything on the surface and then hit it with 99% IPA to finish it. Then I use the most extreme hold hairspray I can find on the bed before a print (immediately before printing as the bed is heating). You don't want to spray the bed any significant time before printing, or it will just grab dust and dirt and ruin the bed adhesion. The hairspray helps stick the first few layers to the bed stronger than just the plain textured glass. Then it's sterile clean all over again before the next print...

3d printing isn't perfect, but if you are willing to put in the time to get it set up right and learn it's intricacies, it can be pretty awesome. But don't be fooled into thinking it's "easy".

And yes, it's probably as close as we have gotten yet to a Star Trek "replicator".....


----------



## XracerHO

Thanks very much for all the info but not ready for a 3d printer yet & appreciate your printer expertise in producing your track details.


----------



## alpink

how about a word regarding software and how to use it?
what background is required or what is the learning curve?


----------



## Tourmax

alpink said:


> how about a word regarding software and how to use it?
> what background is required or what is the learning curve?


Depends. If you just want to print an .stl file, you just need the included "slicer" software and then print.

It's called "slicer" software because it takes a 3D file and chops it up into 0.4 mm layers (can be thinner or thicker, depends on the size of your nozzle), which is how the printer creates the object: 0.4 mm at a pass. Sloooooowwwwwwww........

If you want to alter or create 3D files, it gets much more complicated (and expensive).

I use Ultimaker Cura for my slicing software. It's a free download from Ultimaker. Cura lets you resize things, but not a lot more than that. I use Cura because the slicer program that comes with my Creality printer is basically a "stripped down" Ultimaker Cura program.

If you want to create 3D objects, then you have to get into things like CAD software.

As to "background": I can't say. Everyone is different. I know guys who have been trained to work in CAD and still have a hard time producing things, while some guys just pick it up as a hobby and fly though it like they've been doing it their whole life.

Keep in mind I'm just a "hobbiest" at this as well. All I know is what I've learned on my own so far.

I kind of liken learning the slicer program as opposed to CAD as learning TIG as opposed to MIG. MIG has a fairly easy learning curve and it doesn't take long before you can run a decent bead. But with TIG you can buy the fanciest welder and you can run lots and lots of beads, but you need a couple years "hands on" practice before you're any good at it....


----------



## XracerHO

Tourmac really enjoy following your progress on your track & dragstrip. Keep on posting your progress...


----------



## alpink

thank you for the explanation.
I have been considering getting a resin printing 3D printer.
I just don't know if I am going to be able to create files for it to print from.
you seem to have found sources for the items you print?
or are you writing files yourself?
thank you for the advice and yes, liking what you are doing with both tracks.


----------



## Tourmax

alpink said:


> thank you for the explanation.
> I have been considering getting a resin printing 3D printer.
> I just don't know if I am going to be able to create files for it to print from.
> you seem to have found sources for the items you print?
> or are you writing files yourself?
> thank you for the advice and yes, liking what you are doing with both tracks.


I get most of my files from a website called "Thingiverse". They're all free, you just download the files, open them in your slicer program and (once you confirm the file will print properly), save it to removable media and stick that in your printer. You just have to remember guys put their files up for free, so it may or may not work right.

IOW: "you get what you paid for"......

You have to be a bit creative when searching for files. For example, if you type "slot car" into their search engine, you get some returns, but not a lot. Type in HO railroad and you get more results than you can manage. I just keep in mind I need to search both for exactly what I want and broadly in a category that may have what i want. As another example: I'm going to print off an Adco trailer:










for the plateau area as a place where ambulance and fire truck crews can rest while a race is on. If you search for that under "adco" or "slot car", it won't show up. If you search for "HO train", it shows up. The Train guys are just crazy about producing 3d items. The "RC guys" are also rabid for 3d, so searching RC car turns up lots of useful items. You just may have to scale up (or down) to get your scale size. You just have to be careful when scaling things down, as you may loose details or the printer may not have a small enough nozzle to print finer lines. You can "nozzle down", to keep detail, but a smaller nozzle means even longer print times.

You can also find other "free" stl/3D files on the web, but you have to dig for them. Only one I've found where all the files are free is thingiverse. The rest all may have free files, but they're mixed in with all their "pay to play" files. Prices are all over the chart for pay ones. "Pay" files can be anything from a couple pennies to hundreds of dollars. All depends on what the creator wants to charge.

I would suggest you have a read of the link I posted above before laying down your cash. It lays out the main differences between FDM and Resin printers.

In a nutshell, resin printers are more expensive to buy, more expensive to run and have some limitations compared to FDM (like: only a couple color choices of resin, can't use a resin tank until empty, etc).


----------



## Tourmax

Well, I finally got around to stripping down the two “dyno-mite” fuellers. Sample pic:










one was pretty clean, the other looked like it had been through a mud pit and a big ball of hair.

I got them both cleaned up and dropped them on the “proto” drag strip.

