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| . Brad Bowman’s Hand routed tracks Back in 1994 my home track (named Laguna Point and made from A/FX & Tomy track) was ruined by water coming from a leaky roof. So my friends and I talked about making an attempt at routing our own track. The first step was to come up with a track design. We decided it needed to be on 2) 4’ x 8’ tables and when fully assembled the table would be 4’ x 16’. This way it could be portable so we could take it to model car and Hot Rod shows, birthday parties, hobby shops and wherever else it would be needed. My buddy Jason Boye (BRM) drew a track plan that looked quite promising. We definitely wanted it to be a “figure 8” design where there wouldn’t be one difficult “gutter” lane, so it incorporated a crossover bridge. We also wanted one long sweeping, lightly banked turn. I tweaked with the drawing a bit, and finalized the plan. The next step was to decided what materials we’d use. For the roadway we chose to use MDF (medium density fiberboard), because it was the only material we’d ever heard anybody ever using for slot car tracks. Finding the material for the rails was a tough task. One day while rummaging around a scrap metal yard, I found a spool of rail that I thought would work well. | Brad is noted for having built 5 of the 8 tracks used at The Fray in Ferndale this year, as well as Katz-spa-ring, a 170 foot marvel that we reviewed a few months ago. | |||||||
| Champion Raceway | ||||||||
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| Now I needed to decide how I wanted to guide the router. There’s basically 3 different ways to do this: trammel rod, edge guide and template. I decided to go with the edge guide method. So we went to work building this track and in the meantime we came up with a name…Champion Raceway. Each corner on Champion Raceway was named after all the Formula 1 Multiple World Champions at the time. As soon as we got Champion Raceway running, after the first initial laps, we realized that we had come up with a hit. The track had a real nice flow to it and was really fun to drive. The only drawback was that the rail I used was twice as thick as the rail found in standard track, so cars with traction magnets got a lot more downforce than they normally would. In a way, this was kinda of cool, because a stock car straight out of the package felt like it had polymer traction magnets in it. Jason went to work on the scenery and when he was done, it looked as good as it ran. When we took it to shows, people would say, “This track is awesome! Can you build me one?” I really didn’t think about selling these things, but the demand became too great. Since then I have built 23 tracks and a couple of specialized corners that people incorporated into their standard track section raceways. I reckon I’ve pushed a router about 15 miles routing these tracks! I really enjoy building tracks and have honed my skills quite a bit since Champion Raceway. Nowadays I use plastic for the roadway, which is easier for me to work with, doesn’t need painting and offers a great traction surface for the tires. Also, I now use rail that is compatible with the same rail that is in Tomy track. This was really important to me so that standard cars would have that “stock track” feel when it came to magnetic grip and also so I could make hybrid tracks sections. Right now I’m only building tracks in my spare time, but I’m hoping soon I will be able to start building them full-time so lead time can be reduced, because the demand is still high. Please visit my web-site to see more: http://www.bradstracks.com | ||||||||
