38 - Gas powered slot cars.
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I was over at dad's property the other day,
working on my headlight fence. I'll write about
that some other time, because this thing my dad is
doing is way more interesting.
There's these dwarfs coming around his place more
and more these days, ever since he and I sold them
my old F250 that they fixed up for the
elfs. Similar interests and all that. And lately
they've been doing this gas-powered slot-car drag
racing thing. Yeah. They've put up this pair
of 100m metal guard rails with a groove in them,
and packed the dirt down on either side, and
that's the drag strip. And then they take little
engines from lawn mowers or whatever, fit them on
a frame with some simple drive gear, wheels, and a
tiny gas tank, and attach a guide arm that fits
into the groove on its rail. Set a pair of them up
at one end, let 'em rip, sit back and watch, and
that's some good racing. Tinker and run again.
Noisy and stinky as all hell, and don't even get
me started about the gas they're blowing through,
but my dad and the dwarfs can go all day at this
stuff, so good for them I guess.
Anyways, the other day when I was there, the
dwarfs bring over this massive rig to test out. It
was probably like a 7-liter Cummins they'd ripped
from some truck. They roll this thing over to the
slot, clamp it on and start it up. Pulled the gear
and it goes roaring on down the rail in like 4
seconds. It totally tears off the ignition wire
pull bar at the end of the rail that's supposed to
stop it, and so then this thing is tearing off
across the field all on its own! And so if you can
imagine, there's these dozen little dwarfs chasing
as fast as they can after this disemboweled truck
engine that's ripping around the field. And dad is
laughing so hard, doing that old-guy
cough/choke/laugh/wheeze thing where you're not
sure if you should laugh along, or try to calm
them down. And eventually they get their rig back,
when it ran out of gas in like 5 or 10
minutes. Maybe they want to gear that thing down a
bit next time.