Our second HO club night of the year falls just two days after the club's tenth birthday. We'll be celebrating with an evening of Nascar oval-ish action on our homage to the Trenton Speedway...

   

The start of the night's action will be heralded by Worthing Town Crier, Bob Smytherman - and they'll be cake, bucket-loads of sweets and a prize draw with prizes big and small donated by AFX, Scalextric, Slot Car Magazine, Jadlam Racing Models and Woodcote painted resin bodies.

Ebay is always good for a laugh and I often have a chuckle when this one pops up yet again. LINK

He has been relisting it regularly for at least two years with no takers, I wonder why nobody wants this superb professionally made item?

Please move to another area if this is the wrong place for this....
 
Good morning fellow humans,
We got rid of our dining room table.
I think it is 80 CM by 200 CM (i.e. two section 1 meter long each) with a leaf about 50 CM.
The old frame was heavy steal which we got rid of.


I was able to save (read: hide) the tops from the skip/junk yard and now that I have convinced my daughter to get rid of her drum set I want use this for a semi-permanent layout.

I want to be able to fold the table up in case I do have to tear it down for some reason.

I have a simple and some not so simple questions.
Simple question: What is the ideal height for a slot car table?
I think the original is was about 80 cm high but I am thinking something higher would be more comfortable.  I was thinking 1 meter but I was wondering if someone has experience and help?

The big question is how to make the legs fold (without it costing a ton of money).

It of course has to be stable as people me lean on or against it.

Ideally I would be able to add the leaf to make a decent sized table.

My main goal is to just have a track to mostly do tests and have fun runs.

Folding table legs exist but are not too high and relatively expensive.

I am also fairly clueless on how to get the sections to hold together and be stable.
I was thinking of a flat U shaped bracket that you slide a piece of wood through to keep in place, or a rotating piece of wood.

I am pretty sure though that none of my ideas will work because they almost never do...  

I am on the continent of Europe in the heart of the EU so brand names may or may not be of help...
Thanks!

   

Our first WHO/digital event of 2020 is a Digital Wednesday - featuring a Nascar club car team race and a Trans-Am pairs race.

We'll be racing on Simon's latest creation...

   

All the post-race coverage will be here on SlotRacer Online!

Spotted this display in my local Dobbies garden centre, since when was plant fleece a dangerous weapon?
       

Hearing stories from way back in the 1990s, I understand the London Toy Fair was worth a visit to view most of the new slot car releases. These days it's pretty much only Scalextric and the vast space of the Olympia exhibition hall is crammed full of tens of thousands of toys from many hundreds of companies - it is an amazingly imaginative and diverse market, but also seriously competitive.

   

Hornby Hobbies had a good spread of new products from all their ranges on display, including full-size and Micro Scalextric tracks to play with...

       

The Scalextric team were rather proud - they had picked up a Toy Fair Hero award for the new Batman vs Joker Spark Plug set. The award is a big deal - only 25 are handed out each year, chosen from the thousands of new products unveiled at the event. These are the 25 new toys judged by an independent panel of retailers - along with input from the British Toy & Hobby Association - to be the most exciting, innovative and creative at the event...

   

As part of the award, Scalextric's Head of Brand - Martyn Weaver - had to take the set to the Toy Fair Demo Zone to be tested by a group of enthusiastic young people live on TV. The Spark Plug controller does take a little getting used to, but despite the Demo Zone crew trying out the set for the first time, they enjoyed themselves and gave the experience a big thumbs up.

         

Back on the Hornby stand, I grabbed a pic of one of the Camaros that got me a bit over-excited the other week. I also spotted another three-wheeler van in the new Corgi range...

         

Hornby also had an outlying booth for the new Bassett-Lowke Steampunk railway models. They grabbed my attention on the Hornby website and they looked a hundred times better in the flesh (as models usually do). On hand was Laurie, who starred as a leading light in Team Steampunk during the first series of the Great Model Railway Challenge on Channel 5 TV. Laurie and the team have played an important role in getting the range off the ground...

         

More to come...

Given identical components - body, chassis, wheels, tyres, etc. (other than gears of course), which should be the better motor configuration, inline or anglewinder?

