Slot car drag racing

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moparmat2000

moparmat2000

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Anybody into this? I see some guys run HO scale slot drag racers, and theres 1/25th scale slot drags. I think the bigger stuff would be lots of fun. Be great for keeping reaction times up during the winter months.

Heres pix i got off the net.

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They just opened a track several months ago here in my area and i got the idea to try it [again] had these years ago but never really went full tilt into the hobby [as i did with ho/afx cars]. I started looking into the kits or turn key cars and for the money it ain't worth it for me plus the only track is 25 miles from me so i'm out but it does look like a hell of a lot of fun till you have the clicks and butt hurt guys causing issues.
 
I raced R/Cs years ago, and understand what you mean about the cliques and butt hurt guys. We were all out there to have fun, then word got out about our track, and all these deep pocket "pro" guys would show up with thousands of dollars of new high dollar cars and equipment. I guess it was fun for them to beat teen aged kids who scrimped and saved to maybe have $300 in their whole setup. The simple fun of it went away, and so did i. At the time it was about 1984, and i was a 15 years old kid saving to fix up my real car "68 charger".

In 2008 i built a 4 lane slot car track in my garage and started inviting friends to come race rules were simple i provide 2 wire 60 ohm parma controllers. If you want to run brakes track is wired for it, but bring your own 3 wire 60 ohm controller. Box stock Tomy AFX SRT chassis. Tires your choice. Body your choice of lexan, or hard plastic. Hard plastic bodies may be lowered and lightened. We had a blast. Everybody brought food, i set card tables n chairs up in the driveway. We would hang out till about 10:30 pm racin cars.

Eventually i got married, and my wife came with 3 kids the middle and younger child were 18 months apart and they fight over everything, so much so it became not very enjoyable for me to pull this thing down on friday nights. As such i shut it down. This is a shame because my son whos now 3&1/2 would love to play with this.

Maybe someday. I will pull it back down. If there was a slot dragway, or slot road course in my home town, i think i'd go just to have fun.
 
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I was a "semi-pro" slot car racer back in the 60's, and did mainly road courses since drag courses were rare back then. A few years ago I set up a two-lane Carrera track in my garage and started to buy and build 1/32 and 1/24 scale cars again. Right now my cars and track is stored away in boxes in my garage, but I may get back into it one day. I sure did enjoy slot cars when I was too young to have my own car!
 
We had a guy on our block that had 2 Cox .049 powered fan cars and a drag car. Both ran on a string you set up so it wouldnt fly into a curb. The drag car cut out at the end and picked up a chute with a hook I think. Forgot how they launched. Its been 44 years since then. I think it was like this.
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one of my favorite childhood memories are with my pops running the smaller AFX/TYCO slot cars in the garage.
We built the track on a hinged table mounted to the wall like a fold up bed, for when mom's Galaxy needed to be parked inside..
we had a whole box of cars but two I remember well..
The first was AJ Foyt's orange #14 F1 car. I literally drove the little foam wheels off that car.
The second one was pop's car. Roger McCluskey's #1 Superbird. Since McCluskey was somewhat of an aggressive driver, pops used his middle finger when he drove the superbird, called him "Dirty Finger" McCluskey...
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My father was a sales man for hobby's and crafts back when i was 10-16 there was no end of model cars n trucks i would get [when a store took one back because of missing stuff my father only needed the box ends to get credit from the manufacturer i got the kit] same thing went for Cox gas powered cars and airplanes i had at least 3 of every one they made over several years, the AFX [aurora] HO cars i had the biggest tackle box [my dads old one] you could get filled to the brim [i had to fix them cause i got them free due to being messed up] but i had cigar boxes full of parts. My friend had a huge screened in porch and his brothers an him n i built an HO track on 4 borrowed ping pong tables it had 4 lanes and we would have 24 hours of Le mans and endurance races [man those were the days].
 
JoeSBP said:
one of my favorite childhood memories are with my pops running the smaller AFX/TYCO slot cars in the garage.
We built the track on a hinged table mounted to the wall like a fold up bed, for when mom's Galaxy needed to be parked inside..
we had a whole box of cars but two I remember well..
The first was AJ Foyt's orange #14 F1 car. I literally drove the little foam wheels off that car.
The second one was pop's car. Roger McCluskey's #1 Superbird. Since McCluskey was somewhat of an aggressive driver, pops used his middle finger when he drove the superbird, called him "Dirty Finger" McCluskey...
View attachment 1714940098 View attachment 1714940099
View attachment 1714940100 View attachment 1714940101
Click to expand...

