Slot Cars anyone?

  • Thread starter Keluna
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I was big into 1/24 when I was younger, but the only club left is almost an hour away and one night a week, so my cars have sat in my tool box for a long time now.
 
I was into 1/24 back in the day when every town had at least one slot track, or so it seemed. I moved to HO when I realized that what I was considering spending for a motor would buy me an entire HO set. I had a fair bit of success with HO.
 
BobK
I was into 1/24 back in the day when every town had at least one slot track, or so it seemed. I moved to HO when I realized that what I was considering spending for a motor would buy me an entire HO set. I had a fair bit of success with HO.
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Is H/O 1:64 or 1:43?
 
W3HS
Are slot cars what Scalextrics are? If so @axletramp was some kind of master mini car enthusiast some time ago.
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Aww shucks. Get outta here you! :embarrassed:

1980 Scalextric UK Championship Bronze Medalist, if you must know. Yep, still dining out on that one!

During my recent house move all my old Scalextric kit came out of storage. Still have my hand built Lancia Fulvia HF and Alitalia Strato in their original boxes.
 
As a '70s kid, had AFX set ups with my brother and cousins. I remember one of my older cousins always beat us using his orange Dodge van.

Last slot car buy was the Scalextric V8 Supercars kit. Lowndes, Richards and I picked up a Van Gisbergen #9 Falcon. Sold everything last year.
 
Blitz24
Is H/O 1:64 or 1:43?
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Pedantically HO is 1/87th or more specifically 3.5mm to the foot. In fact the Aurora/AFX and Tyco cars were closer to 1/64th but there was no strict scale that anyone adhered to.

Incidentally if you're thinking that "mm to the foot" is an odd mixture of metric and imperial scales, HO isn't the only one. Airfix and a few others used a scale of 1/76 for many models, primarily tanks and such, that was actually 4mm to the foot.

Edit:
I'm not familiar with Scalextric's entire product line but their best known slot cars were 1/32 scale.
 
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I had a 1/32nd scale set in the mid-60s, just the two cars it came with. It was a bad-ass set because it had the LeMans start, the crossover bridge, a banked turn at one end, and PITS!!!! No idea who made it. Here's a shot of me and Dad fighting it out.

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In my junior high years my next door neighbor and I combined our AFX sets for huge layouts. he had more cars than I did, and I even "cheated" and ran a couple of Tyco cars. I'm not sure I'm remembering correctly, but I think the Tycos were faster than the Aurora AFX an their "pancake" motor.

Also in junior high school and beyond, there was a brief foray into 1/24 racing at a club, with a couple of giant 8-lane tracks. Brass tube chassis, sponge rubber drive tires, Mabuchi motors. the "real" racers scratch-built their own chassis, while I made do with a store-bought one. Had a Ford GT body, the clear shell that you masked the windows and painted on the inside, which both protected your paint job and made it shiny as hell! :) The club and facility only lasted 2 or 3 years.
 
I had a slot car track when I was a kid, in fact I still have the track somewhere, but all the cars are basically broken. It may very well be the reason I got into cars, actually. The set came with 4 cars, a Ferrari F40, a Porsche 935, Corvette ZR1 and a Lamborghini Countach, but I also had a C1 Corvette, another Porsche 911 and others I can't remember now.

I definitely need to dig it out and see if it still works!
 
During my years as an active Scalextric club member (secondary school age), I competed in a couple of 24 hour charity events. We had four teams of four people and changed every half hour or so. A special track was built to give a much larger length than the usual club tracks but still with the standard four lanes.

On both occasions I used a very lazily tuned (hand wound armatures in the motors) BMW M1 for reliability and heat resistance due to the pounding they took. None of the specially built cars we usually raced would have survived more than an hour or so before burning out. It was an absolute trooper on both occasions and looked like this one below but I'd sprayed it a pale sky blue for some unknown reason.

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I couldn't really get into slot cars. I've had various sets, but they weren't great and setting it up all the time was a real pain. It would be great to have one permanently set up but I don't have the space.
 
Raced Slot Cars up to 2015 at Cambridge Slot Car Club in Cape Town on a 41 meter 6 lane track. Mostly raced 1/24 class with Plafitt and JK chassis, but also used to have a 1/32 "plastics" class. Further below [below YouTube video] are two photos from practice sessions during our National Championship [SAMCA] in 2015. First photo my son towards left replacing a car on track and daughter [14 yrs at that time] towards the right. They've both raced with me every Friday night.

Some action on YouTube on Club Night


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I built a 22mt Scalextrics track in my old bachelor pad (there is a picture of it in the My Toys link in sig). Had it so I could fold the whole track up against the wall when not in use.
Back in those days we didn't have a lot of options/brands to choose from here in NZ, so Scalextrics was just the easiest to get parts for, so that's what I built.
Track is in storage now, just waiting for my kids to get a bit older so we can build it again.
I have probably about 12 Scalextrics cars, some stock, some done up a little bit, everything from Rally cars to V8 Supercars to F1.
Also have a few Slot-It cars... One of them is a Ferrari F40 :), couldn't pass up buying that one.

Loved racing these things with my mates, with all the magnets ripped out of them was a lot of fun.
 
Copy/paste from a thread 5+ years ago:

I had an HO Scale Aurora/AFX track when I was a kid, but over time the inside rail stopped working correctly even with cleaning, so I ended up throwing it in the garbage. :indiff: I strangely saved the cars however, but they haven't been used in 10 years, so I don't know what kind of smokeshow to expect if I ever come across another set that isn't insanely overpriced.
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Fast forward to now, I actually found a set on eBay last month for a fair price and in excellent shape, the Tomy Super G Plus Challenge from 1990, which is the exact set I had as a kid. 👍 To my pleasant surprise, none of the cars that were in storage (for 15+ years!) started smoking once they hit the track. Compared to the pics above, I threw out the #4 Kodak body, the green Viper body, the cop car body, and the old-school Vette body as they were in far worse shape than they looked in the pictures. I also have 4 more cars, the #6 Ford Thunderbird and #57 Nissan 300ZX from the set, a blue with white stripes Viper convertible, and a #28 Davey Allison Ford Thunderbird from 1992.
 

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