2009 brought me the chance to share our hobby with a whole new generation through the learning program of “Racing to the Future™”. What I didn’t expect was how much I would be invested in the program or how much time I would devote to it. State championships would be held in May and Racing to the Future™ had become one of the events. Now I have organized clubs, regional and professional racing events for years, so I thought this would be a piece of cake. This was far more challenging the first year in, mostly due to the time constraints of the event’s location, Rupp Arena. The first year, students earned track time by learning science and math related to real race cars and their HO scale counterparts. They received 5 minutes of track time after giving the right answers. What was not expected was the mass participation. We had over 1500 students there and I do believe everyone of them had track time at least once, most had several turns. In short, we opened the track at 9:00 AM that morning and ran continually until 4:30 PM that afternoon. And this was just the beginning. We had been asked to make this a yearly event. So a good chunk of what normally is my track building time for 2010, went into redesigning the program, getting sponsors, signing up schools, building a track (a drag strip now so more kids could race) and coming up with a x-mas tree, track sensors and a computerized timing system. So 2010 was a bit thin on track development at Woodrum Ridge Raceway (WRR). But there were some significant additions made. Check out Racing to the Future™ here.
January-August 2010
So last year, 2009, I started getting the large scenery components of earth, grass and rock formations in place. That also included the skid aprons surrounding the track. Most of these were painted the same color as the track, but I wanted to give the appearance of rumble strips at the turns. Now is the time to do a bit of research. Hit the Internet and did a search for race track images. This may take several searches and refining the search to find examples of turns, scenery and specifically skid aprons. But they are out there. Woodrum Ridge Raceway has a road course and banked oval. The road course is being modeled after the 1950’s-60’s era of sports car racing. Most of the examples of tracks I found had red and white striped skid aprons in the turns. Using that as the model, I began painting the cork. A base coat of flat white, water-based acrylic was applied to the cork surrounding the turns and a short portion of the straight leading and exiting the turn. I let that coat dry completely and applied a second and third coat to get a nice, bright white. A curve section was painted at the ends of each turn area, modeling those of actual tracks. After those coats dried, the red paint was next. Paint the red on both ends of the turn and allow to dry. This will help you center the remaining stripes as you continue to paint the turn. I can paint with either hand, but use my right hand out of habit, most of the time. So as a rule I paint from the left to the right as I paint the red stripes. This keeps my hand and arm out of the fresh wet paint I just put down. Do the reverse if you are a lefty. Also, paint the areas farthest away from you working toward you to avoid the same situation. It took 2 coats of the red to completely cover the white and leave an even color. This leaves you a nice bright warning stripe as you head into the corners. After we complete the scenery stage of the track, we will “weather” the track and the skid aprons and guard rails, to add some grime, rubber and oil marks. That will be later down the road.
Here’s the apron with three coats of white paint applied. Let this dry completely before moving on to the red striping phase.
Paint each of the ends of a turn first. It will help you in dividing the remaining space equally.
I’m working as a lefty here due to space being tight around the scenery. I am working right to left on the apron to avoid getting my hand in the fresh paint.
Here are the two ends completed, I’ll let them dry before painting up the remaining center sections. A blow dryer will speed up drying time.
Notice I finished the far apron first. This helps me avoid sticking my mit in the wet paint, working on the next apron.
Here are the finished aprons. These will get some weathering applied later on. Some rubber build up, oil and few tire marks will add to the flavor.
Guard Rails: More Than Crowd Control
After reviewing several books and Internet photos of 1950’s and 60’s road racing, I noticed guard rails appeared more to keep spectators back and away from the track, than it did to keep cars from getting into the crowds. Buried tires and hay bales were primarily used, with a guard rail several feet back from a skid apron or sand pit. At Woodrum Ridge Raceway, the track rises and falls in several places, as well as containing a bridge passing over another section of the race course. Along with the “country-side” feel and the open spectator areas, guard rails seemed the appropriate measure. Now here’s my gripe on guard rails: Every track manufacturer has them and for simple installation, they are limited in length to 10-12 inches or so. That means if you have more than one section of track in a turn, you will have several breaks in the guard rail. After looking through several dozen pictures, I could not find a single example of this configuration used in real life. Carrera 1/32nd scale track comes with a nice 2-tiered guard rail that comes in a 2 meter roll and clips into the posts that mount to the track. It’s far too big for HO, but it would be nice to see something similar for our scale. So that left me with the problem on how to make a longer continual guard rail with even posts in between. Tomy AFX makes a nicely detailed guard rail that looks very realistic and to scale (1/64th). It is also made of a very flexible, rubbery plastic that conforms to turns of all radii and contorts to “S” curves very nicely. So here’s how I make longer, continuous guard rails from the Tomy AFX product and painted and detailed the finished work.
