[woodcote]

Functionally, everything is now ready for the event trial run at the weekend...

   


I decided to use one power supply and a single channel relay board for now. The power is what I use for the 4-lane bullring oval, an adjustable 12-22V, 8 Amp switch-mode DC laptop supply. Also borrowed from the bullring is the legendary 'Cherry Bakewell' switch, which starts and pauses the races on the oval. When pushed and held, this now launches both lanes on the drag strip via the relay. The stuff in the picture has now been fitted in a rather inelegant, but functional enclosure. I'll keep the 2-Channel relay module for the Arduino / Drag Race Coordinator set-up.

I also had time to do a bit of tyre testing, which I'll post on the Proxy Drag Racing Anyone? thread.

[woodcote]

I now have some rather monochrome temporary hoardings for the trial run this weekend...

       

Nothing is quite finished - I don't want to be tempting fate before a good work out over the next couple of days. Who knows, some things might need ripping out and modifying or replacing. The strip does look a lot less like a building site...

   

It's certainly all a bit retro with that 24-year-old laptop and the DOS program. I'll be running through an event format with sixteen Micro Scalextric Street Stock cars, four Super Stocks and four T-Jet Nostalgia Super Stockers. Plus a match race between two Top Fuelers. Qualifying Saturday and Elimination races Sunday. The coverage will be on the Proxy Drag Racing Anyone? thread.

[BAracer]

Looking good!

[Scuderia_Turini]

A lot more tidy than mine... have been having some fun though - 

Planning to get my car in the post on Monday.

Leo

[Pineman]

I have a few lockdown projects on the go and one is updating my HO drag strip. With the future of club racing very uncertain, organising some proxy drag racing might just be a handy stop-gap.

I built a strip three years ago. It should have been a weekend job... throw up a shelf on the wall, set up my Auto World drag strip and - voilà - let's race. But I didn't count on the geometric idiosyncrasies of my house.

This street was built in the 1840s. With bricks and timber in short supply, many of these working people's houses were put together with shingle from the beach, bits of scrap and anything the builders could put their hands on. This is the infamous Brighton 'bungaroosh'. Improvements have been made in the intervening 170+ years (most of the street is still standing), but the outcome is wonky walls, uneven floors and tilting ceilings.

My plan was to put the drag strip on the wall above my test track. I grabbed some perfect five-inch wide strips of scrap mdf sheet surplus to requirements at a house renovation a few doors down. I then realised the wall was really wonky - the middle bowed out nearly three inches from the corners...

I considered cutting out the curve from the mdf, but soon realised this wasn't going to work - they'd be no room for the track. Instead, I cut the mdf into three pieces and did a little trimming so it skirted around the bulge and allowed the drag strip to stay fairly straight. Batons and a couple of braces were fixed to the wall, mdf fixed to them - and I had a shelf. The mdf was sealed with grey primer and the bottom of the shelf, batons and braces painted blue to blend into the wallpaper...

Love this,  great project,  I am planning on building one in my garage,  limited space,  more like a test track, max 15 feet,  1/24 scale ,  a lot more challenging,  hard to find tracks and the fact that I am planning on running 40k to 50k rpm motors that run on a commercial track,  my question is this... 

For the fans in the bleachers, I would love to do something like that for about 10 feet,  where did you purchase that?  

I figure,  worse case I can get a print shop to blow up the ho scale to a 1/24 scale glossy pic. 

Mike

[woodcote]

Hi Mike - welcome to SlotRacer 

Your plans sound great! 15 feet will be a quick blast, but that's still a lot of fun.

The crowd image was originally from Greg Braun's amazing HO Slot Car Racing site. Sadly, Greg passed away a few years ago. His site was archived, but the link I had no longer works. Thankfully, I did save them to my PC...

   

   

They should scale up to 1/24 - they are relatively low-resolution so print very nicely on a home ink-jet or colour laser printer. And then just keep adding them end-to-end, either the three or four deep image.

[Pineman]

Hi Mike - welcome to SlotRacer 

Your plans sound great! 15 feet will be a quick blast, but that's still a lot of fun.

The crowd image was originally from Greg Braun's amazing HO Slot Car Racing site. Sadly, Greg passed away a few years ago. His site was archived, but the link I had no longer works. Thankfully, I did save them to my PC...





They should scale up to 1/24 - they are relatively low-resolution so print very nicely on a home ink-jet or colour laser printer. And then just keep adding them end-to-end, either the three or four deep image.

Thanks, really appreciate your input and the slides. 

Will keep you posted on the progress, I want to make it as realistic as possible to a real drag track.

[Ntxslotcars]

Functionally, everything is now ready for the event trial run at the weekend...




I decided to use one power supply and a single channel relay board for now. The power is what I use for the 4-lane bullring oval, an adjustable 12-22V, 8 Amp switch-mode DC laptop supply. Also borrowed from the bullring is the legendary 'Cherry Bakewell' switch, which starts and pauses the races on the oval. When pushed and held, this now launches both lanes on the drag strip via the relay. The stuff in the picture has now been fitted in a rather inelegant, but functional enclosure. I'll keep the 2-Channel relay module for the Arduino / Drag Race Coordinator set-up.

I also had time to do a bit of tyre testing, which I'll post on the Proxy Drag Racing Anyone? thread.

Did you have this relay hooked up to an Arduino system, or DOS?

[woodcote]

It's still running on DOS