Christian Gingras
It's so much fun to see all the tracks on Readers Roads that I have to send you photos of my new track!
It was built last summer (2003) in the garage basement of my new house. A little
more than 100 hours of work went into the building of the
table, the tracks, the wiring and the scenery. Since these pictures were taken,
the pit lane was "upgraded" with some pit wall paddocks. The
timing is done on a laptop with an overhead monitor and the Trak-Mate software.
The circuit is a 4-lane 75-foot long Classic Scalextric track. The power supply is a
Trak-Mate, with variable voltage and 10 amps. There are 6
driver stations around the table (3 on each side) and the lanes are assigned by
4 rotary switches at the central command station. This way,
the drivers stay at the same spot all night (no more connecting/disconnecting
the controller) and can put their beer into the
beer holder without anyone drinking it!! And in addition, when I practice all by
myself, I can assign all 4 lanes to my driver station
and I can practice on the 4 lanes without touching or disconnecting anything. A
dream come true!
I have 6 Parma Economy 45-ohm controllers for the visitors. I personally use a
Professor Motor electronic Gold controller and I also have a Parma
Turbo 45-ohm controller. Controller connections at each driver station are 1/4"
jacks, with a screw for the brake wire. There's a polarity
switch for each controller and a brake switch to turn the brakes on or off at
each driver's liking. At the command center, there's a switch to
reverse direction on the track. All driver stations are also equipped with a
kill switch that's really important for our "crash'n'burn" rule.
All in all, a pretty complex wiring scheme and tons of wire under the track.
The scenery was also a fun part to do. Plaster of Paris, some foam for the rock,
Woodland Scenics stuff, some fir trees found on eBay and some
imagination.
The pit lane is black sandpaper. Old and recent Scalextric borders
were painted black almost all around the track. The barriers are
nailed into the plaster, after I drilled some holes in the "posts". The light
gantry is homemade with plywood, as is the overpass.
I now have around 200 cars, mainly Scalextric but also some Fly Classics,
Carrera, Ninco F1s and karts, etc. I try to get sets of 4
same-class cars to race with buddies.
The page where you can find more photos of the finished track is here:
http://www.uquebec.ca/cgingras/selectracingclub/images/final/
Our small racing club has its web site at
http://selectracingclub.com/
- Christian