Racing Slot Cars

[DrB]

Anyone here race slot cars back in the day?  We had a couple of tracks here.  I ran 1/32 and 1/24 scale cars.  One place had several tracks, The largest had 12 lanes and took the whole area of the basement of the building.  Spent a lot of time building cars with different motors, gear ratios, frames, tires and controllers.  Good times when i was a boy.

Dave..

[tous]

Oh, yeah.

I went the 1/24th scale cars on a Strombecker track  when most of my friends did the Aurora tiny ones.

Much experimentation with tires, motors, brushes and body mods.

They used to have commercial tracks at the mall.

Also in to Cox .049 powered U-control aircraft.

Good times.

 

Edited August 18, 2018 by tous

[Boogieman]

11 minutes ago, DrB said:

Anyone here race slot cars back in the day?  We had a couple of tracks here.  I ran 1/32 and 1/24 scale cars.  One place had several tracks, The largest had 12 lanes and took the whole area of the basement of the building.  Spent a lot of time building cars with different motors, gear ratios, frames, tires and controllers.  Good times when i was a boy.

Dave..

Last year a YUGE track near my mother closed up shop.  But the thing was massive.

[DrB]

1 hour ago, Boogieman said:

Last year a YUGE track near my mother closed up shop.  But the thing was massive.

There was a big track/club here that raced a few years ago, was going to stop and see..  Was gone when I got interested again.

Dave

[janice6]

Slot car racing was the age in our lab for a while.  Engineer and Physicists and Technicians all participated.  The place would empty out at Noon.   One person was the most prolific engine/motor designer.  He has a couple turns of Copper strap on the motor IIRC.  The chassis was a chunk of 1/8 inch thick Aluminum with a blister pack bubble form of a VW to cover up the drivetrain.

 

He punched it full bore at the commercial track down the street.  It got airborne after a couple feet.  It cleared the 1 foot sides of the track in flight and broke the floor tile when it hit.  He was the acknowledged Drag Race champion but banned from the track.

 

When he punched the controller, everybody's car on the track slowed down from the load on the common supply.  He was a fun guy.  He dressed very prim and proper, 60's White shirt, narrow black tie, black suit, narrow brimmed hat and carried his slot car paraphernalia in a matching Black Brief case, that he modified with compartments to hold all the spare parts for the racers. 

[aomagrat]

The last time I slot car raced was in 1984 when I was in the Navy.  My ship pulled into Pearl Harbor and some shipmates and I left the base looking for action.  What we found was a slot car racing shop.  We were having so much fun racing each other we lost track of time and stayed until it closed for the night.

[Walt Longmire]

Never raced at a track in town, but had an awesome set up at home when I was a kid. 

[deputy tom]

My older brother and I had an HO set in the mid 60's. Later we got a 1/24 Stromberg set. He would build custom cars and race at the hobby shop and later at Tom Thumb Speedway.  I bought my son an HO set when he was around eight or nine years old. tom.

Edited August 19, 2018 by deputy tom
spelling error

[DrB]

I had a HO setup at home also but was never the same as the "Slot Shop" where we raced the bigger cars.

Dave..

[Borg warner]

Back in 1965 in southern California there were a couple of slot car drag strips. The cars were 1/24th scale and the "track" was a scale 1/4 mile.  I don't remember what the times were now but I think they were around  6 seconds, a little faster than what real dragsters were doing at the time, The distance was about 60 feet.  there were timers at the beginning an the end of the track and the power strip ended at the end of the track so that cars would keep going and crash into the wall which as about another 20 feet away.  I think the rwas a loosely bunched-up up parachute at the end, too, The cars were all custom made using 1/8th inch magnesium flat stock that you would cut and file to make the frame rails and then  bolt them to a Motor and the one everyone used was called a RAM and it weighed about 5-6 ounces and had a large permanent magnet that surrounded the armature.

The motor had a small gear that drove a big gear attached to a rear axle mounted in ball bearings pressed and glued into the magnesium frame. the rear tires were foam rubber  gas-powered model airplane tires that were mounted on aluminum wheels and turned on a lathe and made into racing slicks. ths strip itself wa made from black Plexiglas. I was in my senior year in High school and had a friend who was a drag racing enthusiast and we used to go to Lions drag strip a lot and this one slot car drag strip was not far from Lions in Long Beach, CA,  We did a lot of experimenting with our cars  using titanium axles an special bearings and re-wound armatures and gear ratios and our cars turned some record times.

One thing that was interesting was that it was a whole different group of people who built and raced these cars and most of them were adults and serious hobbyists unlike younger kids who raced slot cars made for tracks that had curves, One thing we started doing was mounting model car bodies on our dragsters and making them into Funny cars. this was a slight handicap but made it more of a challenge. My friend had a 65 Chevelle el camino body that had no windshield and no bottom to the truck bed so it was very light and had very little wind resistance. I took a different approach. I had a 65 dodge Coronet model that had a thin clear plastic body that you we supposed to paint from the inside and I painted it like Dick Landy's dodge. It had somewhat more wind resistance than my friend's car but not enough to make much difference. 

We only raced those cars from 1965 to 1966 when we graduated from high school and a couple of years afterwards the slot car drag strips closed down.

[DrB]

Yep.. Mid 60's was when I raced.  One place had the drag strip.  I was always one of the roundy.... roundy guys though.  We built our own frames.  Re wound the armatures and all that fun stuff.  Even modified the hand held controllers.  Good times but like above died out in the latter 60's.   Fun times then.

Dave..

[astepup]

There wasn't a slot car drag strip anywhere around here and all I had were various HO scale sets, but I'd buy more track and accessories and had some nice set ups. When I was still married and the kids were little I'd set up a track around the Christmas tree to coincide with the train set and we'd race, but most times we'd both be sitting at the cross section of track waiting for the train to pass.

I actually got some more track sections off Ebuy a few years ago and plan on setting up a really cool track layout and introduce my grandson to the fun.