As part of a little experiment - inspired by an unexpected question - I got a single lane hillclimb working using Scalextric Sport Digital pit entry / exit pieces (thread here). It has now become more than just a technical experiment and I plan to gradually turn it into a scenic layout. I've been looking for ages at ways of having a permanent 'round-the-walls' 1/32 scale track to squeeze in my office - along with the 7-foot timed HO drag strip (thread here) on one wall and a fun 9 x 2.5 ft two-lane HO track that's tucked behind the door, under the strip.

The Crystal Palace-inspired idea (see here) I worked on at the start of Lockdown 1.0 was way too big once I actually laid out the track pieces in the room. That reminded me why I'd down-sized to HO all those years ago... Meanwhile, I updated the drag strip, held lots of proxy races, then did quite a lot of 1/32 scale rug-racing - including 4 stages of the WHO Winter Rally-Sprint proxy. But I did want to have fun with some scenics and have a 1/32 track where I could flip a switch and run some cars any time.

I played with the idea of a modular rally track, with each 4x2 ft routed module representing one of my favourite rallies. They'd all join together like a N-Trak model railway. I routed the little foamboard ice track used in the Winter Rally-Sprint to learn more about the techniques, but realised plastic sectional track was the only sensible way to do the modules. And then the space issue returned - not enough space to keep the modules set up and not enough space to store them...

So the email asking if the Scalextric pit pieces would work in a single-lane hillclimb really got me thinking. I hadn't seen that done with sectional track before. If I could get it to work as a concept, then I might have a solution to my space problem. You can see how I slightly modified the pit pieces and how I reverse the polarity on the main strip in the other, more technical thread here: slotracer.online/community/showthread.php?tid=2047

This is more about planning what the little layout will look like and how it will drive - and any advice and gentle correction of rookie errors are most welcome!

   

The layout is a single lane between two turnaround loops. It runs along two walls and then doubles back to a detachable lower loop, which doesn't intrude too much into the room, but can be removed and stored if necessary. The elevation from top to bottom is 15-inches. Removing the lower loop does give the option of extending the track into the rest of the room and adding the loop at the end. That would give a much longer track and an elevation of nearly four feet.

I have tweaked the design - and continue to do so the more I drive it. The last change was to remove the half straight before the lower loop, so the outer edge of the loop now sits just in front of the bridge, rather than underneath it. I have cut up a big sheet of 5mm plywood, put all the pieces in place and am gradually working out the angles and gradients before I start fixing the benchwork permanently. That's mostly coming from running different cars, but also considering the scenery...

   

I thought long and hard about themes - the mosaic of my favourite rallies was still a possibility, but I decided I wanted something more coherent and seamless. A part of the world that means a lot to me - and is home to some of my favourite rallies - is the western basin of the Mediterranean Sea: up the western edge of Italy, round to Valencia in Spain and including the Balearic Islands, Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily. A particularly favourite area is the 300 mile stretch of coast, hills and mountains between the ports of La Spezia and Marseille. It's a magical place and has inspired some vivid memories. The areas around Sanremo and Monte Carlo sit very nicely in that theme - as does Antibes - but the geology and scenery is not dissimilar to Corsica and to northern Catalonia. There are bright colours, the mix of ancient & modern, steep gradients, hairpins, tarmac, unmade roads, sun, rain, snow, rocks, trees and lots of people.

I don't want to pin myself down to one place or one event, but the pre-1997 mixed-surface  Rallye Sanremo has been a particular inspiration...



I have already begun to mock up - with cardboard, foam strips and crunched up paper - where some of those elements might sit on the layout and whether they work or not...

   

There's not a lot of room and the track isn't very long, so I want to concentrate on just three detailed scenes and much of the rest will be very low relief or simple backdrops. I'll be scratch-building almost all of it and sourcing some of the details, like figures and furniture - plus a Vespa and a Ducati. It's the sort of long-term project I really fancy and I can immerse myself in for a few weeks every now and again, but have the functioning track to run cars on while the scenics gradually progress.

I really like how two of the key scenes - the village and the farm - are taking on lives of their own in my imagination, rather than remaining static images... The focus of the village suddenly became a tiny local bar / café with a small terrace overlooking the 90-degree bend after the bridge. There will be lights fitted in the bar and the low-relief village backdrop for night running. The farm was very sketchy, but is now stripped back to a few bits of building(s) with bougainvillea growing over the walls and trees around - allowing space for a small service area to the side, perhaps. The hairpin at the bottom of the hill is just lots and lots of people.