Chopping, Cutting, Pinning and Gluing…Oh My
The flexible plastic of the Tomy AFX guard rails is a blessing and burden. Cutting and drilling the material is very easy and cyno-acrylic (super) glues adhere very well. Paint on the other hand does not. The plastic has a high oil content, similar to vinyl and does not allow most solvent based paints to cure completely. Model figure builders have run into this same issue and solved it by using water-based acrylics to paint their models. However, those models are static and most of the flexing and fitting takes place before the model is painted. Guard rails have to be painted, at least with the base color, before it’s put in place on the track. Bending and flexing around the turns will stress the brittle water-based paints and cause them to peel or chip off. I resolved this by using the water-based acrylic paint, but used an acetone solvent to thin the paint before spraying it through my airbrush. This causes the paint to “burn” into the plastic and is quite durable after the paint dries. A few words of caution, Acetone has a low flash point and contains hazardous vapors. Use it in a well ventilated area with respiratory protection. Also avoid using it in an area that would have open flames or sparks. Spraying this through an airbrush can cause a concentration of the vapor and it could ignite or explode in the right conditions. Also use this very sparingly on the plastic. If too much is applied, the acetone will soften and possibly dissolve the plastic parts.
Allow the paint to dry completely before handling. If it is not completely dry, it will rub off the plastic like most other paints. Now that I’ve jumped out of sequence, let’s get back to the beginning and see how we get these guard rails looking as realistic as possible.
The stock guard rails clip directly to the track. In order to get a more realistic appearance and not have the cars rubbing the rail, these will be placed outside of the skid apron. The first step is to measure the turn you want to add guard rail to. I do this with the individual sections of guard rail, laying them around the turn and allowing for a few inches going into and exiting the turn. I have ceiling tile covering the entire race track table, making up the grassy areas, hills and cliffs. We will sink the guard rail posts into this material to make a realistic scenery component.
So looking at the guard rail, the first thing you see on the posts are these clips. I call them claws. We will clip the tabs that stick upward from these claws. That will give us a wide, flat tab to secure into the hole we drill into ceiling tile. We remove those tabs so they won’t poke back up over the landscaping in case the guard rail moves a bit while the glue is drying.
Now that we have all of the little tabs removed, we will cut the excess rail from the inside of the first post, leaving that post intact. The second guard rail will be joined with this first piece and will get cut on the opposite side of the first post, removing the rail and the post. This is much easier to see in the pictures below. Take one of the newly cut rails and make sure your cut is good and square. Use a sharp hobby knife to clean this up. Don’t sand the guard rail plastic. It is a soft rubbery material and will get “fuzzy” when sanded. A sharp hobby knife will leave a clean smooth surface. Make sure both pieces to be joined are as square as possible. If the edges are not square, they will leave a noticeable gap where you join then together.
A small pair of side cutters do the job of clipping the tabs on the guard rail posts. The picture at the left is how the post start out. This piece will be glued under the landscaping and covered with grass, gravel and dirt. So it doesn’t have to be perfectly neat.
Here is a post being clipped and what the finished post should look like.
Leave enough of the “foot” to act as an anchor for the glue to secure to.
After you have all of the posts clipped, it’s time to cut the end piece from the rail. Remember that we want to keep the posts evenly spaced like guard rails are on a 1:1 race track. The picture on the top left shows where to make those cuts. Cut the first post completely off at the leading edge of the post as in the picture on the top right. The bottom center picture shows the left over piece and the two rails ready to be joined.
Here are a couple of shots showing where to drill the rail support pin holes. I used a .035 drill bit and placed the hole in the thicker sections of the guard rail, both top and bottom.
Here are the finished holes in each rail. The picture on the right shows a piece of .035 brass rod being inserted. I use brass because it’s flexible and will allow some level of adjustment if the holes aren’t perfectly square.
The picture on the left shows the pins inserted to depth, clipped to size and glued in with a drop of cyno-acrylic (super) glue. Be extra careful with the glue and this type of plastic. It dries very quickly and it can run a bit and get on your fingers. The shot on the right is a test fitting of the second guard rail before gluing. The brass pins will allow a bit of flexing to get the molding to line up smoothly.
On the left is the finished joint glued and ready for paint as shown in the picture on the right. The rubbery plastic is tougher to get paint to stick to it.
A combination of acrylic paint and acetone does the trick and “burns” into the plastic, enough to keep it from rubbing off.
Now we can begin installing the guard rail around our track. Hold the rail around the area you want to locate it, and mark the post locations with a pencil. We will drill a hole for the feet of the post to set in, at each of theses marks.
Here we are using a 3/8 inch drill bit to make the mounting holes in the landscape. The drill makes a hole slightly larger than the size of the “foot” on the end of the guard rail post. You only drill as deep as the edge tab on the front of the guard rail post. That’s about 1/4 inch deep. The picture on the right shows the post being test fitted into place.
The top left picture shows the guard rail post in place and white glue filling the mount hole. I used a bit of left over ceiling tile dust to fill the holes before the glue sets up. The bottom picture shows the finished installation.
A little touch up paint and maybe some weeds around the posts for that final detail.
Now we have some detailed guard rails that have a continuous run and evenly spaced posts. And those skid pads are just waiting for the next four wheel drift to take advantage of them!