I know there'd be lots of variables but basically, I have an inline Slot.it BMW McLaren F1 GTR running a 22k ScaleAuto long can 'Endurance' motor, an unused anglewinder pod, time on my hands but no track to test it on.

So do I swap all the components over and hope the change of config. shows a general improvement, or leave it alone?

I need a long background for my track and have some scenic downloads from various places but where is a cheap place to get them printed. I am thinking of five at 3 feet long and about 2 feet high. Only place I found online is asking £12 each...so £60, is that the usual rate?

I really like the Scalextric Chevrolet Monte Carlo and Ford Thunderbird. They are big and tough and perfect for digital racing. However, the Monte Carlo has a problem with lap counting in ARC Pro digital mode. This is something Dr_C has looked at both theoretically and in practice.

The Monte Carlo counts laps perfectly in the analogue mode of ARC Pro - and also with ARC Air, ARC One and other Scalextric analogue lap counters. It is only the digital mode of ARC Pro which is a problem - and I do find that it counts laps reliably on Red, Green and Blue but does miss some laps on Yellow, Orange and White. Basically, the higher the ID number (colours to the right on the powerbase), the greater the risk of missing laps.

The two-step lap counting mechanism involves a black coloured guide breaking a horizontal IR sensor in the track (used in analogue mode and with ARC Air and One). In digital mode, the powerbase then needs to know what car ID has crossed the line. A second vertical sensor immediately searches for the car ID via the digital chip's LED. This second sensor is a set distance behind the first and there is a very short window of searching for the ID. In practice, Dr_C has found that the optimum performance for the second sensor is when the rear edge of the guide to LED distance is in a range between 6mm and 14mm (10mm plus or minus 4mm) - and the absolute maximum is 24mm.

I measured the gaps on both the Thunderbird and the Monte Carlo...

   

The T-Bird is right on the money at 10.6mm. The Monte Carlo is 23.86mm, right on the limit - which explains the issues with lap counting.

   

The easiest fix I've come up with is to wrap some black PVC electrical tape around the guide so it trails back to 10.6mm in front of the LED - marked with the gold dot on the picture below.

   

The tape does add extra width to the guide and - if you will be modifying the car permanently to run exclusively on ARC Pro digital - you could sand down the guide a little on both sides to compensate. I haven't found problems on any of my Scalextric Sport track pieces (including Radius 1s), but the tape does clearly rub. If you have any track pieces that have been bent and the slot closed up at all, the wider guide is likely to get stuck and the slot must opened out again or you risk damaging the digital chip if you gun the motor to get past the blockage.

The first thing to do is to remove the braid plate. Then cut a long length of tape and attach it - one side at a time - to the guide blade, the bottom of the tape just above the slot for the braid plate and then stick the trailing ends together. It is important the tape is wrapped tightly around the front of the blade...

   

Then trim the tape level with the bottom of the guide blade (or top when the car is up-side-down!) and cut at the back in line with the gold dot marking 10.6mm from the LED...

   

Then re-fit the braid plate, which will require looping it over the tape extension at the rear of the guide...

   

We are then ready to race and count laps...

   

There is another issue with the LED being so far back which the guide extension will not solve. This impacts on both lap counting and lane changing. The LED must be directly over the slot to trigger the lane changer and lap counting sensors - any sideways movement of the rear wheels (out of a corner, fishtailing on a straight etc) will move the LED off the centre line - and the further back the LED is positioned from the guide pivot, the further off the centre line the LED will be. Slot.it suggest a maximum distance of 35mm from the guide pivot to the LED and the Monte Carlo is 33.4mm, the T-Bird only 20.14mm.

What this means is there must be at least one half straight between the exit of a corner and either a lane changer, pit entry or the ARC Pro powerbase - otherwise LED and sensor will not line up. This is good practice for any digital track design and running any digital cars. A full straight is even better - especially if running cars without traction magnets. The Monte Carlo will be more susceptible to missing sensors than the T-Bird, so that is important for the drivers to remember.

I received a Pendle FB press release yesterday illustrating a bundle of new cars from Slot.it and Policar.

No idea how to link it to here, but the cars and liveries looked nice...