For the HO Slot Car Fans

[Super]

No secret that as a boy I loved Aurora HO Slot Car Sets. I never had trains but all my allowance and Paper Boy money went into these sets. (When I Was Super ~ Boy!)

There have been many times when I have thought of acquiring and building a Layout again and even have gone so far as looking up old sets for sale. Even found the cars I used to have. Besides the price being high I just don't have the room right now. Maybe the next time I take down the Plarail Layout I will split it up and make half a HO slot car track. Hmmm...talking about this is giving me the itch....maybe even make some custom crossings with Tomy tracks.

Anyway...the reason for the Thread is this video of an HO Slot Car Track.

That is awesome. I never had a chance to own these as a kid but always wanted them. This is still a few years away before I even see if my kids will be into this, but having two buys I think there's a good chance we'll own some slot cars

That layout from video ... I didn't even know such thing was possible :O

Super like you when a kid I didn't really have proper model trains, the budget never stretched to it, but I did have Aurora slot cars - my brother having the larger Scaletrix slot cars.  Personally I preferred the Aurora anyway, I always felt the detail was better, they naturally held the track better due to the magent placements.  But above all else I used to love stripping them down, polishing the armatures, oiling the bearings etc... to make them as fast and quiet as I could.

I've still got all my cars, including a whole bunch I picked up cheap when a chain of model stores here in the UK called Beatties hit financial problems and were selling stuff off cheap.  What I don't really have at the moment is track, but I keep looking at the second hand sets myself and of course if it come to it they should run perfectly well on the micro scaletrix track so long as the voltage is the same.  Those of course are still readily available now, but the cars are not a patch on the Aurora ones in terms of detail and realism.

[Super]

That layout from video ... I didn't even know such thing was possible :O

I didn't know either Bj. Guess with some ingenuity and custom made risers one can do anything. I just have not seen anyone do it before.

@Nigel's
I saw several good deals on large Lots of Aurora tracks on Ebay and it took all my will power not to pull the string on buying some. Looking around it may be the track clips and metal pins that are the hardest to find. I see that later they must have made the 'U' shaped track clips in plastic but my original sets they were a cast metal. Now a days I am sure they easily could be duplicated in either resin or metal molds or the 3D Printers.

Hi Super,

Well as you know given the motivation its possible to do pretty much anything with a 3D printer and a CAD program - that is if someone hasn't already done it

I'm not so sure we ever had the tracks with these clips though in the UK, Aurora was pretty late to the game in the UK, probably mid-70's till whenever Tomy brought them out (and the quality of the cars took a nose dive).  The tracks we used to get in the UK had a clip/socket moulded onto the plastic track with wire inserts as I recall, but it's a few years back now and my old brain could be getting confused

N.

still available under the AFX brand from Tomy .

I might be missing something here, but the video is not HO slot cars.  It is Carrera go 1:43.  The cars are twice or more the size of standard HO slot cars made by AFX, Aurora etc.  Carrera go is also a beginners to intermediate line of slot cars with lots of charater based cars, Lightning McQueen etc..  Easier curves and great fun.   Scaletrix and Carrera also make a bigger size 1:32.

[Super]

@AOF
It is....well nevermind then   Because it reminded be of my old Aurora Race Tracks lets just pretend it is HO. Going by just memory and know what regular, non-motorized HO vehicles look like, I think the HO size of the Aurora, Tyco, AFX cars are probably a bit bigger but its hard for me to be sure after all tis time without one in my hand.

@Rekp
I didn't even know that Tomy made AFX although for nostalgic reasons I prefer the original Aurora with the screw down Steering Wheel Dashboards as Controllers. I also had forgotten that these sets use transformers and when I built my large (Ping Pong Table Size) Layout I had to get a bigger one. I wonder if the different Brands could be interchangeable?

@Nigels
I think that your Scaletrix and AFX or Tyco had easier connections than the Original Aurora. In fact, now that I think of them, the Clips might have been made of a Lead like metal and there was a chance they would bend and break. In the picture below you can see the Pins and Clips that had to be used. The plastic Clips on the bottom were actually just coming out to replace the Lead like ones that looked the same about the time I got out of the hobby. Must have been about the time the world realized lead wasn't good for you. It took 2 Pins and one Clip at every track connection point. As you can see it was very easy to lose these for children.

A feature I really liked about the Aurora tracks that I am not sure the other Brands have is that every straight track had 2 counter sunk holes drilled in them and the curves 1 (see pictures below). This made it perfect to screw down the tracks so they would not move.

Hi Super,

They must have changed the track design at the point they started selling in the UK etc... as I've never seen track like that or connectors like that for that matter.

Aurora was definitely HO'ish as is Micro Scaletrix (about the size of a hot wheels car which is 1/64 scale so technically a bit big for HO).  I found that scale superb as you could have quite big layout in a reasonable size space, whereas Scaletrix at 1/32 needed twice as much space for the same layout.  There is as AOF04 says a 1/43 scale as well made by Carrera which is in-between the two but it tends to have more in common with Aurora than it does with Scaletrix featuring the same 'Stiff' track and similar track pick ups etc...  As he also says they tend to do a lot of themed sets, for example Disney Cars, Marvel, Toy Story, etc... but they also do F1, Rally and similar sets also.  The cars are not that bad, about the same quality/detail as the Micro-Scaletrix, but nowhere near as good as Aurora used to be.

The other thing I've seen beginning to pop up on eBay again lately is another slot oddity of the 70's and which I had one Christmas which is the Matchbox Motorway sets.  These had an interesting twist on the slot car idea.  Basically you had a hollow slot into which a long 'spring' would be inserted, this would mesh with a gear driven by a motor.  You then got hold of your favourite Matchbox/Hot Wheels cars and you had these little adaptors made of a plastic base with a pin on it and a metallic sticker to go over the pin and hold it to the bottom of your diecast car.  You then simply put the car onto the track with the pin in the slot and it would get dragged round by the spring.



Now this isn't like a racing slot track, but more like a motor system you could build alongside say a railway layout to give you moving vehicles alongside your railways. The main downsides though were firstly it was damn noisy, secondly setting up and putting away was a nightmare as you had to get the springs out before disassembly or in after assembly and worse of all the idea of a sticker holding the pin in place on the cars while in theory good is not so good when you try to put them on sticky/grubby toy cars as the sticker just doesn't stay in place so you get cars 'breaking free' randomnly lol!  But even with all these faults if I could lay my hands on a good condition, complete set I would buy it in an instant as I've never seen anything like it before or since...

[Super]

Although I didn't have any HO trains, I liked that the Aurora track offered a R/R Crossing piece. My friend across the street where I grew up had a neat Layout with both Slot Cars and HO Trains (weren't allowed to touch it, his Dads orders but I so wanted to play with it). Did those other brands offer this too?




Its been so long since I held one of these Slot Cars in my hand I can't remember the exact scale. Although my hands were much smaller then, when looking at HO scale vehicles on display at the Hobby Shop, the HO ones seem smaller.

That Matchbox Motorway seems like a good idea at the time especially for those who had extensive collections of the Matchbox cars.  Watching a couple other videos by this same YouTube I can see what you say about it being loud. On another note, you can load them up bumper to bumper for heavy traffic without crashing into each other. But really, this set must have been inexpensive because in 1969 you might as well just got an HO Tyco, AFX etc...set.

Hers a question I don't know the answer to...

Besides Pickup Trucks were there any other trucks made for the HO Slot car sets like Tankers, Box Trucks or maybe even Tractor Trailers?