Holy carp, are these things slooooowwwww!

Now, one almost doesn’t move at all, so its new tires needed and I think the “blade” style pin is scraping the track, so more to check out there.

The other car zips down the course (using anywhere between 16-18v), but it starts out slow and only gets a little bit faster as it goes. By the time it gets to the end, its going a decent clip, but not even close to what one of my afx, tomy or life like “inline box motor” cars.

Are all “pancake” motors this slow? I mean, these are shockingly slow.

I gone though them a couple times now and they’re clean as a whistle, all the contact areas are clean and shiny and everything that shoukd be oiled is oiled...


----------



## alpink

I still advise you to get on Nitro Slots.
there is a 4-gear class being run starting Thursday and they are NOT slugs.
thank you for the info on 3-D printing


----------



## Tourmax

alpink said:


> I still advise you to get on Nitro Slots.
> there is a 4-gear class being run starting Thursday and they are NOT slugs.
> thank you for the info on 3-D printing


I've had a look, not really my jam. LIttle too narrow focused for me, I'm not into "competing".

I'm just building stuff to have fun, which is not to say I haven't picked up a tip or two lurking on that site...


----------



## Tourmax

Well, nearly 48 total hours, but most of the stands are done: 










Thats a total of 6 different pieces glued together, but I think it looks pretty good!



Now to print the roof and the people. I’ll also have to “re-print” the stairways, but I only need to do one of those. There are railings, but those are already done, just not attached yet.

I might take a couple days break from it though. I’m getting a little tired of waiting/watching for days to get something off the printer. Not to mention, the room gets bloody warm while printing and I don’t deal with heat well (on average, Canadians are more used to dealing with cold than heat  ). I’m not what you would consider impatient, but a guy can only take so much of something before you need some time away....


----------



## Tourmax

Trying to sort out fencing and barriers. Tried a few “test prints:



















the barrier fencing is just about spot on I think. Fence mesh is too fine at that scale to print, so I’ll just use door/window screen for that.

The concrete dividers were actually printed out as barriers and fence too, but ended up so small they were only useful as concrete dividers. I have to try a couple different styles of concrete barriers. These are “ok”, but not quite what I want.


----------



## Milton Fox Racing

Really taking shape now!


----------



## Tourmax

Milton Fox Racing said:


> Really taking shape now!


Yessir. It's often when you start getting the small details on a model/diorama that it starts to look "realistic"....


----------



## Tourmax

GD printer!

Well, I guess it might be the filament. 

Using a different brand and it's "blobbing so badly its ripping the print off the print bed!

Grrrrrrrrrr........


----------



## Tourmax

Printed off a lot of the track wall/fence sections and glued them together. No mesh yet, but I have it picked out. I just have to go buy a roll so I have enough to do it all in one shot.

I also got tired of the multi-day prints and started with some small stuff. Namely, light posts:



















I started with several designs that were hollow, to allow running wiring in them. But in order to print them to a scale that didn't look waaaaay out of whack with the rest of the track, I was either loosing detail or the hollow sections would not be able to printed in anything but solid. This was the last design I tried:









I got it to a scale that "almost" looked right and still had some hollow in it, but printing enough of them would have taken something like 300 hrs and 60 meters of filament! Nope, wasn't doing that!

So what I settled on was a street lamp "head" from another design and a section of steel brake line. That gives me a had to put and led in and a strong, hollow "pole" to mount it to the track surface. It looks quite tall in the pictures, and it is too tall. But the plan is to drill a hole through the table surface and then insert the street lamp. That allows me to fine tune the height (to get it looking a little more in scale) and it also allows me hide the wiring under the table.

Right now, I've printing off 50 lamp housings. More than enough and it only took a couple hours.

Next up, another long print:










Next weekend, I'm going to print a "rock shed" for where the terrain overhangs the track:










I try to wait for weekends for multi-day prints because I'm on "time shifting" for my electric power. In a nutshell, the prime rate for power is 19 cents/KW and the "off" hours are 8 cents/KW. Off hours are 11 PM to 7 AM and weekends from 11 pm friday to 7 am Monday. Prime is also reduced after 4 PM, but it only drops to something like 14 cents/KW. Considering that a 3D printer is alll about plastic melting temperatures, it's worth my while to wait for the off peak hours. Which means under 8 hour prints I can do through the week and multi-day prints are best left for weekends.

Here's a few real life examples of rock/snow sheds for those whole live in "flat lands":




























The top pic is from New Zealand (or Australia, can't remember offhand). I'm also looking at that water feature and getting ideas........lol!


----------



## Tourmax

There we go:










That actually looks better than I thought it would.

Street lamps are 6-8 meters high around these parts and that's a 1/64 scale 8 meters tall. 

I like it!



Those will get installed around the track and there will be "flood lights" for the pit area and front straight. The stands will have their own lighting installed in the roof structure (not made yet).


