About my old "Tuckaway 25" speedway.
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Once upon a time, I built a small four-lane
HO-scale slot car racing track, mounted on a door
that stood on foldable legs.
I followed some steps on a website formerly at
hoslotcarracing.com. When I went there recently
after many years, I found the original site was
gone. A bit of searching, and I found the person
who did it (Gregory Braun) had passed away. I
would like to put my track back together one day,
so I decided to pull his instructions off
web.archive.org and save them for my own use. But
I will also share them here.
The file tuckaway25-gregory-braun.txt contains the
text of Gregory Braun's instructions for his
"Tuckaway 25" layout. And I also saved the
diagrams that went with it. It's a cool layout, 4
lanes but small enough to fit on a table made out
of a door.
When I made this, I used a hollow-core door
despite Braun's instructions. I put some lumber on
the bottom so the folding legs would have
something to attach to. I did not put up the
retaining walls around the outside. I did not use
nails like he suggested, but rather some very
short #4 wood screws. I drilled and countersunk
little holes in every piece of track so the screw
heads would be level with the surface of the
track. They were just barely long enough to bite
into the top layer of the hollow-core door. Then
I painted the screws black on top. You can see
this in one of the pictures I show here of my
track. I also had cut some pieces of foam-core
poster board and painted them with red stripes,
and glues that down on some turns. I thought that
looked better than those orange Tomy guard
rails. And in theory it would let non-magnet slot
cars on the outside lane to "drift" a bit.
The door-table without the track is still floating
around in my parents' garage, and I seem to have
found most of my track and lots more I accumulated
in club racing some years afterwards. I remember
I even had an old computer hooked up to some
photo-sensors mounted on a gantry over the
track. You can see the gantry in my photo too. I
think the instructions for that were on Braun's
site too, I will have to go digging in the archive
some more. Hopefully I can put this all back
together one day. It was a fun project and I have
not done things like that for a long time.
