Building Crystal Canyon Speedway
Hey all, Steve from Gunslinger Garage here. I am a customizer on YouTube and I just started following diecast racing. As a natural progression, I just dumped my hobby budget in to the interwebz and ordered the 20' track pack, the crash racers figure 8 set and the hot wheels starter box (yellow start gate one). My goal is to have a 70" start downslope to 35" turn at 180° ( does that even make sense?) Down to 10" in another 180 turn and the flat put to the finish line.
So here are my questions... do orange tracks connect to the crash racers tracks (they won't arrive for another week or so)?
Has anyone lined their track with thin rubber gasket? (I work in an industrial ship building site so I have access to some interesting stuff)
Lastly, how many cameras are good for filming? I have a gopro, 4 cellphones and a dlsr.
Bonus question... has anyone wired a camera for photo finishes? I have no idea how this would work. I'm a mechanic not an electrician lol.
Discussion
So my daughter and I did some testing on our first track tonight. All in all it went well. 2 lanes of orange tracks out of the start gate down about 10 feet into a 180° open track (Crash Racers) 4 feet of open track to a 270° falling turn into a 4 foot run to the finish. We had to put it away and of course I forgot to take pictures lol. I'll post a bit of video on my YouTube channel later and drop the link here.
We also changed the name of our set up to Crystal Canyon Speedway.
Here is the test video
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDhclSShxpg
We still have a lot of work to do but I think we have a solid starting point.
Feedback is always welcome
- I just got that track builder set for exactly that starting gate. — SpyDude
- Got some serious bounce in the transition track. Might want to put something underneath to support the track at that point. Otherwise, you're going to have the cars slamming down into the transition and bouncing over the retaining wall. — SpyDude
So things are developing here at Crystal Canyon. I picked up 2 1x4x6' pine boards and some misc bits and after some testing decided to make the angle of decent about 5° over 6 feet.
What angle do you use for a road track?
The total length comes out to about 16' 6". 
- That drop going into the off-road section looks steep. Gonna have to play with that. — redlinederby
- Both renderings look legit! — KPS_Kustomz
Start gate prototype 1. We'll see if it works ????
- That's essentially how I used my start gate for the first few months. I now have it triggered by a servo so I can reset it remotely as well, instead of having to manually reset it each time — Chaos_Canyon
Got some work in this morning. I bought some storage racks from the dollar store that are used as bases for the tracks.
I'm still working on angles but we are getting closer to a finished layout. The electronics are are planned and all the components should be here in the coming week or so.
I'll post the final coding for the arduino when I get the bugs worked out.
Enjoy this video. youtu.be/vt4QXPu2z7g
--Gunslinger
Welcome, Slinger...glad you found us and are excited to start racing. Sounds like you're starting off with bang and ready to go.
For more thoughts on everything, be sure to browse through the Archive - it has categorized collections and so on. Just good general reading that will cover just about every topic. Videos, photography, track building, modding...it's all there...
The orange track will connect to the Crash Racers so you'd have 2 lanes feeding into the wide track. As for the rubber...I'd say give it a try! Sounds interesting although I'd think that would generally slow cars down quite a bit.
Sounds like you have plenty of camers and equipment to get started. Use what you have and evolve from there. You won't know what works and what doesn't until you just start shooting races. Although the cameras and getting footage is usually the easy part...the time pit is editing videos for sharing.
I don't know that I've see anyone actually have a "triggered photo finish" type rig. Usually they just slow down their video photo or take a screen shot from that. You'd probably need a *very* high speed camera to get a photo finish shot with the cars going so fast. But hey...worth a shot if you're motivated.
So again...welcome to the fold. We all look forward to following your journey into diecast racing and putting your collecting to good use.