----------



## Tourmax

and so it begins:




























Kinda looks like a bunch of :"F's"....which is kind of a hint towards how I feel about all these hours and hours of printing right now!

LOL!


----------



## Milton Fox Racing

Dont burn yourself out! I have been enjoying the progress and build up.

Can you post up a very very short video of the printing process - so we can share you pain? 🤙


----------



## Tourmax

Milton Fox Racing said:


> Dont burn yourself out! I have been enjoying the progress and build up.
> 
> Can you post up a very very short video of the printing process - so we can share you pain? 🤙


“Short” would have to be 5-10 mins long to see anything and even then, it would only be like a .2 mm thick line....yeesh.

I’m probably making it harder on myself than it needs to be by doing a full bed print at once. I just can’t seem to start a print looking at all that empty print bed space and thinking I’m “wasting“ it. Of course, the more items you drop on the print bed, the longer it takes.

When I was refining the size of the light post housings (so the hole would fit the 3/16 brake line poles) It would take roughly 10 minutes per housing. That should give you a rough idea of length.

As well, the taller/thicker the item is, the longer it takes to build it up.


----------



## Tourmax

Well, getting to be the time for my least favorite part of building models/etc:










Paint.

Ugh.

Mostly because there's only one way to do it: slow, precise and fiddly.

It does make things come alive though. That may look poorly done, but it's only the first coat.....


----------



## Tourmax

3 more roof panels, then roof billboards (that's only a 2 hr print job) and we're almost done printing the pit garages:










There is no floor in the back part of hte garage, so I'll have to make that in Tinkercad. Easy peasy, it's just a rectangle of the right thickness. I'm "undecided" on whether or not to make slots in the floor. It would be useful for keeping slot cars in there, but I'm currently thinking I'm just going to make it a static diorama type of deal. You know: cars, crew, toolboxes, etc.

3D printing is certainly an exercise in patience though....looks like another 24-30 hrs before tha last piece of the pit garage is done. That's not counting making a floor and printing it out either....


----------



## Tourmax

Ugh, it's been a while since I painted something this small:










I think my eyes are going crossed! lol!

It's pretty small overall. For reference, the spacebar on the keyboard is bigger!

Believe it or not, it looks much better in real life. The picture is zoomed in to a level that you won't really see in person. .

Chopper will be an overall yellow and red paint scheme. I'm cutting in the details first, then the main colors will go on.


----------



## Tourmax

Yep, I like it:




























Not bad for something that used to be a roll of plastic "string"!

You can also see in that last pic that I've started the fencing:










Little sloppy looking right now, but that was just getting the base of it stuck to the uprights. Now that it's attached, I can start gluing the rest of it down and shape it to the way I want it.


----------



## Tourmax

working on the scale people:









That's pretty close to a good scale in relation to the vehicles. Hard to tell with the camera zoomed in at 4X, but the detail is actually pretty good for fresh off the printer. That's a woman standing with one hand on hip, jeans, blouse and hair pulled back. A little cleanup and paint will make it just about perfect.


----------



## Tourmax

Test print for the fans in the stands:










Nice!

Scale is good, detail is acceptable. Now to start printing different "sitting" fans.....


----------



## Tourmax

Whew! working in HO scale isn't the easiest thing in the world for sure!

Street lamps:










That's some pretty small wiring and LEDs!

Powered up:










That's just the diode tester function on my multi-meter. 

Once on a proper power source, it will be much brighter. It will also be on a PWM dimmer, in order to fine tune the lighting across the track areas. The dimmer will be so nothing looks too "out of tune" with other lighting sources.


----------



## Tourmax

Neato!










Pretty good!

Still fine tuning the "people print", but there's no doubting that's what it was intended to be: a hot chick sitting in the stands.

They will all look look pretty awesome once painted!


----------



## Tourmax

Drew the print quality up to the max and switched to a .2 mm nozzle (from .4 mm):




























That's about as good as my printer gets. You can see wrinkles in the shirt and texture in the pants. 

Good enough!


----------



## Milton Fox Racing

She probably doesnt what the score is....


----------



## Rich Dumas

You should try doing an HO stadium light that has four surface mount LEDs wired in series. Circle Track Lighting Rev2.pdf


----------



## Tourmax

Rich Dumas said:


> You should try doing an HO stadium light that has four surface mount LEDs wired in series. Circle Track Lighting Rev2.pdf


Already have a few designs. Just waiting for printer time.....


----------



## Tourmax

Working on the foot bridge gantry structure for beside the control tower:










Now *THAT* is a fiddly thing to put together... 

The center support doesn't go where you see it (there is no center support), I'm just using it to hold up the gantry while building it.

"Rock shed" structure in the production phase:










If it looks a little strange, that's because it's being printed upside-down. If I had printed it the other way around, the printer would have built supports all through the tunnel section and wasted a lot of plastic. You have to think about how something is going to print out in order to place it on the build plate and not waste a lot of plastic on throw away bits....


