405 replies to this topic

[Steve Ogilvie]

Yes it is not something to worry about. When using an offset router jig like mine, the gutters will not be the same and the lane spacing will be slightly different depending on what side of the corner you are routing off of. The only place the lane spacing will be exactly the same is on the straights but then again the gutters will vary. Adding extra pin holes and changing pin spots lane to lane will cause problems. Consistency is what you want, even if it is a little inconsistant in a few places.

[Steve Ogilvie]

I just wanted to say a bit about Facebook. A lot of people have sent me friend requests and I have confirmed some of them but basically I never use Facebook. I signed up a long time ago(hence the picture of me in my late 40's) and I never really liked it or got the hang of how it works. So it is kind of useless to me so no point being friends cause I am never on there. I tried to delete my account but apperantly you can check out anytime but you can never leave.

 

Track wise I am still waiting on the pinstriper and the power supply. I got the Trackmate system today, might get that installed tomorrow.

[Steve Ogilvie]

 

I hooked up the trackmate system yesterday and I am quite happy with it. As I thought I would have to do, I cut off all the pre wiring on the dead strip because this system does not use a common wire on the positive side. 2 wires per lane, white goes on the positive and the coloured wire on the negative side, cable comes in twisted pairs.

 

I had to get Daniel to walk me threw installing the correct driver. He has a toll free number and he helped me get everything working. He did tell me I should install the old software because there might be a timing problem on the newest version but I have not bothered yet. I will wait for the next version, this works well for now.

 

I did one sub 3 second lap, and that was the fastest. Other than setting up the lane colours the program is as it came. My oldest son Dan and I turned laps for about an hour. 

 

 

 

After I first spoke to Daniel a while back I added a master relay to turn the track on and off. This track has 8 lane control relays with the hi/lo power system so I use the master relay just to turn on the power to the coil side of the other relays. The power supply that comes with the kit is strong enough to probably run 4 relay coils but not 8. This works well and was easy to wire in. Only 4 power relays are on at one time so it might have worked but this ensures reliability. In the pile of wiring supplies that I have I found a Trackmate track call button, I might add later. We always used low power as a caution (yellow flag) system instead of having track calls.

 

 

 

 

[John Streisguth]

That low power "yellow flag" sounds like a great idea for oval track racing

[tonyp]

Great idea.


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[Don Weaver]

We had a low power "yellow flag" at Slots of Fun's tri-oval in Abbeville, SC.  It made restarts difficult depending where your car was when the power came back on full power.

 

Don

[Steve Ogilvie]

We just do a 3 2 1 countdown before full power. No one had a problem with it but we only ran flexi chassis with challenger 1 motors and Nascar bodies. Maybe higher powered cars would have problems I do not know.

 

The big advantage is the racing never stops and it penalizes people for falling off.When we ran track calls our best car builder would have his car set up to coast, sometimes he could go 15 to 20 feet every track call. His lead got bigger every track call and he won 3 series in a row. With the caution on very low power it took away his advantage and put in an element of dumb luck. He still won his share of races but everyone else started to get a win here and there. We had to put a no passing under caution rule for the guys that set their cars up to go fast under low power.

 

Another thing that it helps is you can marshall your own car when you don't have enough racers, super easy when you are running a small trioval like we had most of the time. On a bigger track you need a no running rule or people will hurt themselves.

[Steve Ogilvie]

I am still waiting for my pinstriper to show up so I can call this track done. It was shipped 10 days ago and no sign of it. I am kind of regretting my decision to not do the colour coding on the relief and slots like some newer tracks use but every time I thought about all the extra work it became a no go.

 

With an Embee pin striper I could put the lines on a lane on a king track in 15 minutes. So 2 hours to stripe a whole track. And most of that time was thinning the paint and cleaning the bottles. I have all the colours ready to go.

[Revtor]

Love the ingenuity of setting up a car for lots of coast to gain feet every track call. Thats racing for ya!!!

[MattD]

Steve that  is what the local raceway guys do.   They run breakout races and the car formula makes it easy to build a car faster than the breakout, so the only ingenuity that comes into  building is to make a car that will coast farther than the rest when power is turned off for wrecks.   

[Revtor]

Matt I gotta give that a try... Once I become the guy thats not doing all the wrecking!

[MattD]

I'd rather everybody have equal cars and drive to the best of their ability.   Watching a lap counter and trying to figure out how much to slow down or how to build a coaster doesn't do much for me

[Steve Ogilvie]

I am still waiting for my pin striper. Really annoying but a friend of mine is mailing me his striper to use while I wait. I have tracking but all it tells me is that it is being processed in Toronto.

 

Anyway the friend is Ernie Mossetti. I started working on his new track yesterday. We have been talking about this for about 3 years now but it got stalled for one reason or another till now. Ernie was one of my first customers and what can I say, I could not say no. We are going to build this track together, mostly in his new store but I am busy prefabbing everything I can do up here. So far I have most of the legs cut out and assembled, and tomorrow I should have a good start on the joint blocks. This will be a 6 lane 1/24 track about 130 feet long. The joints will be all MDF construction, and I am thinking about going tapeless. The last joint system Brian Crosby and I developed used paint instead of tape to prevent the tongue bonding together. It worked well but made assembly time longer. The big advantage to this is zero slop on reassembly. So I will demonstrate that on this build.