Wow great minds think alike. I made my current 4 lane to fold out of the wall. But i put wheels on the legs and made the hinges to where the pins slide out, then i rotate it around so it faces long side out. Then lock the hinge pins back to receptacles on the table end in so the track wont move around while racing. Theres a drivers station on each corner. I am running a trakmate computer tap timer program with windows 95 on an old dell desktop. My son was about 1&1/2 in the pix, shortly before i folded it up for now. Heres pix.

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Here is the extent of my slot car collection. Bought it for 5 bucks.

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One of my friends used have a race road track when I was young, I still have my old race track down in the basement, Talk about a fun time, damn thing is my friend would always win and I was 2nd or 3rd.
 
Yep,Cool stuff and lots of fun.The Aurora HO AFX Dodge Daytona was so fast I only used it for drag racing.I had my cars for 40 ish years.My neighbor's sons and grandsons were into the slots like in the first post.They almost bought a track and all the equipment to start their own business till grandpa brought home a JR Dragster.... Now they have 6 of them
 
I lived near the Aurora plant and a friends mom worked there and she always got to take home the cars that were not perfect, had quite a few of them and still have some and a ton of old pin and clip track from the 60's and early 70's.
 
A few years back I sold all my stuff. Posted it here and sold it all in about 20 minutes. Guess I sold it too cheap,but it was just sitting around.
The Aurora toys were much better than the Tyco. They sure don't make stuff like that anymore..
 
Darter6 said:
A few years back I sold all my stuff. Posted it here and sold it all in about 20 minutes. Guess I sold it too cheap,but it was just sitting around.
The Aurora toys were much better than the Tyco. They sure don't make stuff like that anymore..
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Actually the new Tomy AFX stuff is quite good and very detailed. I have the tomy collectors edition cars with interiors in them. Jim halls chapparals, some GT 40 fords. Even the Texas licence plate on the chapparal is present. I have some old aurora model motoring, and a collection of older afx magnetraction cars and they were good for their era. I was never a big fan of the tyco stuff either.
 
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pishta said:
We had a guy on our block that had 2 Cox .049 powered fan cars and a drag car. Both ran on a string you set up so it wouldnt fly into a curb. The drag car cut out at the end and picked up a chute with a hook I think. Forgot how they launched. Its been 44 years since then. I think it was like this.
shrike10.jpg
Click to expand...
My older brother had a cox vega dragster that would run on a tether back in the 70s. That was really cool.
 
Man you guys are bringing back some memories. The Cox Manix Dune Buggy is what I had.Those engines would run in both directions.On a hill climb that was too much the engine would go into a stall and sometimes reverse it's self then the buggy would run backwards.
 
When I was a kid I would always ask for the same thing for my birthday, A race road race set. They wouldn't last long so I was always read for a new one the next year. In 1968 my dad got me a drag strip race set. It came with a Plymouth Roadrunner and a GTX.
There was a blue plastic console at the beginning of the strip and in the console there were two 4 speed stick shifts. The track had numbers on it and to start the race you pushed a button and a Christmas tree would count down. The cars would not move until it reached green and you would have to shift into second when your car reached the track labeled 2 or you would loose power and it would stop. At the end of the track was a catcher that would catch both cars and the flag on it would drop towards the side that won. You would then put the shifter into reverse to bring the car back for the next race.
Found out later that my dad got that race set directly from the dealership where he bought a new 1968 Dodge Coronet. Me, being a kid, I killed it and it likely went into the trash with the rest of the race sets.
About 5 years ago I saw a magazine article entitled "Toys in the Attic" and these things are worth a couple thousand dollars now Arrrghhhh!!!!! But if I still had I probably wouldn't sell it it would be too much fun.
 
The first thing I did with my slot car set was put all the straight sections together. Then I put rubber bands on the pickups so when I nailed them the fronts ends would pop up in the air. I had a car that was exceptionally slow.I could win races at the local Y just because it never came off the track.
 
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