----------



## Tourmax

Working on the "rock shed":



















Didn't turn out exactly as I wanted, but it's close enough that I can work with it. If nothing else. it will look a lot better than a huge rock overhang out over the road.

Gantry almost done:

:









Marshal/flag stand:










Right now, the 3D printer is making people to sit in the stands....


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## alpink

the "Rock Shed" is interesting, but I have to wonder if it is not sort of overkill in that location?
given that photos you provided of real ones have been at the bottom of a high, long, steep hill/cliff.
and the location you have put yours has little if any landslide threat?


Tourmax said:


> Working on the "rock shed":
> 
> View attachment 311020
> 
> 
> View attachment 311021
> 
> 
> Didn't turn out exactly as I wanted, but it's close enough that I can work with it. If nothing else. it will look a lot better than a huge rock overhang out over the road.


ah, but then, I always to forget to "suspend my disbelief".


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## Tourmax

alpink said:


> the "Rock Shed" is interesting, but I have to wonder if it is not sort of overkill in that location?
> given that photos you provided of real ones have been at the bottom of a high, long, steep hill/cliff.
> and the location you have put yours has little if any landslide threat?
> 
> ah, but then, I always to forget to "suspend my disbelief".


"Different strokes" I guess.

The upper part of the "mountain" hangs a little more than halfway over the lower road. Looked odd to me. YMMV......


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## Milton Fox Racing

Are you planning to add some detrius around and down the hill from the overhang later on? 👂


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## Tourmax

Milton Fox Racing said:


> Are you planning to add some detrius around and down the hill from the overhang later on? 👂


Probably, when I get into the final details. But that's still a looooong way off....


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## Tourmax

Started experimenting with guard rails:



















I have several different types, but this one seemed to fit the bill the best. I think it's Tomy, but can't recall offhand. 

It won't be staying all orange though. Painted up a test piece to see how it will look:



















Orange and white on the front, silver on the back. Brown on the posts to simulate wood. Not bad for the first coat. Couple more coats and I'll get a good idea of how it will look once the rest is painted.


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## Tourmax

Welcome race fans!










Bottom left are female photographers to be spread around the course. Top center are the pit girls. The rest are stands and assorted others. Still have to print more, but will have to start on things like pit crew, news coverage, etc.

On a sad note, MIL had a stroke Saturday night. Fast growing tumor with a bleed into the brain. Had been feeling dizzy of an on a couple weeks, nothing on Xray or cat scan. Was scheduled for an MRI this week to further investigate some "anomalies" on the cat scan. 

She passed on yesterday, early in the morning. 

Thank fully, being in the "Atlantic Bubble" (we only have one active covid case in the province right now), services will go on fairly unimpeded. Restrictions, yes. But nothing overly onerous or difficult to follow.

RIP Linda.


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## Milton Fox Racing

Sorry for your loss.


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## alpink

sincere condolences.
RIP Linda


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## samace22

I'm so sorry for your loss. RIP Linda. My thoughts and prayers are with you, her, your family, her family, your friends, and here friends. God bless all of them. Have her rest in peace my friend. This is so sad.


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## Milton Fox Racing

.... here friends. A most excellent phrase, Sam. Congrates!


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## samace22

Thank you for the nice comment milton congrats. 👍


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## XracerHO

Condolences, I'm so sorry for your loss.


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## Tourmax

Haven't done much work on the track lately, for obvious reasons. But here's a couple quick snaps of the few things I've tinkered with


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## Milton Fox Racing

Understandable, but still good to see you back posting. Give Mrs Tourmax an extra hug from us today.


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## Tourmax

Needed a little more height on the Dunlop footbridge to clear the fencing, so I whipped up a couple risers:



















Looks pretty good I think!


----------



## Tourmax

Managed to grab a couple slot car "dragsters" off ebay:



















It was looking like I was going to get them fairly cheaply, but you know how ebay is.... 

In the last 3 seconds, there were a couple "bid snipers" that bid them right up. I paid 70 usd plus shipping, which works out to somewhere around 120-130 CAD (with shipping).

Oh well, they are pretty complete and they're fairly rare around these parts (heck, slot cars are pretty rare in general around here). They seem to usually be missing things like the front or rear chrome bits and that's the first one in I've seen with the chrome front arms. The arms are probably an "add on" someone put on it, but it's kinda cool all the same. I'm not looking to really "race" them, so I don't much mind if one is heavier than the other. I can always add some weight to the other one if I really want them equal. Nice thing is, I can use the arms on the red one to make a template to 3d print more if I want.Same with the "wheelie bars" that seem to be broken off the white one.They'll need tires, but that's SOP with used slot cars.

Ebay prices are just nucking futz these days. I get the whole "pandemic" reasoning, but you would think people don't have a lot of money to throw around anymore at this point. It is what it is I guess....


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## alpink

having the front chrome on those is a plus.


