Two experiments in cardboard, making banked turns
With the holidays approaching, we do not have a ton of time for racing on the weekend. Cookie baking and other special projects are the center of attention. Thankfully today I had a chance to do some experimenting and building.
My parents sent AB a big present (Hot Wheels!) in a large Amazon box. It gave us two generous sides of cardboard, so I grabbed the duct tape, ruler, pencil, and the razor to see what could be made of them.
In this house we are fans of Beaverworks and the Chaos Canyon. Both make great videos of their DIY tracks. Thought I could make a hairpin turn like the ones they have.
Take 1: My first attempt was to small. I cut out a few semicircles, glued them together, and taped on a big wall. They attached to my fat track without a problem, but the cars that didn't like the setup.
The turn was too sharp. The cars (including the duck) crossed from track to cardboard no problem, but ran right into the wall. None of them made it around the horn and out of the turn. As you can see, ole Duckie made it to the edge but had already lost all momentum.
After watching a couple more videos I decided to build a new, wider turn.
Take 2: Improvement. The new turn did not have the same shortcomings as the first. If a car hugged the outside wall (right side) it would pop out the other side. If it came on the inside (left side) it would run right into the wall and stop.
While I'm happy with the second turn, it still needs a little more work. We are going to do more research and hopefully post a few videos later this week.
Let me know what you think of the track and if there may be a better way to go short building a track out of cardboard. Thanks!
Discussion
Check out this track I just found as well. It has one crash racers corner but the rest looks hand made. It's a very cool rally track
- Holy cow. That course is amazing. It has a bit of everything. Need to follow immediately! — AB_IB_Racing
In development phase:
Almost done:
My cardboard track, it has a nice turn also made from cardboard and hard paper(thin cardboard) yet it's not that smooth but most cars can ride through it. Only high center of gravity cars have troubles on it.
I have a group in FB where I post my track build updates:www.facebook.com/groups/178100403948814/?ref=share
And here's the track in action :D:youtu.be/7F84uoRl-Dk
Glad you're enjoying the canyon. It is always hard to handmake those types of corners from scratch, and I have the same issue when building wide corners, that if a car is on the inside line, it will tend to hit the wall and stop, due to the angle of attack.
Couple things I've done that seems to help (mostly at least) is to add a bank to the turn - this is harder in corrugated card but a standard flat poster board works fine - where you cut the angle flatter than the final shape then pull the ends in to the final position and because the outside edge is longer it pulls that outside edge up (see the picture below, this is what I use). The other thing I try to do is have the entry higher, even by an inch, than the exit, this helps start the turn of cars on the inside line, or even if it doesn't it helps give them some momentum again afterwards.
I have built a full corner like they build a skate bowl, and it kind of worked ok, but I found all the transitions between the edges of the pieces tended to make it a very rough ride for the cars and they would bounce a lot, so having the lower bank, but smoother track was a better option for me at least.
You may also have noticed, that Carhooner corner has a built in buffer to take some of the impact out of the corner too. It always had that from the launch of the new canyon, but I recently changed to a softer foam and left the front panel free floating on one edge which also helped to ease some of the pressure and reduce (but not eliminate) the rollovers