New Car Coming - No Surprise This Time

So that tax return special car that I mentioned...well, my wife forgot to order it, so we did it together yesterday. This will be the first time since I've raced 1:32 cars that I'll actually be picking the car I want. Not that I didn't want all the other cars, I certainly did and do, but those were on a list of cars, and my wife ultimately chose which cars I'd have. It's a fun game, makes things interesting, keeps her interested, and tests our tastes in cars with each other.

I'm not going to mention what car I picked just yet, just know that it has consistently been on my list in one form or another since this all started, it was just for whatever reason glossed over every time. Other cars came and went on that list, but this one has always been there. I think there will be some surprised by my pick. I can tell you what car didn't get picked and why. The Porsche 956 Jägermeister car was an absolute no go, because my wife doesn't like the stuff. She says it tastes like something you would drink if you were sick. Good enough for me, even though I like the way the car looks.

The car comes in the next couple of days, hopefully by Friday, and I'm aiming to give it a full tuneup and good strong workout. Will the fact that I picked this car say anything special about me? Hard to say. Maybe I'm making too much out of it, but I'm feeling good about my pick. I think it should round out my collection nicely.
I'll report once the car is here.


2/30 and 3/30 Curves Appreciation Society

I haven't mentioned how much I enjoy these new turns in awhile. There's such a contrast from a tight 1/60 to a flowing 3/30. Going through the Mulsanne Kink and the Sweeper really allows you to take the cars up another notch. Suddenly you're dealing with something you're not used to; high-speed control issues.
While a 3/30 turn, or even a 2/30 turn has a much wider radius than a 1/60 turn, it's still a turn. You still have to go through it, and when you're racing you have to do it at pretty much your best speed through the curve. If not, the guy in the other lane will smoke you. And your best speed isn't going to be your fastest speed. A 3/30 curve will still throw a car going into it at full speed. While a slight release of the throttle heading toward a curve is always a good thing, too much letup and you'll lose all momentum going into the curve. And trying to make it up in the curve with acceleration will only produce sliding and spinning out. On the Porsche I have this problem if I don't let up a little; the tail comes out. This is especially noticeable in this car, and was the first thing I had to learn about driving it. On the flip side, a cruiser like this coasts wonderfully through turns at some pretty high speeds.

Since I added the turns [six 2/30 and three 3/30 curves], I haven't felt the urge to change a thing to the layout. It immediately filled a hole I needed; that of a fast track. I had the technical, but now it came with the fast. If I had more track pieces I'd likely use them somehow, but I really like the way Pike's came out being this challenging uphill climb. I wouldn't change a thing. It's going to be awesome when it's finished and a showcase, I think. It's also going to keep racers honest.

Not quite a racing post

More along the lines of keeping the cars in a good clean spot. I've been dragging them around in the pit box for the longest time, which actually works great, but there's something about having them out to see that I like. I showed some pics of my room a few months ago to my brother and he suggested the idea, or something like it.

We're redoing our bathrooms, so things are suddenly getting moved around and left for scrap [yay me]. My wife asked me if I wanted a couple of shelves and I told her that I'd take them. One in particular is working quite nicely as a display rack:

I don't know what particular model of Ikea furniture it is, so I'll ask my wife.

I was able to wedge the Slot.it display cases in there perfectly and connected everything down so it's nice and sturdy. Nice thing is I still have room for at least 4 more cars, and I still have a second shelf I haven't used yet.

If you look at the pics of the track you'd notice that most of the stuff in the room is older, REAL furniture. I'm going to do something to this thing to un-Ikea it a little bit now that I know it works as a display rack. I wonder if they make a glass door for it....

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.

Incoming

Looks like the tax man is being nice to me this year. I've got an unscheduled car coming in the next few days.

I won't say anything about it just now, other than that it's a Slot.it car, as I'm not done collecting them yet.

Stay tuned.

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.

100 Posts - What Have I Learned?

By the time I started this blog, I had already had a track for awhile, and had even already made my first track expansion. My first post of any worth was about painting Carrera track, and I was already well into my slot car fever, which started when I was a kid.

So what have I learned over the past three years of track improvements, car upgrades and blog posts?