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## Tourmax

alpink said:


> having the front chrome on those is a plus.


yessir, I've noticed that most are either missing or beat to "poop". These seem pretty good:










At least they do in the auction pics....


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## Tourmax

well, I've given up..........








Wait-wait-wait! Not on building the slot track, on trying to buy an Oscar Track Cleaner!

LOL!

I've been trying to grab one for months now. Everything from ones missing parts to complete near NIB ones. I had decided I was going to buy one last night no matter what. Life doens't work out like you planned sometimes though. I was bidding on one that was complete and in decent shape, but by no means was it "mint". It was going around the 60-70 usd mark and it looked like I was going to get it. More than I wanted to pay, but they seem to go pretty fast when up for sale. In the last 30 secs, I upped my bid to just over 150 USD. With shipping, that would have been around 250 CAD. In the last 15 seconds, someone bid over my maximum bid and I had a moment of clarity as I started to put an even higher max bid in: what the heck was I doing?!?!? 250 CAD for a slot car?!?!?!? Nah, they could have it. That's just ridiculous. 

So I then found a US1 dump truck chassis in good shape, 30 bucks CAD shipped. That will become a track cleaner and I can put one of the street sweeper bodies over it. the seller also had a couple 440x2 and a couple G2 narrow chassis up for sale. I combined shipping and got it all for a bit under 100 CAD. 

So 5 decent chassis for under half what that stupid Oscar would have been. 

I'm good with that.


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## Milton Fox Racing

....cool!


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## GMDad

Will be interested in seeing the dump truck turned into a track cleaner. Very enjoyable write up I check every day to see what you have been upto.. lol


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## Tourmax

GMDad said:


> Will be interested in seeing the dump truck turned into a track cleaner. Very enjoyable write up I check every day to see what you have been upto.. lol


Well, it's not the dump truck itself, just the chassis:




























I wanted the truck chassis because (supposedly) it has lots of torque at low revs and it also has the front/rear shoes to give it the best chance to get power on a dirty rail. 

I'm thinking I might print out this 3d file to make a "street sweeper":










I'll have to rework it a bit, but it's a decent start....


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## Tourmax

Another track cleaner body possibility:



















Warming up to this one more than the other. The square angles and such make it much easier to edit and the large front bumper gives a lot of room to mount a hone/stone/cleaner....


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## Tourmax

Also bought some equipment to get up and running in airbrushing. I've wanted to get into it for a while and the track is a good place to start. First, I grabbed a kit from a local store:










The syphon gun doesn't get very good reviews, but the rest is reported to be good. Not to mention, it regularly runs 199 bucks, was on sale for 99 bucks. Worth it for the compressor and accessories.

Then, grabbed a gravity feed gun of at least decent quality:










Iwata Neo. Technically not an Iwata, but built for Iwata and quality controlled by Iwata. Its got a crazy long 5 year warranty on it. I mean, who gives 5 year warranties on small items anymore? So you know it has to at least be half decent. Sold as a gun for beginners, but that's what I am so......

Then, for grins and giggles, I grabbed a cheapy off ebay:










I'm not expecting too much out of it, but you never know. At least I'll have something to compare the Iwata to. Since reviews re relatively spread over the chart on ebay cheapie airbrushes, I bought two of them. It was cheaper to buy a second one for parts than buy parts (if I need them). If it turns out to be a decent piece, bonus. If not; well, I only spent 24 bucks for two of them, so no big loss. That's less than the price of a pizza.....lol! If it's total junk, at least I'll get some cleaning brushes and other little bits out of them....


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## Tourmax

With winter on the horizon, time to pull some effort away from the slot track for another project:










I’ve had it for several years now and most of what you see I have built. I run it without tracks in the summer and with in the winter. Unfortunately, when I routed the engine exhaust to the rear (it normally dumps right out the side at the front):










I didn’t account for enough clearance and the left track ripped the exhaust off. You can see it sticking up on the left if you look closely at the first pic.
I was intending to build a full suspension for it (Argo’s are solid axle, no suspension) so I wasn’t concerned with exhaust clearance. A suspension would have moved the tracks/wheels down another 4-6 inches, but I just didn’t get to it this year. Now I have to move the exhaust above the body pinch seam...


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## XracerHO

Have fun with your vehicle, you got some great buys & can't wait to see the finished track cleaner. Do not stop posting, enjoy them very much & look forward to see what you have been up too!


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## Milton Fox Racing

When does the slot car version of it arrive?


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## alpink

didn't the Banana Splits drive those?


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## Tourmax

alpink said:


> didn't the Banana Splits drive those?


I’m not sure it it was argo’s or Max II’s...


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## Tourmax

Milton Fox Racing said:


> When does the slot car version of it arrive?


Actually, I know there was a “dinky” style of the 6x6, not sure if there ever was a slot car version....


