[BAracer]

#82

"Let's pour some rubber..."

JohnK started the ball rolling with an update on the GG Whaletail. He has had one of those eureka moments where, having spend loads of time looking as something and trying to make it fit, you finally realise that you need to scrap it and start from scratch. And that is what he has done with the interior cockpit of the car. Full depth in the original, but needing to be shorter to allow for the motor, and shallower to allow for some body float on the chassis, he has made up a bespoke one that ticked all of Dennis's boxes ahead of the chassis build. Not wishing to worry John, but Greg is itching to have another car giveaway for when he makes it to 2k subscribers. So sign up quickly if you want a chance to win a Porsche...

Brian took us through the validation process he has followed having picked a 3D design for a Sunbeam Tiger free off the internet. It's too long, too wide, too long a wheelbase, but "it's a nice model". Everyone chipped in with ideas on how to get it to match the 1:1 car...and if Brian takes up all the advice, it might look a bit weird and disproportioned, but Dewann will always be there to buy it to go with his new collection of weird and disproportionately shaped comic cars.

Dewann gave us a look at the massive hotel building he has made out of the cardboard kit, and his computer desktop, and his computer desktop, and his computer desktop...Our Leo has taken a slightly different approach to scenery making. He has 3DP'ed a Race Control Tower as an introductory offer from SlotRacer.Online's new 3DP section, courtesy of JMay. All he needs to do now is work out what to do with it! Bill showed off two cars that he has just chipped for digital running. As he is beginning to find out, wiring the chips is the easy part, fitting the wiring into the limited space between the chassis and body is the hard bit!

Garth is after a 1:32 scale Briggs & Cunningham 1959 Corvette. Out came everyone's Corvettes..."No Steve, not that one, not enough headlights.". "No Don, right car, wrong scale". But a probably supplier was named in the Chat. Jeremy wanted to know the secret for making a smooth approach and descent for a bridge on his track. Lots and lots of advice was offered, and almost all of it came down to one, well proven technique that will look the business. 

For Track Topics this week, Greg had a good old moan about how adding chemicals to his foam tyres is causing them to come off the hubs as he goes round corners, or as he calls it, suffering a touch of chatter. He was in complete denial that he was doing anything illegal or outside manufacturers recommendations, so to help him out, Dennis disclosed the secret technique for gluing foam tyres back onto hubs that has evolved over the decades of foam tyre racing.

Bill has a problem with his two lane digital track in that one lane is so much easier to drive that the other, and he was wondering about ways to equalise things up a bit. A simple question, and one that may be quite common. The answers were varied and touched on corner radii, corner visibility, straight/corner relationships, crossover locations on digital tracks and even overtaking techniques on digital tracks. Lots of ideas for consideration. 

Luff was able to demonstrate how he dealt with the topic of track gradient and cambers using a hill climb track he had prepared earlier. This showed how his track starts going up, and just keeps going up. And then goes up some more. What more would you want out of a hill climb track? Dennis had the answer...low cloud. The Halloween race meeting at Electric Dreams featured fancily dressed racers, fancily dressed cars, races run in the twilight zone with just the car headlights to show the way, and...a smoke machine! 

Paul has been quiet on here recently, but he came on this week to reveal why. He has been going round and round all the slot car shops in the UK buying up one piece of SRC spare part each time...calmly, not drawing attention to himself...until this evening. His motivation is to build up examples of all the un-available/discontinued SRC Formula 1 cars out of spare parts! And he has boxes and boxes and takeaway boxes full of bits ready to build up Renaults and Ferraris and the like. Obviously he had to keep it all hush hush in order to avoid alerting SRC who might then has adjusted the price of the spares accordingly. And the other reason of course, was that it has given him lots of boxes that he can now stack up on his workbench and hide his still unopened 3D printer.