Judging from the date on the bottom of the last entry, it seems like a year has gone by, though it really does not seem that long. Ah well, such is life. Well, I have still been active in the hobby, both with the club and with the track at home. Many of you will not be surprised to find that I've done absolutely nothing in terms of updating track scenery. There are still areas that need some sort of scenery put down over what is bare particle board, but the muse has not struck so I've done little more than clean the surface every once in a while. I'm sure that something will happen in the near future.
To the club, we have finished a season of wood oval racing, and I did not do as well as I'd have liked, but it was still fun. That has gone and a new one has started (generally the wood track season is 6 months with the plastic track season a year (or in this case more than a year). I like the plastic season as I'm quite successful being unbeaten in the LeMans Prototype class and winning about half of the Grand Am events. We are now in the process of nominating new classes as the plastic season ends in March.
Back at home, most of my efforts have been going into rehabing
and repainting 'used' slot cars. Some of these have been VERY used and there are
times when I wonder what folks have been doing to get these cars to such a
state. However, they are cheap and I get to use my modeling skills on these.
Mostly it is removing the mold seams from the body as well as repairing a bunch
of damage. Sometimes parts are missing, which results in scrounging or buying
new ones. Mostly it is asking on the forums for bits and pieces from dead cars
that other folks have as new replacement parts are rarely easily available. Of
course, some require more work than others, especially when 'repaired' by using
the mantra that if a little super glue fixes things, a LOT should make it so
much better. Much sanding is required for these once the paint is stripped.
For the most part, I like to use rattle can paint. One reason
is that I have
quite a bit of it. A few years back, Testors sent me several of
their one step lacquer metalflake colors and I've bought a few other shades
since then. This paint, along with Tamiya's rattle can gloss paints (which are
acrylic lacquer), dry quickly and won't pull up when removing tape. In this way,
you can get a nice, sharp boundary line when doing two color schemes or racing
stripes. To the right is how it turned out after painting and decals.
There are more repaints at the head of the article.
As you can see at least from the image, I've managed to do
quite a few since last time with even more in the pipeline. I find that I enjoy using animé
images for the hood or roof of a car. These are not difficult to find as there
are many websites that have large collections of images from which to choose.
Adds a bit of interest to things and printing out decals is not difficult as
long as the image has a white background. If not, I use white decal pa
per and
due to the natural semi-transparency of white paper, install multiple decals to
get a proper color density. This is especially needed over dark surfaces or when
going over two different shades.
Here
is an image of a hood design where I didn't use white underlying paper and the
image is quite dark, despite the somewhat light background. Basically, if it
isn't a white background, then the image needs to be printed on white decal
paper.
So enough on painting cars, but it has been pretty much the only thing that has been new since the last update. Sure, cars are still being added to the collection, but not at the rate it was a few years ago. Still, I enjoy running the various cars. To me, it is relaxing and gives me a chance to think through things that have been going on and what's to come. It is the same sort of relaxation I get while mowing the lawn or building a model.
Moving to a slightly different topic, a week or so back our club ran the Petite Le Mans. Basically, they took the 24 hours and reduced the time by 1/32 to match the cars. The cars had to have lights that would stay on even when deslotted. We ran 5.6 minute heats with four heats in light and four with the lights turned off. It was a ton of fun and my team ran a Corvette that I prepped for the event. Thanks to my inability to stay in the slot as often as I'd have liked, we ended up in second place after 45 minutes of racing. We were beaten by less than half a lap with our team feet away from lap 259 and the other team halfway around the track on lap 259. Close,eh?
June 2011
I hope you learned a bit and if you have any questions or wish to share your experiences or images of your track, I'd like to hear from you on the subject so please e-mail me at mmreaders@aol.com.
Scott