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## Milton Fox Racing

Matchbox has recently been releasing a 6X6 (?) ATV casting but I dont remember an 8X8 (?) by them.


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## alpink




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## Tourmax

alpink said:


>


Those are Amphicat's:










Went out of production a looooooong time ago. The tires are impossible to get. If you look closely, you can see they are bonded to the rim. Essentially, it's a one piece assembly. Most guys that still run them have to modify them to take a modern rim/tire combo. But it isn't an easy task. The mechanicals are super primitive as well (IE: small, fragile, hard to get and mondo underpowered).

Still, they're neat little buggies. I'd like to have one... if I had the cash, space and time to work on it....


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## Tourmax

Milton Fox Racing said:


> Matchbox has recently been releasing a 6X6 (?) ATV casting but I dont remember an 8X8 (?) by them.


Yep:










Tonka used to make an Attex 6x6 toy:










but I think you have to go "overseas" to find an 8x8:


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## NTxSlotCars

Looks like you got a great start!

Aurora Gplus models from the 70s has the Ferrari 312t and McLaren M23 cars with the big scoops. 
There are so many out there with the stickers missing, you could surely find some that you can customize to the later season cars.
There are also reproduction sticker manufacturers to restore them, and more detailed vinyl and water slide decals out there.

Have fun!


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## amxbmw

Great thread/ build. Glad I picked up on it! Interested it the final drag strip and the info on the 3D printer A+


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## Tourmax

Not part of the track, but at least racing related. Decided I needed a phone holder, so I 3D printed this:



















pretty cool. Fits the iphone vertically or horizontally. I had the option of a full cage or just the short risers:









I chose the short rails for convenience sake in printing. I may print off a couple of each and send them out as xmas gifts to friends and family. Its only about a 24hr print, so not too much of a hassle.
I do need to get a new glass print bed though. My original is pretty worn now. Glass is on order...


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## Milton Fox Racing

That is awesome looking!


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## Tourmax

Adding a couple cars to the stable. These are pretty hard (or stupidly expensive) to find, so I’ll be “building” them myself. First, a Ford GT40 MK II:




























That’s (obviously) a resin kit. You can find MK II’s, but majorly expensive. You can find a complete MK I at somewhat decent prices, but I specifically wanted a MK II and those are pretty pricey. No doubt due to the recent Ford vs Ferrari movie. Some of the details are too small to paint accurately, so I also ordered up a decal kit:










I’ve got several spare chassis hanging around, so I’m out the door at a decent price overall. Shipping was a real bummer, but seems you can’t escape high shipping costs anywhere these days. I just need to put in a little time/effort to paint and assemble to get it on the track.

I don’t watch Nascar anymore, they lost me totally when they went to the “world cars”. But truthfully, they pretty much lost me when they started allowing front driver bodies to be run. Nascar was about the cars for me more than the drivers and I wanted them to at least _look _like a production car.

When I did watch, I was a Bill Elliot fan. Mostly because of the fox chassis T-Bird he drove. I’ve always been a big TBird fan. Had a 62 HT and a 78 and have always lusted over a 57 “F” model (factory supercharged). I’ve seen Elliot TBird slot cars before, but only one. I got tired of waiting for one to “show up” without it being stupid priced, so another kit it is:



















Thats the 83-88 style body, being the earlier of the generation with the chrome grill instead of the “aero” nose. The paint scheme that really sticks in my mind is the #9 Coors from (IIRC) 84. Again, some details are too fine for painting, so decal kit is the way to go:









I’ll paint what I can, decal the rest.

Both should be pretty cool.


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## Tourmax

Grabbed 4 of these yesterday:



















AFX “specialty” chassis.

Advertised as cleaned and tested, 7 ohm blue tip armature. I’ve bought from this particular seller before and have no reason to doubt them.

I’ve got a couple bodies that need chassis (they’re longer wheel base bodies) so these should work nicely.


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## GMDad

I like the 4 gear chassis. I have a few that run pretty good.. Just curious mine also have a screw at the back of the chassis to hold it together, what is the difference with these that don't have a screw ?
Tks


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## Tourmax

GMDad said:


> I like the 4 gear chassis. I have a few that run pretty good.. Just curious mine also have a screw at the back of the chassis to hold it together, what is the difference with these that don't have a screw ?
> Tks


Don’t know. Model year changes maybe?

edit:

did a quick google. It appears the “autoworld” 4 gear chassis have the rear screw and the original Aurora AFX ones don’t....

edit no. 2:

a bit more “googling” seems to indicate that early specialty chassis didn’t have the rear screw and it was incorporated later into the Aurora AFX production run. It also appears the Autoworld 4 gear chassis always had the rear screw....


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## Tourmax

The order confirmation came through for the specialty chassis. I just looked at the pics of the chassis I ordered. I didn’t notice when I ordered, but apparently one of them is (ahem) “screwed” and three of them are “non-screwed”.

