About my old "Tuckaway 25" speedway.
- joneworlds@mailbox.org

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.