The lower loop will have a few people and will be fairly flat - as it'll need to be stored from time to time. The transitions will be simple - more man-made walls than walls of natural rock, plus trees, foliage and a striking, but not overly-complex bridge. Painting (and possibly texturing) the track will come after some experimentation. The surface will be widened a little in most places.

There's a lot to be getting on with

Slot.It F22s have long been my tyre of choice for home use but it seems that they will be discontinued in the near future along with the similar N22. A new compound, G25, has been recommended to me by Tel (Savage) so are they any good? Only one way to find out - buy some and do a back to back test with a varied selection of tyres.

Details:
Track - 50ft copper taped routed mdf, matt emulsion, unvarnished paint surface.
Car used - Slot.It Merc 190 DTM.
Tyre prep - none apart from light sanding to remove shiny top surface. No oil, no glue. Truing, gluing and oiling will always change the characteristics but that is a whole different can of worms.
Temperature - a bit chilly in the garage today so performance slightly reduced with all tyres. 

Results and comments:
1) Scalextric stock. 10 lap average time 7.9 secs. Best lap 6.94.
Rubbish as expected.

2) Slot.It C1. 10 lap average time 6.1 secs. Best lap 5.79.
These are the stock tyres fitted to the car and are meant for plastic track so not that great on wood.

3) Wasp urethanes. 10 lap average time 5.69 secs. Best lap 5.53.
Urethanes are always better than original manufacturer stock tyres but rarely as good as decent rubber ones. They do last forever though.

4) Slot.It N22. 10 lap average time 5.46 secs. Best lap 5.38.

5) Slot.It F22. 10 lap average time 5.41 secs. Best lap 5.35.

6) Slot.It G25. 10 lap average time 5.42 secs. Best lap 5.32.

7) NSR Ultra. 10 lap average time 5.2 secs. Best lap 4.98.
These are always the canine round things in terms of ultimate lap times but come with the disadvantages that they have a very short lifespan and quality control is terrible. You are lucky to get a useable pair out of any packet. Probably essential at club level but I rarely use them at home.

Conclusions:
Best lap times are always a bit misleading as you can never hit the sweet spot with any consistency and the average over ten laps is a more useful guide so N22/F22/G25 are remarkably close with just a few hundredths of a second between them. Initial thoughts therefore are that the new G25 compound should be alright as a suitable replacement but longevity remains an unknown as I have not used them long term. They do seem a bit tighter fit on the rims than the other two. Mind you they come with a 46p price hike over the others and Pendle currently has stock of F22s so I won't be changing over just yet.

As always these are my findings as an average home user on my track on a particular day - your mileage may well vary depending on track type and skill level.

And Finally......
If you believe that  urethanes ruin the grip for rubber ones and/or vice versa - suffice to say that I duplicated the tests in reverse order and the results were, to all intents and purposes, identical.

Hey all! 

This looks like my go to site as the 2 others I signed up for won't let me post or even view pages.

Got a great deal on a Carrera Digital 1:32 GT Face Off set. Used to go slot car racing back in the (I think late) 6o's.

Two questions, will a Scalextric 1:32 car work on the Carrera track w/out modification? If not what would I need to do to make it work? 

Looking forward to getting back into this and seeing all the innovations compared to my old analog cars.

I loved the look of the Scalextric short tail GTR, but unfortunately that is where my love ended !
Apart from the usual Scalextric axle slop and guide slop, the chassis is just not beefy enough around the axle/motor area, and as a result on wood once it has some grippy tyres on, it hops, chatters, and ties itself in knots.
I could have spent time bracing the chassis and sorting the guide, but what I really fancied was a proper chassis, but no one made one that I could find.
Luckily, Angelo of Amato Slot Car Design was amenable to my proposition to make one.

The chassis is flat and designed for the body to sit on it (its thin enough at the edges that it is unobtrusive this way).
He even managed to squeeze in a diffuser detail and fitment of the stock lights, not an easy task when the pod fiittings eat into the little space left at the rear of the tail on this car !





As is standard on most of his designs, we also have grub screw adjustable height for the front axle.

I opted to retain the wheels and motor from the donor, and fit the lighting.



Everything went together beautifully.



But as I wanted more body rock, I decided to trim down the edges and rear mounting post a tiny bit to sit inside the body.



I replaced the Scalextric screws with Sloting Plus smooth shanked body screws, and the axles with Slot.it items. I used a Mitos 8 tooth plastic pinion mated to an All Slot Car 25 tooth crown gear. 
I used Slot.It G25 tyres on the rear and rummaged through my tyres to find suitable fronts (the stock ones were a bit loose fitting on the rims for my liking, and needed to be a fraction smaller to allow body rock).