They are all AFX chassis (ie: not AW) so it would seem that the later production run AFX specialty chassis got......er......”screwed”.....from the factory.

lol!


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## Tourmax

Well, I must have the bug bad because just grabbed this:



























had it in my ebay watch list, but it was a tick more than I wanted to pay. Seller offer 15 bucks usd off asking price and I grabbed it.

I’m not sure if its a “wheel stander” as delivered, it doesn’t look to be from the pic. But I’ve got an old pdf around here somewhere that turns one like it into a wheel stander pretty easily.

Nice thing is I can use it as a template to build another and drop a 60’s econoline pickup body on it. I already have the .stl file (3D printer file) for the econoline:


















Then, I can race two wheel stander van/pickups against each other.

Should be major cool!


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## alpink

the Aurora 4 gear chassis had evolved through a couple changes,
originally with a set up similar to AFX with the small magnets and no screw to hold the chassis together in back
then they created the one with the tall (magnatraction) magnets and still no screw in the back of the chassis
then after all the complaints ( and probably returns to toy stores ) about the car not running well, they diagnosed that because of the length, the gear plate clamp wasn't capable of holding the back of the gear plate down and they redesigned both chassis to use the screws 
there were also a couple different armatures used.
in the low magnet chassis was a blue tip green wire armature that was 7 OHMs
in the tall magnet chassis was a red tip gold (copper) wire armature that was 14 ohm
Auto World simply copied the most successful design.


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## Tourmax

Added another tyco pro to the stable:




































paint is a little chipped up, but I don’t want to loose the decals that are on it. I doubt they can be removed without destroying them. I may be able to airbrush some flames on it and cover the chips. I’ll have to wait for it to arrive before I can formulate a plan.

if nothing else, I’ll have another “brass pan” to race against the “trick truck”.....


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## Tourmax

Aaaaaand another tyco pro on the way:




























Was sold as "not tested" and it's missing lots of cosmetic bits. Price reflected condition. Worse case scenario I'll pull it down for spare parts. Might try and 3d build/print some of the missing body pieces for the practice.....


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## Milton Fox Racing

It would also make an interesting piece to put on a hauler or out back of the garage. 🤙


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## Tourmax

Looks like the Lola is going to be restored since I just picked these up as well;




























the Chaparral is a Tyco Pro, the McClaren is (I believe) an HP7:



















Both need restoration and I'll 3d print the missing parts.

And that's it for a while for purchasing. Too much work to do on cars and tracks and the wife is going to kill me when she sees the banking history. The missus is the biggest reason for not spending any more for 6 months to a year from now. She's understanding and forgiving of my many vices, but I'm really pushing it now......


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## Milton Fox Racing

Just so long as she doesnt take away your internet access!


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## Tourmax

thingiverse to the rescue!

Engine intakes:










Chaparral wing:










Driver/cockpit:










They're by no means perfect, but they're pretty close. I won't have to start building from scratch, I'll only need to modify thee to get what I want. Much easier process.....


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## XracerHO

Great 3d printing restoration parts. Enjoy following your restoration & track progress so keep posting.


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## Tourmax

Well, figured I'd give making replacement parts a bit of a test run. Started with something simple, a Lamborghini Countach (teenage fantasy car!) with a broken rear wing:










Came that way from the seller. I knew it was broken, it came in a batch lot.

Off to the 3d printer and:










Not perfect, but pretty close. That's with a 0.2 mm nozzle (smallest mine takes) and quality as high as it will go. Problem is, scale is so small (HO), you can only get so close to a finished product with 3d printing. But a little filling, a little sanding, a scootch of paint and it should be nearly perfect.

Or, at least perfect enough.

Test run complete, ready for more bits!

Also, grabbed this for 10 bucks:





































Seen better days, but hey.....10 bucks!

These days, that's pretty cheap. Might turn out to be ok with a good, deep cleaning and some fresh rubber.....


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## Tourmax

Well, chum selling the white lol cancelled the order. “Out of stock” was the reason given. How do you run “out of stock” on an old used slot car?
I’m half guessing it was more like “I didn’t want to sell it for 10 bucks”.

oh well, money was refunded, so no harm done. At least I don’t have to explain the “expenditure” to the missus...lol!


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## Tourmax

Working on the track cleaner. Printed body just sitting on top of the US1 truck chassis:




























Scale is just about right, maybe a teenie bit too large, but more than workable. A street cleaner isn't exactly a small vehicle anyways.

Lots more still to do, but that's a great start!


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## Tourmax

Coming along nicely:



















atill working on getting it to fit the chassis properly, but you can see its almost there. I may print another rear rear section to add a little more length so I can have a bit more rear overhang. A bit more length will give me the room to install the rear felt wiper....


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## Tourmax

Sweeper body is nearly fit to the chassis now:










Looking pretty good! Plan is for a rear felt wiper and a mid point wiper on each side. I think I'm gogin to ditch the front hone idea. Running the truck around the track a coiuple times will clean the rails just fine I think. Wipers will be to remove dust and whatnot that could affect traction.

