Build Journal: Janky Track
I decided to build my first track layout and instead of buying a bunch of orange track, I used two old planks of wood from an IKEA bed that I'm not using.
Does it work? Yes. Is it good? No.
Every thing is level, and it fits 8 car max, so it can be used as a track, but I wouldn't recommend it. Because there are no lanes, cars will sometimes swerve, collide, and spin out on the slope.
Because 90% of the track is downhill, cars pick up a lot of speed. This forces me to put the finish so close because if I put it any farther, cars swerve off the wood and don't really finish.
I do technically have a starting gate, which is the base of a Wii.
I guess the takeaway is if I should continue this project or just scrap it and build a new one with more conventional materials?
Thanks for reading!
Discussion
Also, where the two pieces of wood meet at the angle between floor and ramp, you might want to use something to smooth out the transition from piece to piece. I'm guessing the way it is now, the cars race down the ramp, hit the transition, and bounce, right? You want to smooth that out so the cars don't just slam into the bottom of the slope, but continue at speed through a nice curved base. Get some poster paper and smooth out that transition, or a sheet of thin but durable plastic and tape it down tight.
You can easilty set up some lanes in the first part of th etrack, to get the cars up to speed in a straight line. You could use carboard strips, corestrip or even thin wood glued into lanes, then let them go open after that.
You could even look at lining the wood with another material, like a poster board, where it won't slow the cars too much but give them more grip than a shiny wood surface.