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Track Troubles!!

How DO they do that??
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wixwacing
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Posts: 1871
Joined: Thu Jul 10, 2008 9:22 am

Track Troubles!!

Post by wixwacing »

Judging by the amount of Scalextric Plexitrack (Classic) being sold on ebay, I would imagine that out in the wide slotcar world there are a lot of good sized tracks being assembled from this universally available product. With it there must be some huge headaches too!

It looks tempting to buy up whole trackloads of this stuff and build yourself an instant mega circuit but this commodity is not without its pitfalls! Why? Well!

Plexitrck was and is great, It is one of the universally accepted standards that a slotcar track has to meet. Other makes surpass it in some respects and fall woefully short in others


eg.
Carrera track is great but is a lot wider than Classic scaley, it takes up more room for the same lap length. Also it has stainless steel rails which offer less magnetic attraction therefore rendering some models less stable. It is also a bit rigid which reduces its versatility as far as having high and low sections in a confined layout. Plus's are that if you are a non magnet racer then it has a very good surface for silicone and natural rubber tyres and if you enjoy a bit of 1/24th it has the width.

Artin is similar in texture to Carrera and I believe it is related to it as well. It has some hideous jointing methods, the ends of the track sections are heavily crenelated and they have opted for flourescent paint on the borders!

Ninco track has a very coarse texture which is great for SCM's. Deslots are at breakneck speed and are usually quite serious. Plus's are a good selection of track sections and nice armco style barriers. Minus's are joint problems where the slot material closes together at any joints that are slightly strained and if you try to put a bridge or flyover in the circuit the sections that change the elevation end up with quite large protuberances which can stop some low magnmet cars dead. Not very good for Non magnet racing either unless your model is carrying about forty grams of weight. Also there is no provision for power taps.

Then there is SCX, this is a fair to good track being very similar to Scalectric classic. In fact it will almost match with ease and many a 'bitza' track will have some of this in it.

So, back to Scaley classic. What goes wrong, well, nothing when it was new, it's just that time and several changes of owner can be a bit unkind to it!

The early plexitrack had very fragile contacts, in rough hands the male section would peel back and break off giving a break in continuity. Also, it may have been lent on, stood on or walked on over the years with resulting banana shaped track sections which causes cars to become airborne by the end of the straight. Another problem is that a lot of the track for sale has not been stored in the best or driest of conditions and therefore collects anything from a fine film to a barnacled layer of rust on the rail.

Most will give the rails a good rub down with emery or wet and dry or some other abrasive material and then treat the surface with some proprietary rust inhibitor. Problem is you need to get up inside the female part of the contact, this is the more crucial area and if this isn't clean it will be like having a built in 100 ohm resistor at every joint! Other drawbacks can be the variance in surface grip. Scalextric track surface varies dramatically from year to year. You may find you have a corner where the car is fine for most of it then just slides away. Odds are you have a fairly smooth textured piece of track near the end of the curve.

As well as the UK, Scalextric Plexitrack (Classic) was also made in France, Spain, Australia and even Russia that I know of. Each country of origin had its own surface texture and a wide variety there is to.

Another pitfall is mixing SCX track with Scalextric. Very tempting as it is supposed to be the same. WRONG! A standard SCX straight track section is actually about 1.5 mm in difference to Scalextric and the curves too have a slight radius variance. You'll find that after laying out a four lane circuit, you can't get rid of the gap between tracks in corners, causing models to perform a variety of antics. Plus's are you can power in to any straight. No special power section here, and you can lay power boosting taps all over the place. fairly essential on any aging track as the joints will become poor with age.

So,

As far as heaps of track on ebay goes! ask some questions first,like,

Is it rusty?
Is it flat?
Are all the contacts intact.

If the vendor is reluctant to answer these simple questions then I would give it a wide berth.

A couple of pointers for those with Scalextric recycled track is firstly, after laying your circuit out, leave the joint directly downstream from your controller plug disconnected. Now drive a car completely round the circuit. Every time it stops you will have a bad joint to repair. Next, connect the track together and by revving the car with rear wheels lifted, run it across the last joint to make sure that's ok.

You will find that on a circuit of fifteen to twenty metres with the downstream joint disconnected, the models will go slower and slower as they travel around the track. If they make it to the end they may well be at half speed. This is a result of poor old joint connections. Rather than uproot it all and clean the joints which is almost impossible, it is best to acquire some power taps and tap from near the track 'power in' to a couple of points at one third and two thirds distance round the track.

Another old wives tale for those who have heaps of rusty track is to immerse it for a period of a day or so in a solution of Molasses and water at a mix of five to one! TRUE!! molasses has a slight acidic property and has been used by farmers and the like for many years to clean rusty machinery. Trust me!
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When I'm not racing slotcars,
I'm out in the back yard, burning food!!

When I win, it's because of my talent, not my car or my controller!
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