Very short sessions

I haven't had much of a chance to do any racing lately. We're prepping the house to have the plumbing redone, and it's going to take a couple weeks before things are back to normal. Probably three if the week after is included of cleaning and organizing whatever we end up with.

So there will be workers here for the next couple of weeks. I've got a car due in the mail, which will likely come early next week. I'll get chances in the evening to try it out. It's a tax refund gift, and instead of picking it out myself I sent my wife a couple links and had her pick. So it's likely to be either a competitive match for the Leyton House Porsche or will continue in the 60's Le Mans line and be a Matra. We'll see.

Meanwhile, I think the elevation of the Sweeper is starting to get out of hand.

I never intended it to be that high up. If you can imagine in the photo above, a rolling hill getting progressively higher as it goes toward the back corner of the table. By the end those hills will be as high up as those light spots on that roof support in the center. So the run up to the Sweeper will cut through the hill, while the rest of the curve will run over the top.

I'm going to have to try to get a bit better banking going, which I won't be able to do until I have measured and cut my track support beds. It's 8" at its peak right now, which is about three inches too high. Every bit of the track, with the exception of the bottom of the Mulsanne hill and the front stretch are suspended off the table. I guess that's normal. Right.

So I'll have to work on that when I buy the wood. In the meantime, I'll continue racing with it as it is. It's actually at a point right now where the outside lane is workable. There are a few cars already threatening 5 sec laps on it and it isn't even finished yet.

Ever since I repaired that broken pickup wire on the Alfa, it has been screaming around the track. I don't know if maybe it was so precariously in there that maybe I was having intermittent power issues without realizing it or something, but it's doing great now. No issues at all.

I think there's a pretty strong chance that the next car coming will be another Porsche, likely a short tail of some sort. I think it would be great to have a match for this car, as it would really help determine what's a faster car on my track. Plus having another inliner setup is good as well. That'll give me an opportunity to compare gear ratios when it comes time to start doing those kinds of experiments. That's going to be quite awhile, however.

I'm thinking that once I have the track all setup and in a happy place, I'm going to get a decent power supply for it. I'm going to need something to run all the accessories anyway, so it'll be good to have some balanced track power. Then I can run all the other crap on a smaller secondary transformer. Just thinking.