 

 

 

 

And so it begins again.

 

[MattD]

Back in the saddle!

[Steve Ogilvie]

As you can see from the earlier pictures, I have been busy gluing together mdf for the joints and cutting and assembling legs for this track. The legs are 21" wide and 19" high. So the track surface will be 20 " off the floor at the lowest position. A little higher than most tracks but this track will not have any noticeable banking so a little higher should make it more comfortable for most racers. The legs are all assembled and the joints are ready for sides tops and bottoms.

 

 

 

 

All the tracks I have sold have used offset routing, and elliptical slots are part of that process. Since you have to follow the same side of the track all the way around to cut the first slot, you have to be carefull of going around the inside of a tight turn. This track has some 16" inside radiuses so I made up some practice slots to make sure it would work out ok. I made two cuts, one 4.5" off the inner edge and one 5" off the innere edge. The 5" spacing worked the best, giving slightly more outer skid apron and slightly less inner skid apron.

 

 

I have cut 1 track section, tomorrow I will cut 4 more sections and then use the scrap to make and assemble the joint blocks.

[Steve Ogilvie]

We have stripes finally. And I did not get the orange mixed very well, I made another batch that I will put on later on this week.

 

 

Busy working on Ernie's new track. Assembling the joint blocks now. MDF blocks take a lot more time than 2x4 based joint blocks but they are more precise. Gluing the sides and installing bolts:

 

 

 

There will be a 5" top plate put on as well as a 3" bottom plate. The bottom plate will go on in 2 pieces without tape. It is used to bond the vertical grain of the mdf together as a precaution against seperation when the joint gets pulled apart.

[Steve Ogilvie]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Steve Ogilvie]

 

Other than gluing together your own lumber, an MDF joint is pretty much made the same as a pine or 2x4 joint. It does have one big advantage- it is very precise and you can take it apart and it goes back together perfectly. With a 2x4 joint I never take it apart until the track surface is atatched.

[Steve Ogilvie]

                                                                                                                                            Above is the test track we built for Parma, for sale in the classifieds now.I am going to add pictures of tracks I have built as I find them here and other places on the net. Most of our tracks were built before the digital camera age so I just do not have pics of all the tracks we built. If you have a pic of a track that me or Brian Crosby or Donn Bryans built, feel free to post them here. Thanks

 

 

This is Fantasy Raceways track, built by me about 25 years ago. Pic is from their race postings, much appreciated that they posted some pics of the track along with their race reports. Of course I am a little biased but I like to see pics of tracks along with the usual podium photos. Long live Fantasy Raceways of Rochester NY !

[Steve Ogilvie]

I am making progress on Ernie Mossetti's track. The plan is to take all the prefabbed pieces down to his location on Monday and have all the woodwork done by Thursday afternoon. I have one more corner left to cut and then the straights. After that, cut up all the offcuts to make the L brackets and glue them together. I would like to glue on all the L brackets ahead of time, but our van is not big enough to fit all the assembled track sections inside. I might not have enough time to do that between now and monday anyway. Here is a video showing how to cut out curves that have a 15 foot radius:

 

(1) GOPR0094 - YouTube

[Racer36]

This is the Hillclimb I bought from Brian Crosby in 2007. It was only about 18 months old at the time. It was the main track at my Raceway until I closed in 2012. I also had an oval that I bought from Brian.

the Hillclimb is now in Manitoba.

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[Steve Ogilvie]

A Space Saver Hillclimb. One of my original designs, I built the first one in the early 90's. We had one just like that in the raceway in our shop for about 2 years. Thanks for the picture Dennis.

[Jay Guard]

Steve:

This may be the very first track you built.  It is signed by you on the bottom and has a big "#1" right near your signature.  I purchased this from a track that was closing in South Carolina and then set it up in my garage in Anniston, Alabama around 2008.  I have since moved to Florida but before the move I sold the track to a club called Doghouse Raceway in Gilbert, South Carolina where it is being raced on to this day.  Do you have any recollection of this track and could it be your first build?

 

[Steve Ogilvie]

It is one of my earliest builds but not the first. I am pretty sure it was first set up in the garage of a house somewhere in PA. It was built sometime around 1987. I sold some other 4 lane tracks before this one but they did not have the moulded sidewalls and used a lap joint system so they are not numbered. I considered them as practice tracks, I sold them dirt cheap while I was developing the system. So this was the first track I built and sold using a system very close to what became my standard track. So I decided to call it #1, even though there are earlier tracks that I built I just did not consider those tracks as a Steve Ogilvie Custom Track. I know this contradicts what I told you in a PM, but I have been racking my brain ever since I saw the picture of this track and that is what I remember.

[Jay Guard]

Steve:

The track definitely had the tongue and groove system, maybe even a double if I recall correctly.  Super little track and as I said still being raced on to this day.