1. Get some decent quality slot cars that aren't the same brand as your track. Slot.it, NSR, BRM, Scaleauto, etc. Many companies make better cars than the big box companies do. Learn to separate the way you feel about the track over how you feel about the cars. Doesn't matter which track you have, there are better cars out there than the track brand cars.
2. Expand if you can. For a lot of people, space is at a premium. And Carrera track is LARGE. 1:32 track in general is large. But if you can do it, expand. I know I ran for a long time happily with not much track, but the more track I got, the happier I got. 
3. Don't forget to race. There are a lot of times when I find myself racing alone, so I run my own races. They're all over the place on this blog. I think running mindless laps with no timing is enjoyable in itself, but there are times when I want to see what my car can do. It's one thing to think a car is the fastest car, but it's another to prove it against a clock. Even if you don't have a lap counter or sophisticated timing system, you can still do good enough work with the timer on your mobile phone. Most of those even allow you to tap your laps on a lap counter that'll give you a lap time. If you don't have any competitive cars and are down to one good one and one shit one, that's a hard one. Maybe try suggestion #1.
4. A clean car is a happy car. Slot cars are reasonably sturdy if you drive them correctly, but that doesn't mean they don't need work to continue running at high speeds. If you get in the habit of cleaning and tuning your cars regularly, they'll respond much better to everything. Supplies don't cost much, and many can be found already around the house. Chances are if you're looking at nice slot cars and considering buying them, you're already wanting to get under the hood. That's how I am. I love that aspect of the hobby.
5. If you have the space, make a table. Such a huge improvement in every way over rug racing. That's a tough one, though, because many people don't have enough space to dedicate to a track. It's really easy to take up half a room with just the table. But if you can do it, you won't regret it. 
6. Try a lot of things. You might think that your car likes to have a loose pod float because it set the lap record with one, but you didn't take into account all the other things that could have had an influence on that happening. I've had that happen to me loads of times. I think I have an idea what might work, and end up making things worse instead of better. It takes experimentation, trial and error to learn what works and what doesn't, and that's what it really comes down to. This is especially important when you're getting into the nitty gritty of your track and how to make it its fastest. Trying different banking ideas, supports, angles and whatnot are a good way to find the unexpected.
7. Be patient. Just be patient with everything. If the car isn't running, focus on getting it running. If the track layout sucks, change it. If you want to get on a table but are stuck on a rug, be patient. If you make a blog and nobody reads it, be patient.

Track Build Notes - Elevation and Mulsanne

A couple of posts ago I mentioned adding some found wood as under supports for the Mulsanne Straight. They work great, but I can see now where the under support will be a great equalizer regarding any radical track height changes I might try to introduce.

Here's my problem:

When I added the two flat pieces of wood, a few things happened. The first part of the Straight, coming right off the curve and going until the drop starts, had been previously at a very slight downhill the entire way. So once it hit the top of the hill it was already going downhill. The first wood piece smoothed that first section out, giving me an easier chance to raise the whole corner.

A level shot of how the beginning of the Straight had a slight downward slope before hitting the true downhill, which started at the white box support.

What also happened was, because of the addition of the 2nd flat wood piece, the bottom of the downhill was also a smoother transition. That was great going into the Kink and setting up for the Sweeper, but in adding the two pieces I ended up softening the drop of the hill.

So I'm adding an apex. It didn't have one since the highest part was the curve going into the straight, so I need to add one to give the up to the down. There's a point in the straight that, when you're racing, there's a noticeable unweighting of the car. You can hear it. I want the idea to be, if you're going to punch it through this section, expect a bit of a light race car.

With new, taller under supports added, the apex now begins and ends between the two Lego structures instead of at the turn before it, allowing for more of a drop.

I don't want the hill on my Mulsanne Straight to feel like a normal straight away. I want there to be a noticeable hill you have to negotiate to get just the right amount of speed, acceleration and then braking to be successful throughout the section. I got there on an early version of this hill, but since I've strengthened it is has lost that edge.

The angle of the hill itself was okay when the track was unsupported, as each individual piece would flex a lot more at the joint without any support. So the drop could be more radical, and there would be that ever present "clickclickclickclick" as the cars would race over the uneven track joints. The straight is as smooth as a carpet now, which contributes to the lack of hairiness in the drop. Gotta get that drop. That's the whole point.

The base of the hill. I'm going to run a pencil between the two layers of wood right about to center of this picture. That'll smooth out that slightly uneven joint. I have to be careful doing little things like that, though, because those types of changes are exactly what can smooth out the track and take out the strategic effectiveness of the hill itself.

