Posted for OPA...
"The title of this posting should have been: HOW TO MAKE YOUR WIFE HAPPY Here is a picture of my new Test Track Long ago, we had a family almost as big as John's, and thus a house with many bedrooms.
All the kids are long gone, and the house basement was all but unused.
So I decided to put it there. Unfortunately, a 40 foot track takes a lot of room. No problem. Just pass the track through 2 bedrooms, and into the recreation room.
My old test track was a plastic track from Derby Magic, and caused me a lot of trouble, because the whole area was carpeted, and the carpet piling made the track creep, so i decided that the new single lane aluminum track had to have a substantial platform underneath. So I built a wooden platform 10 inches wide, and secured it by running 1 x 3 inch boards from the wall to the track (if you look closely at the picture, you can see three of them on the left hand side, but there are actually
9 of them.
I used the downhill aluminum support and the timing system from the old Derby Magic track. SoGone then came over with his Lazer Leveler, and in a couple of hours we had the track absolutely straight and level. Also, the wooden track platform is wide enough to add another lane, if I ever decide to. SoGone claims, and I am sure he is right, that to get a true idea of a cars time, you need to time it against other cars in order to see how the car reacts with all the air currents and vibration cause by the side by side competitors. However, I can do 90 percent of the work on a single test track, and then go to SoGone's workshop for a final test.
Oh yes! My wife never saw project until is was completed. She was overjoyed! I think? Except as she went back upstairs, I kept hearing the words OBSESSIVE, OBSESSION or something like that."
