Welcome to the latest edition of 'In the Groove'. The last update was December of 2013 and since then I got involved in N scale (1/150) trains, which put much of my home slot car work onto the back burner. In fact, other than racing in the weekly racing series in St. Louis (of which I compete in about 65% of the events), the track basically collected dust for about six months.
It also meant that I spent no money on additional cars and in fact, during 2014 I was a vendor at two of the St. Louis slot car shows and sold off a number of duplicate cars and some other materials that I wasn't using. I guess this is pretty common with hobbies. One gets intensely involved in the beginning and then things level out and then decline a bit when other interests surface.
Not to mean that I've given up on it as that is very much not the case. In fact, around July, I put in a concerted effort to clean up the track and get things running again. When it comes to plastic track, there are basically two ways to do this. One is to get one's favorite cleaning material and wipe down everything.
Now with plastic track, one has to be careful not to use any material which might attack the plastic so things like naphtha, thinners or even lighter fluid, besides the problems with it being flammable, are not used. What I have used with success is WD-40 soaked in a cleaning rag. As most of you know, WD-40 is mostly fish oil and is a very good, non-flammable cleaner. Others will use rubbing alcohol. This material not only picks up dust, but will also remove all the carbon arcing from the metal power strips on the track. It is time consuming and not a lot of fun.
The other way, which is not as work intensive, but also does not clean the power strips, is to simply run cars, cleaning the tires every lap until one can go for a long time without removing any dirt from the tires when cleaning them. Again, I use WD-40 to clean the tires as it will not hurt the track or the silicone based tires I use. There are several Can-Am cars I have with very wide tires that I keep specifically for this purpose. The more powerful the motors in the cars, the better it seems to be in digging out what dirt is in the track. While not as much work, it does take a while. Fortunately I use Scalextric track, which is relatively smooth so doesn't hold as much dirt. Some tracks are quite rough and while it give great traction, it is also very difficult to clean. Running on the track every day or so is really the best way to keep it clean. Doing so means that only about once every year or so will I need to give the power strips a good cleaning.
As I mentioned, I am still running cars with the St. Louis club and we have started a new season last week. For this there are six different sets of cars that we needed to get together to race.
I will start with the plastic season, which runs once a month for a year. This year we went with cars that ran at Le Mans from about 1995 to the present. These could be any car with any wheels, gears and body. They have to be based on a plastic ready to run car and the maximum motor is one that operates at 18,000 rpm or less. For this class I painted up an old Fly Kraemer and replaced all the plastic wheels with nice aluminum ones. In its first outing it proved to be disappointing and I may have to run an older car than seems to be quicker that I ran two other times we did this type of car several years back.
The other is a Scalextric Mini Cooper. These are a ton of fun as they are quite limited to modifications (as in tires) and they are also top heavy compared to other cars so take some challenge to drive. These all have magnets in them as one of our plastic tracks is not well suited to no-magnet cars as it is quite bumpy. Basically the owner built it with a lot of second hand track that was warped.
Here are the two cars being run in the Plastic Series. Naturally, I have repainted both cars as it is something I like to do.
The other year long series is for oval tracks. Currently there is only one oval we race on regularly, though there used to be more, and so this is limited to one time a month. There is one other oval, but it is a track that can be converted into a road course and the owner only has it in the oval configuration for about a month each year around the time of the Indy 500. For some reason, the other folks who had ovals either sold them or just stopped participating.
Both of these cars are based on metal chassis as the track is painted particle board (what we all call a 'wood' track). One is a 1/32 Indy car which we ran on the oval course a couple of years ago, and the other is a 1/24 old time sprint car. Both of these cars can be built up from easily available parts and like the majority of wood track cars, have a vacuformed body that is painted on the inside. I should also mention that wood cars run on foam tires that wear out rather quickly while plastic cars generally use silicones.
The third series is for wood road courses. There are probably a half dozen or more of these in the area, but I only participate in a few. This is because most of them are quite a distance away. Not a major issue for most of the club which lives in west St. Louis county, about an hour from me, but farther away than I'm willing to drive on a Sunday night.
The two classes are for 1/24 'D3' chassis Le Mans cars from the 1965-73 time frame. The D3 chassis is a standard chassis, but has to be built from kits that are basically just brass sheet and brass rod. For this one I chose a Lola T-70 GT. The other is from what is known as International 32 chassis, which is 1/32 scale. These are, like the open wheel cars, a car you can build up from readily available parts or get one ready to run from various vendors. I picked a Kraemer body for mine. Again, these have vacuform bodies and while I usually get pretty fancy with them, this time around I just stuck to the basics.
There were also two special events in 2014. One was the Petit Le Mans in June. These have two classes. One is for prototype cars and run pretty much the same as the silver Kraemer shown above. The other is for plastic GT cars. All cars have to have lights and the lights have to stay on even when the cars leave the track. This can be easily accomplished by including a capacitor network which charges during the operation of the car and then discharges through the lights when there is no power. There are kits one can buy to accomplish this. I only run the GT class and won the class with a Corvette. This is the fourth time I have raced this car in the last four years and have so far won two firsts, a second and a third. The other event was Thunder Road which I mentioned last installment. Again, my police car took the 'looks pretty' award.
Just in the last several months I have continued with the car repaints for the home track. I mostly go for cars with large flat hoods (bonnets) as they are a more user friendly canvas for the anime artwork I put on them. Some of these are real basket cases with broken bits and missing bits (mostly mirrors and wings, which can be bought as spares though availability is often quite limited). So far I have finished four of them with a few more in the wings. When I do these I basically disassemble the extant bodies, remove the mold seams, primer them and then add the various colors and decals. These are mostly painted with Tamiya and Testors lacquer paints in rattle cans.
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 svanaken61@gmail.com Please note that the previous e-mail has become quite unreliable and is no longer used.
Scott
January 2015