There's also the issue of getting just the right banking at the Kink [and past it] to make an entry into the Sweeper that is fast. The thin wood allowed me to start the bank during the descent, which helped the other side of the Kink to drop a bit on the inside lane. There are a few points on the outside lane that need addressing now, though.

The run up to the Mulsanne Kink is looking great, but there are some issues with the outside of the track going in to the Sweeper. The area right where that black tuft is sticking out above the track needs a little support.

So that's what I'm talking about. I try to add about an inch of height in a section, and it ends up affecting a section 10 feet away.
In my years on the rug, I never bothered with elevating track, even when I was a kid. I was more into making a flat, fast track than bothering with all the loops and circles and crap. But that also meant that I didn't have any practical experience regarding that stuff. Now that I'm on a table and making a committed plan, I need to be satisfied with every square inch of the track before moving to the next step, which will be permanent installation of the under-support. I'll have to carefully measure out everything so that what's finished is the same height as what was in the plan. If I'm off anywhere, the track will run different than I want it to. That's no good.

Lego

Up until recently, the supports had been made out of a number of things: actual Carrera plastic supports, small blocks of wood, with the larger pieces being cookie boxes wrapped in unused black t-shirts. Yeah, not glamorous, but you do what you have to do. The problem is that I need to control each piece's overall height, and the cookie boxes are of finite proportions.

Here's where I switched to Lego. It just makes sense. I need a temporary, adjustable support that can hold up the track neatly, be adjustable in more than one direction, and serve as the support until the time it is replaced with the permanent version. I can't think of a better building block to use than Lego. Even doing something like banking a raised track section can be done very simply with a Lego structure on each side of the track. This will also help with adjustments that need to be made after any track adjustments are done anywhere else on the track.

This is one of those things that is perfect for Lego to be involved in, especially in the planning stages. Since adding it I have had much more flexibility in those portions of the track. I don't have enough to outfit the entire track, but I do have enough to work off the existing cookie boxes when I need to. They're holding up fine and will work just swell as base structures for a small Lego support.

A little over table-level, and it's easy to see just how high up the track gets in a short amount of space. So adding an apex also effected Pike's.  Most of the load is going to be put on the curve just to the right of the picture.

 There will be a point where I'll have to stop going higher. I still have plans to extend scenery behind the entire section, and it needs to be higher than track level at that point to stop cars from hitting the wall. The more I raise the track, the closer the roof gets, which cuts of my scenery possibilities. Between the border, the run-off, and the protective barrier, there will need to be enough space to handle scenery as well. My other option would be to make it a town instead of a forest and build a row of buildings against the wall. That has always been a thought in the back of my head. I could probably get away with a combination of both. Some houses going around the outside curve, followed by a forest section on the upper straight that tails off as the hill goes down.

Now you see it...now you don't.

I just talked to my wife about the need for wood for the under support, and she asked if I needed any more track pieces. I told her no, but that I will likely need some borders. She was okay with that and okay with the wood for the track, so the next step might happen sooner than I expected.

Naturally in a case like this racing takes a back seat to building. Nice thing is that it's all going to the same thing, which is making everything better. Just adding those two boards as under supports to the back straight made such an improvement I can't wait to get to the finished product. I expect much faster lap times than 5 seconds once it's all said and done.

When I recently ran the Midwinter Marathon, I neglected to mention that I had started working on the Mulsanne Straight after the race had already started. That's why I didn't make such a big deal out of the slower times. The #5 and #11 Fords ran before I added them, and I think track times improved as I went. I imagine if I re-ran the race for the Fords they'd be right up with the rest in points. Problem is, I can't really stop now and get an official run, because I've already improved the Straight again since running the other three cars. That means I'd have to run all five cars again to get a proper result. I'm not going to do that.

So, I'm going to suspend racing for a bit, work on the track build, finalizing my elevations, and running time trials. That'll give me plenty to do and still keep the racing fair. To be honest, I should probably disqualify that race from the program altogether. We'll see about that. Lap times will change until it's permanent, in which case I'll likely start over from scratch tracking car progress. There won't be any point in comparing the time of the cars on the finished track to what they ran when the track was under construction.

This is the 100th post on this blog. I didn't think it was going to be what it was. Originally it was just going to be some cool shots of my basic track and that was about it. But, as the slot car fever gets hotter and hotter, so does the need to do something like this for completion purposes. I don't know if anybody reads it, and that's great if there are people actually reading it. But I won't let any of that slow me down around here.
So, happy 100th post to me. Let's see how fast we can get to 200.