where can I find this wire?

[WMcD]

Well, I should not argue with Artto.

My experience was in 8th grade. There was a slot car track in West Hempstead which was a big step up from the home type units. Naturally, all of us should have been doing homework instead of fooling with this stuff. Smile. But it was a bit of a training ground for engineers to be. Standard excuse.

There was some brand of off the shelf car which was known to be an "amp sucker." It was almost banned. Now that Artto brings it up, the guys behind the counter watched the meters on the power supplies and comment about the current draw. But how much, I could not say.

There was an article in some slot car magazine about rewinding motors. "Who Put Eight Great Tomatos In That Itty Bitty Can?" Again Artto brings up some memories. Cox was a leading brand of slot car kits. The motors were known as can motors, hence the "can" reference. Contadina was running an ad about its tomato paste.

I re-wound a motor per the article. It worked okay but not a big winner.

Remember, this was Long Island in the mid '60s just at the time baby boomers were no longer children -- and there were a lot of us. What are parents to do? Slot car tracks (and bowling alleys) advertised as something "for the whole family to do."

Viet Nam, Civil Rights, War in the Mid-East, Drugs, were near or just over the horizon.

WMcD

[Arkytype]

Gil,

Your slot car story brought back some fond memories of the mid '60s. In Little Rock, there was a large multi-lane slot car track in the Park Plaza Shopping Center. My electronics mentor and I designed and built a variable duty cycle hand controller. In today's vernacular that would probably be called a "manually operated pulse width modulation controller".

The slot car engine would get the full voltage (12VDC?) but the duty cycle would vary from 0 to 100%. As I was more of a pilot (kept launching my car over the wall) than a driver, I let a friend do the road testing. That car was amazing! You could approach a curve at full speed and then quickly turn the throttle potentiometer CCW and the braking action of the PWM would slow the car to a crawl in less than a foot. I've always wondered if the PWM idea was from a Radio World or Popular Electronics I was reading at the time.

Lee