The outside edges of turns require guard rails or borders to prevent the outside lane’s car from dropping off the edge of the track. The benefits of a 4-lane raceway are numerous. Seriously consider building a 4-lane race track instead of a 2-lane circuit. Most home racers build race tracks with either 2 or 4 lanes. Once you have decided upon the size of the table that you wish to build you will need to consider how many lanes your race track will have.
Building a solid table requires time and effort so choose wisely. Whatever table size you ultimately decide on, keep in mind that you will have to live with your selection and its size restrictions for many years to come. If your space is very limited you may also want to look a the Tuckaway section which describes a challenging race track that can be built on a small 36″ × 80″ table. See the Tables section of this web site for construction ideas on building any of the table sizes mentioned above. The extra foot of length also makes for longer and faster main straights. The additional width of a 5×9 foot table makes it much easier to fill the center with an extra set of turns and straights. A 5×9 foot table allows for much more track than a 4×8 foot table. A table of at least 5×9 feet would be an ideal starting point. Then, even if you do not initially fill it with track you will be able to expand your layout later on. Unless your space is very limited you should try to build the largest table possible.
Tables that are wider than 6 feet will make it difficult to re-slot cars at the center, while tables longer than 16 feet make it very difficult to see the cars at the far end. Keep in mind that whatever table size you ultimately select you will need at least an additional two feet on each side to move around when you have to re-slot your cars. If you have enough room for a larger layout then you may want to consider a 5×12 or 6×16 foot table. Tables of this size can be constructed from standard-sized sheets of plywood. These will normally provide enough room for a variety of turn radius sizes and several fast straights. While a challenging racing circuit can easily be built on a table as small as 36″ × 80″ most racers build a larger layout. The first decision you will need to make is the overall size of your HO slot car track table. The decisions you make will effect the ultimate success of your design, so weigh your options carefully. Several crucial design decisions need to be made early on in this process. All you have to do to make this is buy a railroad model track point motor/switches (about $6.00 each) and be willing to do some cutting of plastic.After initially purchasing an HO scale slot car racing set most racers quickly tire of the small circuits these sets provide, and start thinking about building a more challenging raceway. Spicing up your layouts: In Artin 1/43, the following two track pieces are available: the Split piece (left, part number 4551, $10) and the Join piece (right, part number 4550, $10).īased on the existence of these pieces, I have modified the split piece (left picture) so that the direction in which the cars exit that track piece can be remotely controlled from the pits.To complete this layout, you will also need to cut two additional R2 30 degree curves in half to get four 15 degree curves) Le Mans: to build this layout in Artin 1/43 you will need: 47 straights, 10 1/2 straights, 32 R1 45 deg curves, 36 R2 30 deg curves.
If interested, you can download the file, right click and save as). Tracker 2000 definition file with Artin 1/43 tracks (I had to create my own definition file for Artin 1/43 as it does not exist in Tracker2000.The following is dedicated to Artin 1/43 Layouts See these tracks from various 1/43 racers (Photo Gallery).
To design track layouts, I used a very good piece of Software: Tracker 2000.a road/street course where the utilization of the available table space had to be maximal. Track Layout Design: after the table was built, I had to decide which layout would be optimal for what I was looking for, i.e.