Who's into slot cars

[mikea96]

Actually after checking the cars that we were watching and the rental car my kid used was 1/24 scale. Definetly going to pick one up for him.

[Mr. ED]

I built my own car and was the team mechanic in a 24 hour race. No track lighting over the night. The cars were 1/24 with lexan bodies and steelplate chassis.
When I went to study not even a year later, that was the end for this hobby.

[j-sou]

I was heavy into early slot stuff for a long time. I still have a display case full of it in my office. Traded off some of my extra parts/cars a year or so ago, but still have more than I would like to admit....
I was really into the 60s stuff. Dynamic in particular.

[R Cane]

There's an auction house not too far away from me; they do auctions Wednesdays and Saturdays. They sometimes post pics online of what they've got, and these were added today for tomorrow's auction.
When I was a kid, we had a couple old sets, the larger cars - I think they were Aurora? These look older than what we had.
Anyone familiar with these two sets?

[romulus22]

Meh, slotcars are gay!

I never put that together as that's where your screen name comes from till just now

[Coelacanth]

I thought I'd update this topic as my wife dug up my old AFX slot track box from storage and asked about it. After a few days, I decided to set up a track and see if any of my 20 or so cars worked anymore. Practically all of them ran like crap. So I spent the next 2 days disassembling and restoring each of those cars, even showed her how so she was helping me...and impressed myself that we got 16 of those cars working great! About half of them had bad tires, either cracking or glazed or the rubber had dried out so much they were like plastic...and several had cracked rear wheels, where they push onto the splined axles...but I had enough spare parts to get most of the cars working.

It's easy to forget how much fun these things were, over 30 years ago! She thought it would be a great idea to setup a permanent track on a piece of 4 x 8 plywood and have kids (and adult kids, heh!) over for a race night. So I dug out an old track design I drafted to scale on graph paper back when I was a teen, recently made a few modifications to it, and now I want to build it. I carefully designed it to be fair for both lanes, so each lane has almost the same number of outside curves to be able to floor it and lean on the guardrails, and I wanted it to be fast with some nice straightaways, and not overly complex where you wouldn't be able to see the cars at all times, or where it would be a real b!tch to build and maintain.

Almost all of my cars are Magnatraction cars that fishtail all over the place, and will pop off the track on inside curves if the driver doesn't slow down, and that's the way it ought to be, IMHO. I see modern slot cars going so fast it just looks ridiculous to me. The fun should be in pitting the drivers' skills against each other, and trying to stay on the track while knocking the other car off the track. I even find the old G-Plus cars too fast and stick too much.

If anyone here in Canada has some spare AFX track (or sets) and extra rear wheels for Magnatraction cars or 4-gear cars that aren't cracked, send me a PM. I'm looking for about 2 dozen 9" 1/4-turn curve track sections (Tomy-style track that pushes straight together, not the older slide-lock type that had the tabs break off all the time), a Flex Track, and a couple 9" Squeeze track sections.

[NomadRacer]

I've been a slotcar junkie off and on since the 60's. HO scale to 1/24, back to HO. Currently, I have a custom 4-lane, 4' x 12' layout on a rolling table. It doesn't get run on much anymore, all the kids in the neighborhood have grown up and moved on.

[klavy69]

not in your canadian section but same continent. You want nine inch turns? The most common of the turns makes it easy to get but again, I'm in the US so not sure what it would be to ship them to you. I've got tons of those leftover from my sets I bought to set up my tracks if you'd be interested in them for the shipping Coelacanth.

without digging for the squeeze sections I don't know if I have any left but know for sure the only flex sections I have are the old afx snap/lock/break sections...

let me know.

Todd

[Coelacanth]

PM sent, Todd...thank you, that would really help me out!

[rnoswal3434]

If only..sigh. Back in the 60's, 1/24 and HO. We had a 10 lane track in town when I was a kid. We had enduros of a few hours. Had to actually dunk the controllers in the toilet to cool them off a the end of each section. My dad built the cars. They were all vintage cars from 60's. My favorite was the Chaparral, good old number 66. The 2E and the Chaparral 2. He built brass tube chassis, I think brass anyway, soldering, painting, good times. I have nothing of that left now but this section was sure nice to refresh those memories. Then the HO cars my cousin and I spent hours on, filling the ping pong table, trying the latest cars. Then of course the hot wheels, but that is for another section probably.

Even now at 68, I still smile and can almost hear the 1/24 cars. Thanks for this memory lane moment.

Russ