17th-Mar-22, 09:07 AM
Our HO warm-up event went smoothly last night...
The main thing was to get a few of us together and go through the motions of a club night. Perhaps not surprisingly, the humans were far more rusty than the track or equipment! It was great to welcome some new faces to our set-up team. With Covid cases still high, it's more important to have a big group of volunteers in case people have to cancel at the last minute.
The HO track hadn't been used for 24 1/2 months and was stored in crates in an unheated side room at the Barn. There was absolutely no rust and very little dirt came off when Jerome shined up every piece with a pan scourer. That's probably thanks to the long-term effect of INOX MX3 we run round on a Micro Scalextric car's braids at the start of each event - which, of course, I forgot to pack last night... Even so, everything fired up and we had the track running as quickly as if we'd raced four weeks ago.
We have made some changes to the technology. Gone are three ancient Windows 98 laptops and monitors - in is one newer laptop running Windows 10 and with an HDMI output to a massive 50" TV. We'll use this for both WHO/digital and our HO nights. I took Race Coordinator along for a quick demo, but people really took to it and we used it all night. In 2 hours, I'd trained up three others to run heats, add parts etc.. To be honest, I think all the 15 people there could easily run a race - it's that intuitive. The only headache is the event set-up... TopDown will be getting an email for advice - I have 3 weeks to get RC ready to run a full WHO event in the format we want.
It was brilliant to be back - still plenty of care is needed with cases and hospital admissions spiking on the south coast (meaning one no-show last night). We did manage to get a very good breeze through most of the Barn - and mask-wearing and hand-sanitizing became second-nature pretty quickly. Back at our last event in March 2020, hand sanitizer cost £5-10 for a 500ml bottle. We have a supply of 22 bottles than cost us about a tenner in total! That should keep us going for a while...
Fingers-crossed, in 3 weeks we will have officially 'returned to the Barn' and this thread will have done its job.
The main thing was to get a few of us together and go through the motions of a club night. Perhaps not surprisingly, the humans were far more rusty than the track or equipment! It was great to welcome some new faces to our set-up team. With Covid cases still high, it's more important to have a big group of volunteers in case people have to cancel at the last minute.
The HO track hadn't been used for 24 1/2 months and was stored in crates in an unheated side room at the Barn. There was absolutely no rust and very little dirt came off when Jerome shined up every piece with a pan scourer. That's probably thanks to the long-term effect of INOX MX3 we run round on a Micro Scalextric car's braids at the start of each event - which, of course, I forgot to pack last night... Even so, everything fired up and we had the track running as quickly as if we'd raced four weeks ago.
We have made some changes to the technology. Gone are three ancient Windows 98 laptops and monitors - in is one newer laptop running Windows 10 and with an HDMI output to a massive 50" TV. We'll use this for both WHO/digital and our HO nights. I took Race Coordinator along for a quick demo, but people really took to it and we used it all night. In 2 hours, I'd trained up three others to run heats, add parts etc.. To be honest, I think all the 15 people there could easily run a race - it's that intuitive. The only headache is the event set-up... TopDown will be getting an email for advice - I have 3 weeks to get RC ready to run a full WHO event in the format we want.
It was brilliant to be back - still plenty of care is needed with cases and hospital admissions spiking on the south coast (meaning one no-show last night). We did manage to get a very good breeze through most of the Barn - and mask-wearing and hand-sanitizing became second-nature pretty quickly. Back at our last event in March 2020, hand sanitizer cost £5-10 for a 500ml bottle. We have a supply of 22 bottles than cost us about a tenner in total! That should keep us going for a while...
Fingers-crossed, in 3 weeks we will have officially 'returned to the Barn' and this thread will have done its job.
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