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I wanna get a couple of bicycle hoists and put it in the shop down stairs. I have 12' ceilings down there.
The local hobby shop has a fair selection of H.O. cars, tracks and car parts so I think what I will do is get my old H.O. stuff going again. Then see whats up with the tracks at the Mitty. The Race Place will be there again wont they? I didnt have time to check it out in years past.
I have a bunch of old Aurora stuff from the late 60's. I've wanted to build Tiny Lime Rock for years. I've got a few neat cars, too: A Cobra, a '65 Mustang, one or two '67 Camaros, a GT40, an E-Type and a couple of newer ones from the '70s.
And am I the only one that noticed that Spitsix's track is supported by Koni stools?! I need to find a pair of those!
Spitsix wrote:
My slot car experience is limited to a half-broken, garage-sale Aurora set I briefly had as a kid in the 80's. There's a hobby store near me with an enormous slot car selection, but it offers too much choice to make heads or tails of it all. Anyone know where to find a good primer to get me up to speed?
Tomy stuff is great (AFX and Super G+). The G's are faster. LifeLike makes great entry-level stuff. Old-school stuff (Aurora, Thunderjets, etc) are slow but challenging (little to no traction magnets). BSRT is Captain Insano and the new stuff goes so fast it could probably kill somebody if the magnets ever let go of the earth.
Find a set that has cars you like and go for it. 
PS - I'll have to post pics of my collection. It's farking huge...
P71 wrote:Tomy stuff is great (AFX and Super G+). The G's are faster. LifeLike makes great entry-level stuff. Old-school stuff (Aurora, Thunderjets, etc) are slow but challenging (little to no traction magnets). BSRT is Captain Insano and the new stuff goes so fast it could probably kill somebody if the magnets ever let go of the earth.
Find a set that has cars you like and go for it.
PS - I'll have to post pics of my collection. It's farking huge...
Heh, heh..figures. Even my auto-related hobby dreams are now "vintage".
I'd like to see some of that collection. I noticed spitsix's photo had a pretty big one down by "Sunset Bend" and up the front straight..
P71 wrote:PS - I'll have to post pics of my collection. It's farking huge...
Right on!
I miss my slot set.
I'll get something good again soon.
I used to live about 5 miles from the Aurora car factory in Garden City, NY. My brother and I got thrown out of their dumpsters so many times the guard actually figured out what our names really were, but we had one huge honkin' setup, built with defective, scrapped, but found in the dumpster parts. We had several transformers located around the track, as the voltage drop was too severe due to the length of the track, to just use one transformer.
The downside. . . . He has the cars, I have the Lionel setup. Maybe I made the wrong choice?
Jack
friedgreencorrado wrote:In reply to mtn:
Not big enough. I just did some math, and discovered a 1/64 scale Road Atlanta would be about 1860ft. of track. I guess I'm looking at a symbolic re-creation of the place, and not a realistic one..
Although, if I had the space...
Recalculate for 1/87 scale. HO is that scale. I just skipped ahead so please pardon if somebody already told you.
Spitsix wrote:My wall hinged AFX track is a 4 lane representation of Sebring. 4 lanes are much more fun. I have to get working on it again.
Lengthen those straights so I can bring my old 1970 car with a 16-tooth armature gear in place of the original 9-tooth over the pinion gear.
Jerry From LA wrote:friedgreencorrado wrote:In reply to mtn:
Not big enough. I just did some math, and discovered a 1/64 scale Road Atlanta would be about 1860ft. of track. I guess I'm looking at a symbolic re-creation of the place, and not a realistic one..
Although, if I had the space...
Recalculate for 1/87 scale. HO is that scale. I just skipped ahead so please pardon if somebody already told you.
That's one of the strange things I discovered researching it all...railroad HO and slot racing HO are different, largely due to the manufacturing limitations 40 years ago.. Seems that the cars had to be bigger to house the motors & stuff. And Aurora may have been a part of that, since they had a line of cars intended to compete with Hot Wheels/Matchbox, using the same bodies on free-wheeling chassis on their "toy cars" as they did on their slot racers. I remember recieving a set of "chromed" ones for X-mess one year, and taking the screws out so I could mount the bodies on my Thunderjets.
