Well, I didn’t choose “Flux” as my handle/nickname for nothing. 😉
This one isn’t completely out of the blue, though. When I was a kid, I enjoyed model railroading quite a bit. I still do to a certain casual extent. I also played with my set of AFX slot cars quite a bit. Fast-forward to a few weeks ago when the family met for lunch after church at a nearby Applebees… which happened to be in the same plaza as a large hobby shop I was curious to look inside. Probably a bad idea, but I was fully prepared to walk out empty-handed with no new hobbies to worry about.
Nikolas was not prepared at all. Not in the least. He quickly fell in love with the idea of slot car racing. We managed to get out of there with the promise that we’d come back if the “bug” didn’t leave him. As I expected, it didn’t leave him. It only burrowed in deeper, and by the next week we were looking at the various sets with more interest. Against my better judgement and advice, he chose a “Speed Racer” set that was small scale/size, but had a LOT of tracks and a really fun looking layout for a decent price. I knew that it would probably not be a very good set, but decided it would be better for him to learn the “you get what you pay for” rule first hand.
When we got home, the boys immediately went to set it up and play. It didn’t take long for them to have a simple oval to make the cars GO on. It took even less time for them to realize how bad it was. The cars seemed to only have one speed: FAST. Poor pick-ups and very little magentism turned playing with the set an exercise in futility. Sometimes I hate being right.
Fortunately for Nikolas, the set had a track that was missing one of the metal conducting rails. The car won’t go without both rails on every track. This gave us solid ground for returning the set, so I called the hobby shop immediately to talk about the return, since we wouldn’t be down to Tacoma for another week. The lady that sold it to us agreed to take it back for store credit, which was fine since the plan was to upgrade to a better quality set anyway.
During the intervening week, I did my homework. I found that although there were two companies with long histories behind them with strong competition between them, that Scalextric track would be the best for us. The choice was then between standard “Sport” sets, or a “Digital” set. The Digital sets allowed up to 6 cars to drive on the same 2-lane track using lane changing tracks, but they were also more expensive. We decided to simply see what the hobby store had on hand and go from there. I brought a short list of things to look for with me, though.
As luck would have it, the store had a digital set, that was much too expensive, marked down to a price that Nikolas could almost afford. Since it was such a large purchase, I helped him out a little so that he wasn’t stuck with a lesser, non-digital set. Alex even decided to purchase a car and controller set of his own, so that all three of us could race together, and he would have his own car.
It took even LESS time after we got home to get it set up and tested… I helped. 😉 This one worked, as I expected, like a champ. The cars controlled wonderfully, and the track went together smoothly. The ability to change lanes strategically and race more than 2 cars at a time was an absolute blast.
All that week we would set up new layouts each day, I would do more and more research into the hobby, and we would all watch cool videos of fun layouts around the world, and look at amazing photos of beautiful scenery and track designs.
We still are…Â Damnit.