Renovation Raceway

[ausbodies]

Hi guys,

This little project was planned in my head for over twenty years but finally got built early last year.  It doesn't really fit any other categories here so I have gone with the General category - hope that is OK.

I have a modest collection of 1/64th scale short track racers and they needed a home.  At least 20 years ago a mate rang me to say he had seen an old glass-topped coffee table in a second hand furniture shop for $15.  Turns out the glass was broken but it was based on a box under the lid that gave me somewhere to build a display of some description.  A speedway was the obvious choice.

Now my wife and I have been doing some fairly extensive renovations on our home for the last decade.  My wife does a lot of the work herself including truly stunning brickwork but she likes to have me around to cut bricks, mix mortar, carry tools etc.  However, she doesn't like me standing by watching her so I was left with the dilemma of - what can I do while staying within earshot and that I can be interrupted on regularly without ruining anything?  Looking at a mountain of leftover building materials in my garage I decided it was time to start building the long planned miniature short track.

So that I could work on it in the garage and avoid making a mess inside the house, I made the track as a module that drops inside the coffee table.  This way I can remove it and take it to a model show without having to take the coffee table out of the house.

The base and sides are made from Masonite that came from the back of a disused wardrobe. Leftover 2x1 pine battens were glued and screwed inside to stiffen everything up.  I then got a bunch of junky old diecast to start mocking up how much space I would need for the track, infield, pits and car park.

[ausbodies]

Once I got my head around how much space I had, I decided to place the oval track diagonally across the corners of the box, giving me the longest possible track.  This has come at the expense of the pits and carpark but it was one or the other so I went for track.  Having it on an angle adds a bit more interest as well.

The infield was a chunk of MDF left over from another project. After gluing it in place It looked a bit too thick so I split it through the middle with a mallet and a plane blade.  I also trapped underneath the MDF a pair of threaded clamps used to hold benchtops together. When it is all finished I can use bolts threaded into these clamps to use as handles to lift the display in and out of the coffee table.  The bolts are easy to remove and by parking a pair of models over the holes they disappear.

The fence was lad out with more thin strips of Masonite backed by scraps of timber that were ready to be thrown out.  The banking behind the fence was made from foam packing from Ikea cabinets we bought for our office.



I then used some ceiling filler compound that was passed its use-by date to smooth out the roughness of the foam. I cut up the cardboard mailing envelopes for my Rodder's Journal magazines to blend the infield into the track surface.  Finally I laid out a very irregular bead of auto body filler (what you call Bondo) to form the basis of an inside curb or rim for the track.

[john2]

   Truly amazing.  I am sure lots of modelers have wanted to do something like that, but never quite got around to trying it.

I am sure there will be more work done on it in the future. 

[TarheelRick]

Looking forward to more updates on this build.  Ingenuous use of left-overs.  Only thing I noticed is the cars are headed in the wrong direction  .

[ausbodies]

Thanks guys - you must be up early in the morning!

As you can see I got a bit carried away and missed a few steps with the camera.
I cut one hundred popsticks into thirds to give me 300 miniature railway sleepers.  Forrestfield Speedway was built in an old gravel pit and after a spectator fatality when a supermod broke a steering arm and ran up the bank, the WA Hot Rod Association spent weekends embedding vertically a zillion railway sleepers into the gravel.  Talk about a fence that took no prisoners!

I dragged a hacksaw blade over each of the popsticks to give them the texture of weathered sleepers and then randomly sprayed them with grey and flat black primer. I then glued them to the Masonite perimeter that I constructed earlier.


My work takes me into the Western Australian goldfields in the outback and the red dirt there is very fine, almost powder.  On one trip it was raining so when I got back to our branch I broke some dried chunks of mud off the ute and took them home.  I brushed PVA glue over the track and then sieved the red dirt onto the track to get a clay effect.

Remember my wife's brickwork? The leftover dust and crumbs from cutting bricks was used to fill in the infield with a coarser dirt.  This is very much how I remember Forrestfield, the local dirt track I attended as a teenager.
That Bondo I mentioned was getting rather stiff so I sacrificed the rest of the  can and built up the corners with some gentle banking.  I also used the last of the Bondo to blend the infield down to the track.

