Other Interests.

Ever since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, there has been a need for people to find a way to spend their 'excess' or free time. Initially this meant little more than taking the Sunday one was given off from the mills or the mines to go sightseeing with the family. As the years went on and due to organized labor, workers had more and more free time, there came a need to find additional things to do with this time as work days lessened from 12 hours, to 10 and finally 8. The addition of Saturday as a day off struck the need for more ways for now well-paid and increasingly bored people to occupy their time.

Today, many in the work force are working 10 hour days, four days a week to get their wages and that leaves, you guessed it, more free time. Through the years, most have spent their way into finding ways to fill this space with motor homes, huge boats and motorcycles that rarely get used, expensive cars as toys and so on.

The rest of us have to find more thrifty ways to occupy our time and for us, that is scale modeling. Now I realize that many of us think that this hobby is expensive. But I say that it is one of the most dollar-wise ways to spend time that there is. When you think of the time spent on a project vs the cost once one is properly set up, it is downright miserly. However, we have been over this before.

Some of us have yet other hobbies that we do when we are not gluing or painting and often times this additional hobby is somewhat related to scale modeling. How many of you have a railroad layout, or fly/drive/float Radio Control, or spend time amassing a huge collection of reference books and spend hours reading them, or some other pastime? I dare say most of you.

One thing many of these additional hobbies have in common are that they are things that many of us enjoyed when we were young and now that we have the free time, either through job arrangements or retirement, we are reintroducing ourselves.

For me, a reintroduction to a childhood hobby came in the most innocuous way. I was sent a magazine called Model Car Racing. It is about the current state of slot cars, a hobby that I had thought died back in the early 1970s. Yet, it is not only alive and well but is thriving. The was further spurred on by a purchase of some car bodies at a show earlier on this year. Soon, I was in the attic digging out all the old stuff that had been sitting around gathering dust and corrosion since 1970 or so.

The old track was brought out and plugged in. The cars were cleaned up and though most failed to run, one did. I felt a sting as I was bitten by the bug. I was doomed.

What followed was a foray onto the auction sites for more track and a few more cars. I was able to get some great deals and soon had much of the open area of the basement full of track with little plastic cars zooming around. Today's slot cars are much more detailed and a heck of a lot faster than those old Strombecker and Cox and Riggen cars of the 1960s.

A bit of moving around of the stash in the basement, some careful measuring and a trip to the lumberyard for some particleboard was next. Soon, with the help of the rather prodigious amount of lumber left in the garage by my father before he passed away in 1988, and some standard tools, I had put together a 16 x 6.5 foot  2 lane 1/32 scale circuit measuring about 75 feet in lap length.

I'm now fully hooked and have been spending valuable modeling time assembling and playing with slot cars. Counseling is, of course, totally out of the question. At the moment, I'm putting my time into scenery and have discovered plaster cloth, newspaper and spackling compound work together wonderfully to provide lightweight scenery stuff. It is something that is going slowly, but something new is added all the time, even if it isn't anything more than a bit of paint.

Here is how it looked several weeks ago. Of course, I can't run four cars as it isn't a digital set, but it does show that I've filled about every available space with track. The stupidly fast cars will lap the 75 feet in a little under 7 seconds. The racing direction is how you see it.

I'm having so much fun with it that I'm seriously considering starting a section just for slot cars.

So, any other slot car addicts out there and what do you think about adding these to MM's repertoire?

Scott Van Aken

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