Guest visiting - always interesting

Interesting night tonight. We have a friend visiting who has been getting into some racing with me over the past few hours. During the session I noticed something while driving the Alfa: it started cutting out intermittently. At first I thought it might have been a power supply issue, as it kind of felt like it, but then the more I drove it the worse it got. Then it didn't go at all.

I took it downstairs and opened it up, and the first thing I noticed was a detached pickup wire.

Sorry about the blurry phone pic, but that red wire is clearly not connected.

There's a tiny grub screw inside of the whole mess of wire that sort of keeps it all in there by basically taking up space. Works well, won't argue. I got the wire together, undid the grub screw, put the wire in, and screwed the grub screw right into it.

I thought I had it here.

The fix seemed simple enough. All I had to do was gather the wire up, twist it a bit to get it into threadable shape, and insert it. So I did that, and it looked good, and I took it upstairs to test it.

It ran about 2 laps and then cut out completely. I didn't make a firm connection. So I took it back downstairs, went through all the steps again, but this time I trimmed some more wire bare and wound it before putting it back in. It was much more firm now. Thankfully there was plenty of wire to pull up from the back end of the car. Thanks Slot.it.

The car is now running as good as ever. It should be noted that this is the first breakdown I've had in any of my cars since owning them, and I've owned this one well over two years and raced it often. Parts give up, and I'm okay with that, but it's good to be able to fix it with little or no extra parts. That's always been a good thing about slot cars. You can pretty much repair them with a few tools and a little knuckle grease.

Our friend will be here the whole weekend, so we'll get more chances to race. This is allowing me more time on the not-much-used outside lane. I'm also using the stock Carrera controller and giving my friend the SCP-1, so I'm struggling mightily. I think I should get another decent controller, even if it would be used only occasionally.



TRACK UPDATE

More work on the Mulsanne Straight, particularly the apex of it.

The apex of the hill used to be just ahead of the yellow GT40. Now it's back by the blue GT40. I'm going to move it where the Porsche is by raising it at that point by about two inches. I expect that to have a huge effect on the rest of the track. It'll also add a slight uphill to the straight before going downhill, which could potentially unweight the car at high speeds. The angle of the hill [where the Alfa is] will be steeper.

I took that light brown support plank and moved it about six inches toward the top of the hill and it had the desired effect. The cars definitely unweight if they are going full speed down the straight, but quickly gain it back well before the Kink, so it's not going to be an issue as far as throwing the cars off the track or anything. What I want it to do is to be another element to deal with in what would ordinarily be a pretty basic straight section.

It's pretty crazy how much of a fine balance it all is. It's not like I can just put up a couple of supports and it'll work perfectly. You can definitely tell when driving it what works and what doesn't. I've taken that approach for the entire track. Pike's is about to gain elevation, and that's not going to be easy. I suspect there's more work on the Sweeper as well, as I came off plenty on the outside lane tonight, and I wasn't even going very fast through it when it happened.



FRIEND UPDATE

Overall racing has been good, but mostly casual running. We haven't had any lap races or anything like that, instead focusing on getting together and doing a little rolling drag racing. We've had a few offs tonight in some very hard to reach places. Many offs after the Mulsanne Kink, which is just at the edge of my reach, and one that went off the far end of the Peak. I had to climb on the table to get the car, which is the first time I've tried that. I hoped it could hold me, and it can. It didn't even creak.

That says nothing about the fact that I'll need to make sure to scenic those areas properly to stop cars from flying into impossible to reach places. The curves on the back half of the track will all be cut into hillsides, which will act as a barrier to stop the cars if they come off. That'll work great on the Peak and the Mulsanne Kink, but I'm not sure I'll be able to do it with the sweeper. It's not looking very practical to make a huge hillside in that area, so I will probably make a combination of hillside and border with catch fence.

I couldn't give an estimate of how close I am to being finished with the elevation aspect of the planning stages, although I'm closer to being finished than I am to being started. It feels a bit like when you lay a blanket on the bed...you flip it out and after a few tries it lays nice and smooth with no weird folds or kinks. So I think if I work at this a little more, it'll all come together nicely. It's already much better than when I started, and still very fast when it needs to be.