I think the car now sits perfectly on the track, and of course it handles like it should on wood 

Thank you Angelo, for yet another wonderful chassis 

This is a return loop for a single-lane hillclimb (or rally track) using one Scalextric Sport Digital pit lane piece as the 'Y' of the loop. I was asked a while back whether it was possible and I thought it probably was... but the only way to find out was to try it!

This is the Scalextric Digital pit lane...

   

The official product costs £54 (£45 at Pendles) and contains entry and exit pieces, plus borders and barriers. The two track pieces (all we need for this project) are often seen for £25-30 split from digital sets - no borders or barriers included. You could try Jadlams. The pit lanes come in right-hand (C7015) and left hand (C7014) versions. The difference is which way the pit entry directs you from the track - to the right or to the left. The entry piece has all the lane-changing electronics installed, plus a moving 'flipper'. The exit piece has no electronics and the flipper is fixed with a metal pin, so its point sits in the centre of the slot. The mouldings for exit and entry pieces are identical - the plastic bits, flipper and rails of the exit piece of a RH set are the same as the entry of the LH set. The electronics of an entry piece can be removed quite easily.

On paper, there are lots of ways of making a return loop with a digital pit exit or entry piece. Here are just two, using the single lane straight (C7016) and curve (C7017) pieces, plus either the inner or outer lanes of Radius 1 curves - two C8202 packs (cut into single lanes) would suffice for the pair of loops...

   

The first obvious thing to notice is that you'll get a short if you attached power to one of these. The loop has to be isolated from the main, single-lane track - and the direction on the main track must change before the car exits the loop. It's fairly basic 'DC' (as opposed to digital) model railway return loop wiring...

   

With the loop isolated and a manual DPDT switch on the main track, I was ready to find out if the pit piece would work as the 'Y' of the loop. The idea was that the fixed flipper on the standard exit piece would allow cars to go straight on, round the loop and then merge back in the other direction...

   

This was the case with most cars - old and new Scalextric, old and new SCX, Ninco S, Teamslot, Policar. I tried a dozen runs of each - a bit of a 'click' with some, but all went straight on and around the loop and - if I remembered to flip the direction switch - they continued back in the opposite direction. If I didn't, the car very gracefully reversed off the track.

However, there were a couple of cars - both Ninco with the older grey guide blade that either hammered into the end of the flipper or went the wrong way down the 'Y' and reversed off the track in the loop. I did have a suspicion this might happen. The guides weren't any fatter or less straight than cars that went straight on, so there wasn't any obvious car fix.

What I did have was an idea to add a spring to the flipper to pull it wide open to oncoming traffic and then let the car exiting the loop slip out...

   

This meant removing the fixing pin, adding a screw to the solenoid socket (which physically moves the flipper on an 'active' entry piece) and then hooking a controller spring round the screw and a piece of brass rod braced between two sockets moulded into the plastic. It worked a treat...



I will be trying slightly softer springs (that one was from an old Scalextric digital controller), but the hard spring did the job very well - no chance of anything catching the end of the flipper and an accelerating car had no problems exiting the loop.

This wasn't just an exercise in curiosity, it is a possible solution to my desire for a track in my office / slot room that goes round two walls, doesn't take up much space, but allows me to experiment with some scenics. All previous plans have failed the space test. This might be possible...

   

And if it is, it will be the subject of its own thread before too long

Good information on chassis selection and motor mount suspension is hard to find.

Some useful pointers from NSR
http://www.nsrslot.it/assets/download/gu...one_GB.pdf

Some good info from Black Arrow
https://www.blackarrow.es/archivos/1357676535.pdf

Slot.IT  manufacture suspension systems, even magnetically levitated systems,  but I can find no Slot.IT specific information on setting up the suspension. 

Chassis and Motor mount suspension in general : 

-Lower grip surfaces require softer chassis.
-Higher grip surfaces require harder, stiffer chassis.
-Bumpy and uneven surfaces require softer suspension
-Glass-smooth surfaces can use harder suspension.
Often a compromise setup has to be found (eg a slippery but bump free surface)

A soft spring screwed down harder is not the same as using a hard spring!
Further generalised recommendations are hard to figure out because each manufacturer uses differrent numbers of spring mount points.
(NSR use 3  slot.it use 4, thunderslot use 5 )


Full Size racing cars often use hard suspension but  not  because it improves cornering. 
The suspension is "hard" (in f1 for example) to keep the aerodynamic components where they are supposed to be in relation to the rest of the car and the road .
At full size, high speed,aero is  more important to the road holding than the suspension.