Since the cockpit is so open, started working on a driver and controls:










It's a little hard to see in black plastic, but painted up it will look cool.

Also started another project:










Gt40 MK II on a GPlus chassis.

The black piece you see is a 3d printed work stand for slot cars. It extends underneath the car and keeps the tires up off whatever surface it's sitting on. Basically, it's a handle on an A-frame. I printed off a couple dozen A-frame style ones (ie: no handle) for the rest of my cars so they're all up off their tires while not being used. Essentially, they're all "up on blocks"....lol!

It's a resin body, but it was warped all to "heck" when I got it. I used some hot water to soften it slightly and held it in shape until it cooled. It's dead straight now.

Currently working on making the body adapter clip and then on to a bit of bodywork and paint.

Major cool!


----------



## Tourmax

Grabbed another cheapy bid off ebay:












































was another min 10 buck bids. Looks pretty clean!


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## GMDad

That ebay .ca ? I find the U.S. ebay shipping a little on the high side. Nice find.


----------



## Tourmax

GMDad said:


> That ebay .ca ? I find the U.S. ebay shipping a little on the high side. Nice find.


Thats where I search, but its coming out of the states.

just over 20 cad shipping on top of that 10 buck bid. About 36 cad (paypal seems to be adding “fees” that weren’t there before) all said and done.

For Canadians, shipping out of the US isn’t really worth it unless you’re outside of a center where you can’t find this kind of stuff locally. I do try and look for Canadian ebayers, but thier prices are usually just as high (if not higher) and we all know how expensive Canada post is so...well, its a “rock and a hard place” type of thing....


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## Tourmax

Shipping has been sloooooooowwwwe lately. Pandemic, weather, xmas, etc. but these two howed up yesterday:










The auction pics made the paint look much worse than it is, on both of them. You have to get right up close to them to see any really serious damaged paint. I may be able to make a few “surgical” repairs and run them as is.

Thats the early beginnings of the drag strip they are sitting on. Haven’t done much with any slots lately, busy out in the garage working on the Corvette...


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## Milton Fox Racing

Corvette you say?









1:1 Car Threads


General discussion for all full size 1:1 automotive topics.




www.hobbytalk.com


----------



## Tourmax

Milton Fox Racing said:


> Corvette you say?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 1:1 Car Threads
> 
> 
> General discussion for all full size 1:1 automotive topics.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.hobbytalk.com


Yep



















1988. I’m not a big fan of the body kit, a previous owner installed it. But to take it off, I’d have to repair the body where they attached it. It has also been painted once with the kit in place so I’m stuck with it unless I want to do bodywork and a full respray.

shares the two bay with my “fox in waiting










which used to share space with my 62 bullet:










sasly, the bullet bird was sold off before completed. Too many projects,not enough time/money and we were being moved to the other side of the continent...


----------



## Tourmax

haven't done much to the track for a while now. Decided to get back to it while I wait for my 3d printer to spit out some parts:


















That's some "Spackle" laid on over the Styrofoam forms. Once I get a decent coat over it all, I can do some finish sculpting and then into paint to simulate ground, rock, etc.

Waiting for parts to be printed for my 1:8 scale RC Landrover:


















Took months of printing just to get to this stage. 

I finally had to completely rebuild my 3d printer. As delivered, it's just too "lame" to do much more than print small objects in PLA and even then it can barely keep up. 

Now, it's got solid bed mounts, an E3D titan direct extruder, an E3D volcano hot end, a BLTouch probe and a custom version of Marlin firmware. 

Now it prints great no matter what material or project I can throw at it! Only had to spend another $400-$500 bucks to get to the point where it's reliable and effective. The stock hot end just can't keep up with big prints or filament that requires higher temps (IE: abs, etc), but the Volcano hot end has no troubles at all!


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## XracerHO

Glad your back to the track which will be more fun once you run cars on it then gradually do the scenery. Landrover is a very impressive RC project which you should also share on the RC forums! Keep on posting ...great viewing!! ..RL


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## Tourmax

XracerHO said:


> Glad your back to the track which will be more fun once you run cars on it then gradually do the scenery. Landrover is a very impressive RC project which you should also share on the RC forums! Keep on posting ...great viewing!! ..RL


Oh, it's already functional. Been running cars on it when I feel like it. But doing the spackling has put it out of commission until I get the plaster all laid out. It's still a long term project. Might get it done before my wake....LOL!


----------



## Tourmax

Still at it:








Currently working on building up the road beds around the track. Made a jig to plane the mud level on the track edges and low enough to fit a strip of cork around it. the cork will give a roadside gravel look but also give the cars a little grip if they "kick out" on the curves. 

Summer has made working on the track roughly a once a month thing. Summer always lots of things to do and that need to be done....not to mention being outside enjoying the sun!


----------

