23 replies to this topic

[Alchemist]

Interesting enough - your thoughts please?

 

Thanks for looking.

 

Ernie

 

[Bill from NH]

Looks like 1/24 scale RC? A slot car without a slot? It could be fun to play with.

[Tim Neja]

Those are "drift" cars and obviously great fun.

 

Kyosho makes 1/24 RC race cars that are the BOMB!!  They handle great--and very fast for their size.  A great RC product.

[Montoya1]

How about this for a hybrid.

 

RC cars adapted so that they have slow, minimal steering, but a fast-dipping up/down pin geared off the same servo.

 

Fit magnets, run them on a slot car track.

 

'Digital' slot car racing with lane changing anywhere you want, no need to even power the track!

[Bill Seitz]

The 1/24 r/c cars have been run on slot car tracks already. The usual arrangement is to place the foam normally used as track surface for these cars on top of the slotted surface of the slot car track. This was popular at a number of raceways that also had r/c a few years ago, and there are still a few that race them that way.

 

The question is are they slot cars if they don't have a guide and need a slotted track?

[Bill from NH]

They don't have wings either, so are we going to call them an airplane? 

[Montoya1]

The 1/24 r/c cars have been run on slot car tracks already. 

The question is are they slot cars if they don't have a guide and need a slotted track?

 

Right, and I have sampled it. But it was not fun for me

 

By adding the guide pin the cars can run in the slots, much more controllable, but having the pin on this hypothetical servo means you can have overtaking everywhere.

[MSwiss]

The small Kyosho RC cars are considered 1/27 or 1/28.

According to Google, they have sold 1.5 million of them.

I use to have a guy come in once a week and run his cars on my tracks.

The slots were not an issue at all.

After a while, he got bored with running on the flat track and moved on to the King.

Steering the car through the 33 degree banking, on the high bank, was a real challenge for him.

For me it was next to impossible. Lol

I use to also run the small Losi(?) buggies around my flat track.

Again, running on the stock surface wasn't an issue.

As far as a retractable pin, it seems like the driver would need a high degree of skill to reliably re-engage with the slot.

If one was that good, they might as well steer the car the whole time.

[Paul Menkens]

How long have these cars been around? I can remember almost 30 years ago the 12yo son of one of the racers where I raced bringing in a 1/24th scale RC car and running it on the American Orange track, he even was able to drive up on the sides for short periods (both this kid and his dad were highly skilled RC racers) the surface, as pointed out above, was no prob. Not only would putting a pin down take a lot of skill, it seems that if it went down in the wrong place it could pull the braid up.

[Montoya1]

There is only one way to find out

[MSwiss]

How long have these cars been around? I can remember almost 30 years ago the 12yo son of one of the racers where I raced bringing in a 1/24th scale RC car and running it on the American Orange track, he even was able to drive up on the sides for short periods (both this kid and his dad were highly skilled RC racers) the surface, as pointed out above, was no prob. Not only would putting a pin down take a lot of skill, it seems that if it went down in the wrong place it could pull the braid up.

According to Google, 1999, on the Mini Z.

I think Tamiya had a true 1/24 RC car earlier.

And yes, as a raceway owner, I wouldn't be real welcoming to a vehicle on my track that would have the ability to drive around on its own power, with a pin hanging below the chassis, retractable or not.

[Montoya1]

This is thinking small, rather than of something that potentiially could replace/merge 1/24th RC and Slotcars, and make digital look limiting.

[Mike Patterson]

IIRC, somebody in the distant past came up with the brilliant idea of attaching a guide flag to a 1/12 RC car, and running it around a King track. Any of you reprobates ever try that?

[Montoya1]

I have seem some video of such things, but of course the steering becomes moot at that point.

 

My idea would repurpose that servo.

 

No idea if it can be done, but somebody might try......

[MSwiss]

This was discussed about 10 years ago, fairly extensively on Slotblog.

 

[MSwiss]

Apparently it failed and was resurrected about 4 years ago.

 

[Montoya1]

They are still very slow.

[Phil Smith]

I don't think you can ask for anything better than what's in the original post. They seem to be relatively easy to drive and it looks fun as hell!

 

If there was somewhere around me racing those I'd be interested in checking it out.

[Paul Menkens]

Why not try using the Faller Car System components to put together a "slotless" racing system? 

For anyone not familiar it is a system that uses wires embedded in the road to guide cars and trucks around streets and highways on model train layouts, the largest layout in the world, Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg Germany uses this system in HO scale (true 1/87 not the 1/64 that HO slot cars are (roughly) scaled at. It is also available in N scale. This system is so sophisticated that the vehicles even pull into the charging stations when their batteries get weak!

On the down side, this system is very expensive, it would prob cost close to 6 figures to put one together.

[Dominator]

This video may have already been shared but is from about 10 years ago. 1:12 RC bodies on a slotcar.

[Eddie Fleming]

As a former RC racer and a slot car racer I think this is all cool interesting stuff. I like the idea of smaller scale rc on something like a slot car track and would love to try it. 

 

On the other hand it is not slot car racing and referring to it as such in any way is just wrong.

[Montoya1]

if the car uses the slot for at least some of the lap, regardless of how it is powered it is a slot car!

[Alchemist]

Slot car track converted to RC power.

 

[Montoya1]

If only normal slot car controllers had finger-tip brakes!