Front end suspension systems
- drop arms 
- sliding sprung guides

I've not found any good sources for how to set these options up so if anyone has information, please post. 

There is far more to suspension design than I  will ever know.
Experimentation and track time is required to figure out what works for you and what does not. 
Keep a log of suspension settings for each car and note how small changes impact the road holding and handling.
Only change one thing at a time 

Please feel free to comment and throw rocks. 
(I'm thick skinned) 

AlanW

Love these little cars, had the chance to buy them all at once from a guy where I bought another car and asked him if he had more slot cars. 
The two white ones in front where the same cars, I modified and detailed one

Good evening,

My pseudo is Marcury. I'm living near by Paris (France, not Texas), so excuse-me for my English, please.
I started playing slot in the cave of my neighbors. The old man had a grandson the same age as me but he also had a large Scalex circuit. Oh, large because I was young, but yes it was a long one at this time. I spent hours playing with his grandson. One year I received a Jouef at Christmas. It was a competitor to my electric N gauge train. But a few years later we moved. I was older and I stopped playing with my very small 1/48 Jouef slot car circuit. I continued to play train. But the song was alive in mymemory, deep inside. And the years have passed. My wife hated these hobbies. Since, my 1/160 train is in a small case. And one day we divorced. To stay on my feet I bought a motorcycle (for me) and I offered a Scalex to my three children.
Was it a good gift ?
Was it truely a gift for my children ?
We spent hours playing together. And the only race I won was with my daughter. So, yes it was a good gift for them... sure for me too andI was very happy to play...
Now they are bigger. They have left home.
The circuit is bigger too but it is still at home. And I still play with it.
I've met many people around Paris region and beyond where to play on their large permanent tracks (mine is not permenent). Many new friends...

4 years ago one guy created a new type of race in France. François created the FOLM Dakar d'Antan. It was a meeting for a whole week-end. Around 12 special stages were build to play the Dakar with slot cars. Diane Thierry-Mieg was present as a "patron" of the event. She was discovering the slto and many of us were discorvering slot rallye raid. The Spanish champion was present. It was great ! 2 years later we played the second edition and Diane was still present but with a throttle this time. Third one should be this year, May 2021, 15th and 16th, but is still depending of the health crisis. I will share you info later.

But I don't play only rallye raid slot cars. I also have many cars in my garage (too many says my cashier - and problably thinks my new wife too).
2 years ago with a friend we resurrected an old track from an old club and got it going again... A 38m 4 lanes track. Great ! Since one year the door is closed due to governmental restrictions, but it is just a question of time... we all are in the starting blocks for the reopening.

I met Graham on another forum and he asked me to come and visit you. Here I am, with pleasure, to exchange about slot cars, to stay young ;-)

Best regards.

The Corgi Wall's Ice Cream van from 1966 is legendary and commands premium prices on the collector's market. If any of you would like one for your 1/43 layout a reissue is available for the princely sum of £1.99 including postage!
   

No catch, genuine offer but be quick as supplies are limited.

Link to Offer

Use promo code COS21AH if you would like a free Corgi badge as well.

   

Teamslot SRE30 - Ford Escort RS2000 'NUF 617P' Roman Bronze. Limited Edition of 200 items, exclusive to Weevils Slot Cars. RRP £57.50.

UK retailer Weevils Slot Cars have commissioned this Teamslot Escort RS2000 as their first limited edition car. Slot car enthusiasts Jonathan and Tim have built up their Sussex-based business over the past few years and launched a new website in 2020 as an official retailer for Scalextric, Pioneer, Teamslot and Avant Slot. They see special edition cars as an important part of the Weevils ethos and are currently working with Avant Slot on a Subaru model as their 2022 exclusive limited edition - possibly as part of a membership scheme.

   

The Ford Escort RS2000 they've chosen for this 2021 release is pretty special. It's the unique Roman Bronze automatic RS2000 produced at Halewood for the personal use of Henry Ford II during his visit to the UK in 1977. The original car featured some luxury touches, including a cream leather interior...

   

I suspect it was a change from the usual luxury car offered to Hank the Deuce. However, he was not just the CEO of Ford Motor Co, but also an ambassador for the brand - and the RS2000 was certainly a flagship model in Europe at the time.

The Roman Bronze RS2000 is scheduled to arrive with Weevils next month. It can be pre-ordered directly at their website here.

Thanks to Tim and Jonathan for details of their limited edition car. You can browse their entire range, including monthly special offers and a 'Collectors Corner' at weevilsslotcars.co.uk