When planning the tables that would fill the biggest room in my basement and carry the bigger track I wanted to build, I knew right from the beginning that there was a danger in moving my activities out of my toy room and into the main living room: my toy room is thickly carpeted with a high quality pyle with heavy padding underneath. There had been numerous incidents where very high speed cars had flown off the track and completely off the table onto the floor, but no damage had ever resulted from this due to the heavy padding. The central room of my basement, by contrast, is covered in tile. This, I knew, was a potential problem, and I was sure that the table I wanted to build was going to have to have some sort of edge around it to prevent the same types of crash from occurring in an environment where real damage would definitely result. Even with a much bigger track and a much more expansive surface behind it, these cars move so fast that the right circumstances could result in disaster.
What I didn’t know was what kind of edge to put around the table. Of course the simple answer would be to just put 2×4’s or an extra lip of plywood around the perimeter, which is the easiest and cheapest solution, but I didn’t like this idea because part of the point of having such a large table was to build a sprawling and detailed diorama around it; a wooden edge wouldn’t prevent that from happening but it would make it less attractive to viewers and harder to see some of the detail. I knew I wanted something clear, and I know I’ve seen track tables on the web that have what looked like Plexiglas edging around them, but I hadn’t worked out how to do that with my table.
When I first built Drag City Mk III everything was still in the construction phase and there was still a lot to work out; lighting, power, cord management, mounting the TV and the computer-all had to be considered. At first the track was more for positioning than anything. While I didn’t run any type of full blown event on it at this stage, I did feel a need to test the track; it was my first AFX track, after all, and I wanted to see if I truly did prefer it to the Tyco track. So I slowly, carefully, ran a few cars around it, thinking that if I kept the speed down and was careful, everything would be fine.
I still have flashbacks to that awful night…
It was shortly after the tables were covered with cork and the track was set cabled for power that it happened; I had finished working on it for the day and was one my way to bed when I thought I’d put just a few more cars through their paces to see how the different wheel types, sizes, and wheel bases performed, making sure there were no crooked joints or other problem areas. I then made a very bad decision: I took my pristine original Aurora blue Alfa Romeo out its case. At the time I bought it, this was the 2nd most expensive slot car body I had acquired, and with good reason: it was absolutely mint. The day I received it, it was clear that it had never even been mounted. I put it on a brand new chassis and fitted it with wheels I thought were fitting, but it was so fast that it was difficult to use on the Tyco track due to the track’s small size and tight corners. Here, I thought, was a chance to see how it did on a long track. I thought I was being careful. I thought I was keeping the speed down. And as it went into the first turn, I watched in horror as the very scenario I had so feared unfolded before my eyes as if in slow motion: my beautiful, perfect mint condition vintage Alfa Romeo jumped the track, barrel rolled across the table, and went off the edge.
Sometimes it takes a trauma like that to spur us to action.
My blue Alfa Romeo now races without its front ailerons; since one broke off I had no choice but to break off the other one and sand down the edges. It is now disfigured forever. And yet I keep it as a reminder to myself of the night that necessity caused me to find a solution to the clear edging problem.
I knew acrylic sheeting was the answer, so I bought enough of it to surround the 3 sides of the table that were not facing the wall. Let me tell you, acrylic sheeting in that quantity is not cheap! And it didn’t help that, coinciding with my looking for 26 feet linear feet of acrylic sheets for the first time in my life, we’re in the middle of a virus pandemic and every piece of clear plastic in the country is being used to set up barriers at business across the land! It took over a month for me to to get it all, as I had to order from 2 different vendors online and scrounge the “scratch and crack” scraps at the local Lowe’s to get enough of it, but eventually I had enough to surround the track.
Now I had to figure out 2 more things; how to cut it without breaking it, and how to mount it.
Cutting was the first thing to tackle. I had a couple of mishaps and lost a couple of pieces but I was smart enough to practice on scrap and fortunately I bought the right tools:
The trick is to use a cutter specifically designed for cutting acrylic and Plexiglas and to use a thick, sturdy metal straight edge, held down by 2 strong clamps to prevent it from moving, to score BOTH SIDES of the sheet in exactly the same place. This would be very difficult to do with an opaque piece of sheeting, but with a transparent piece you can mark one side with a Sharpie, cut, flip, and use the first score to line up the straight edge for the second. Scoring deeply and deliberately on both sides, and snapping the sheet decisively in the right place afterward, produces a clean cut; within only a couple of tries, I had the hang of it.
But…how to attach it? My first idea-drilling holes through it and bolting it to the 2×4 structure of the table-was rejected early on, and not just for the fear of breaking the sheets when I drilled them; it was also the fear of breaking them afterward, maybe even years afterward; if one of them was caught while I was on the table setting something up and bent against the bolts, or if I just needed to remove them and then replaced them and tightened those bolts a little too tight, I figured bolting them on through holes drilled in the sheeting would result in a short life span. After working through some other ideas, what I came up with seemed inelegant at first but wound up being a nearly perfect solution: a LOT of Velcro!
After measuring everything twice, I used a high-strength double-sided padded tape to run a strip all the way around the table in such a way as to clear the heads of the bolts that hold the edging to the legs; then I bought 2 spools of Velcro with adhesive backing and ran a bead of the “soft side” on top of that, giving the adhesive a “double strength” that was more than enough for it to stick permanently. Then, each piece of acrylic got a strip of the hook side of the Velcro.
Finally, to keep the sheets even with one another I simply used a set of small paper clamps; they look fine, especially the white ones I bought; this was an affordable solution to make the sheeting look like a smooth uniform look down the whole 10’ length of the table.The best part of this solution is that it makes the sheets easy to remove without damage; if I decide to change things up on the diorama and have to do some construction, and need to lean over the table or climb up on top of it for any reason, I simply undo the clips and pull the sheets off, and then stick them right back on when I’m done; it also provides for a “breakaway” affect, so that if some inadvertent pressure is put against the sheets from either side they are more likely to just detach then to crack. Of course if they detach and fall to the tile floor at just the right angle that creates a different problem, but, no plan is perfect.
I’m sure there are all kinds of ways to do this and there were probably even better ways, but I had no one to ask; the few people I did run it by had no constructive ideas to offer, so this was what I came up with. And if my poor little blue Alfa Romeo could talk, she’d remind you that necessity is the mother of invention!