Slot Cars are a fun hobby!

[NeilBlanchard]

I've been racing slot cars for close to 20 years now, and I've been painting my own bodies with tiger stripes almost all that time:



Recently though, a friend offered to paint a body with "a sponsor":

This body has been raced twice now - I took a couple of low resolution pictures at the start of the first race:


Those are the bodies - here are some typical chassis - these are Group 10 chassis:

These are powered by balanced 16D motors, and are stamped steel or stainless steel. Here's my controller, which is a 30 band Difalco.



I race almost every Friday night at Modelville Hobby. We race on two tracks mainly - the blue Figure 8:

... and the red King:

If there is a fifth Friday in the month, we race on the 45 year old Sovereign track aka The Purple Mile - because it is a scale mile! It is 220 feet long which for a 1/24th scale slot car, that is a scale mile.

Here's a picture of the HO scale Sovereign track that is in the same building:


http://www.modelvillehobby.com/track_information.html

Typical lap times on the ~90' Figure 8 track are about 3 to 3.3 seconds. On the 155' King typical lap times are 4.1 to 4.8 seconds - this track is really fast. The Sovereign is actually the first of six that were ever made, and it may be the only one left - lap times for Group 10 cars (the slowest class of 24th scale slot cars) is about 7.3-7.9 seconds. Scale speed is well in excess of 400MPH!

Here are some cars I painted for my son - a 1/32nd scale Whomp! and a 'reverse' tiger stripe:

[nemo]

From a time long ago.