Railroad HO scale is 1/87, but IIRC, slot car HO is 1/64. I tried to search for a citation...but when I enter "ho scale 1/87 1/64" into Google, all I get is 3,498,570,213,945 results from people trying to sell me model trains or model cars, and 38,457 from pimps trying to sell me a "ho"..
At 1/64 scale, shouldn't Road Atlanta only be about 210 ft of track?
Jerry From LA wrote:Spitsix wrote:My wall hinged AFX track is a 4 lane representation of Sebring. 4 lanes are much more fun. I have to get working on it again.
Lengthen those straights so I can bring my old 1970 car with a 16-tooth armature gear in place of the original 9-tooth over the pinion gear.
Wait.. Are those barstools made from Koni Shocks?
+1, what's the scoop on those stools? They're awesome!
friedgreencorrado wrote:Railroad HO scale is 1/87, but IIRC, slot car HO is 1/64. I tried to search for a citation...but when I enter "ho scale 1/87 1/64" into Google, all I get is 3,498,570,213,945 results from people trying to sell me model trains or model cars, and 38,457 from pimps trying to sell me a "ho"..
Maybe they were HO-scale hos. 
The bar stools look like the ones shock vendors leave at auto parts stores as advertisements customers can sit on.
Also, I believe your calculations for Road Atlanta added a zero.
Just recalculated: 5280 x 2.54 (the actual track length in miles) / 64 = 209.55 ft.
Jerry From LA wrote:Just recalculated: 5280 x 2.54 (the actual track length in miles) / 64 = 209.55 ft.
Yeah, I screwed up the math too. But a track that long would let you get that 16-tooth car up to speed..
If/when (I got a lot of other stuff to do first), I did it, I'd do the old circuit without the chicane at 10, though. The chicane added two tenths of a mi. to the length. I miss "The Dip", but it probably kept the thing a race track instead of a housing development. Only weird thing is that a lot of the younger folks call the esses (3 through 5) "The Dip". The track surface at 10 was also raised about 15-20ft. when they built the chicane, and the run from 3 to 5 now has the biggest elevation change down & back up.
I found a track map of the old (2.52mi.) circuit:
The chicane's been there since 94. For anyone who hasn't seen it:
Best story I have from those days..I'd just been divorced, and was crewing for a friend of mine at SCCA Regionals, since I couldn't drive anymore. He brought the thing (ITA Honda Civic 4th gen) back to our paddock space, ripped off his gloves, jumped out, threw his helmet into the car, and shouted, "BRAKES! Damn car's got no brakes!"
I said, "Hell, man, this thing's never had any brakes!"
He replied, "Yeah, but I never needed em before!!"
friedgreencorrado wrote:Jerry From LA wrote:Just recalculated: 5280 x 2.54 (the actual track length in miles) / 64 = 209.55 ft.
Yeah, I screwed up the math too. But a track that long would let you get that 16-tooth car up to speed..
OK so recalculate at 1/87 scale (who's going to know?) and you get around 154 feet of track. OR just build something that looks like a pork chop with a couple of squiggles on one side and call it Road Atlanta.
Jerry From LA wrote:OK so recalculate at 1/87 scale (who's going to know?) and you get around 154 feet of track. OR just build something that looks like a pork chop with a couple of squiggles on one side and call it Road Atlanta.
This sounds like the GRM way to do it.. It would probably end up that way due to the track piece selection, anyhoo. Get something looking passable, detail the hell out of the buildings, and nobody'll care.
I also screwed up the date on the addition of the chicane (not a banner week for me, eh?). It was not 94. I actually found my t-shirt from the 1st SCCA race after it was installed. "The Dawn of a New Era at Road Atlanta", with a Spec RX-7 overlaid on the new track map. Dated April, 1998.