[Dirtman]

Well, how about that! Just AWESOME is all I can think of! I'll bet it is quite a conversation piece!

Rett

[Bill in MA]

That is just fantastic, Alan!  May I come over and play?

[ausbodies]

The picture above was my first real mockup as the scene started to take shape.  Rick, well done for spotting the cars going in the opposite direction.  Forrestfield ran, for most of it's twenty or so years of existence the various classes of sedans and modifieds ran in a clockwise direction, keeping the sedan drivers off the wall in Aussie Right hand drive cars. Only Superstocks, which also ran at our main city speedway, Claremont, ran anticlockwise, because Claremont had always been an anticlockwise track.

Now, like I said, this was a mockup but it isn't accurate to Forrestfield because they only ran anticlockwise in the last couple of years and when they finally closed around 1981 or 82, the sprintcar freight train had only just hit Australia and I don't think they ever raced at Forrestfield. never the less, I was pretty happy at this stage.


In this photo you can see where I grabbed an offcut of mirror and stood it up against the back of the wall to see if I could visually double the size of the carpark.  Sadly it looked all wrong so I abandoned that idea..

[ausbodies]

I'll try to take some new pics over the weekend.  This one here shows another little trick I am trying.  Most of the race cars are around 1/64th scale but I am using approximately HO scale cars in the car park.  This gives a bit of a forced perspective look.  I can fit more cars into the carpark and it helps give the impression that the track is bigger than it really is.  With the track being quite a way below the spectator banking, the disparity in scale doesn't scream at you.

One thing I didn't mention is that, at least for now, I see this display as more like a presentation setting for my diecasts than a true to scale diorama.  I have now got a few scratchbuilt buildings on the track and have just picked up a heap of cheap HO figures from a model train show so that thought might change eventually.  I'm thinking that I will have a field of, say, modifieds on the track for a year, then swap them out for some late models the next year, maybe sprints after that - just so that there is something different to see every now and then.

Cheers
Alan

[Greg Birky]

It's very cool to see your dream come to life, Alan!!!  Great use of the coffee table!!!  Can't wait to see more!!!🤗👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻🏁

[Prostreeter69]

That is very cool! It reminds me of being a kid, me and my cousin's had a dirt track built where we would play with our hot wheels. Man to be a kid again!

Jon 

[ausbodies]

Dead right there, David!  I hadn't mentioned her work just yet because none of these older photos do justice to the input she added.  The problem with packing foam as a base is that it is white and crumby - very porous by nature.  Another renovation waste product I used for ground cover was a variety of colours of sawdust that came out of the dust bag on my circular saw. No matter how many applications I made of this you could always see white specks in every nook and cranny from the foam. Yeah, I could have painted the foam first (and will next time!)  but most spray paints eat foam so that is not a simple solution.

So I came home from work one day and my wife had spent the whole day using her acrylic folk art paints to artfully blend a whole variety of earthy tones into the scene.  It really made it pop and got rid of the snowstorm that seemed to be there before!

The scene is now displayed in my model room and will probably never be completely finished - it is one of those things you add to when an idea pops into your head.  I love that it cost virtually nothing - I spent about $25 on PVA glue and about everything else was free, being waste or leftovers.  The only hobby shop material in the whole track was some Evergreen for the buildings and some lichen for the foliage in the trees.

The best thing is, after such a long gestation period, it matched the picture in my head after 20 odd years of planning!

Cheers
Alan

[ausbodies]

There we go - got rid of that pesky cat! 

Thanks everyone, glad you are enjoying my track!  here's a photo I took yesterday that gives you a better idea of how the coffee table looks in my model room.  We haven't started any sort of restoration or final finishing on the table itself yet but as it is so easy to remove the track module we will do it after we get a few other projects finished.

Cheers
Alan 

[ausbodies]

This was meant to be a parade lap but those sprinter boys got carried away in the back straight!

[ausbodies]

At least the tin top boys kept to their three wide salute to the fans (Forrestfield was too narrow for a four wide salute!