As life changes and time becomes a premium, I am looking back on the last 5.5 years as a “slottist” and wondering where I should take my hobby next. Over that time I’ve floated a lot of ideas and discussed a lot of things I would like to do, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some readers of this blog (if there are any!) are starting to be like: “Yeah, you keep talking about doing all this stuff, when you gonna do it?”
That’s probably just a voice inside my head, but, OK! I’m going to list back all the ideas for upping my game at Drag City that I’ve talked about but haven’t done! I’m going to put them down here as bullet points in the order of which I hope they are most likely to occur in, but bear in mind this is no promise, to myself or to anyone else, as “life stuff” often intervenes at the most inopportune times to suck away the time and the money I need to accomplish these tasks!
Here is everything I’ve talked about doing…
- Improve ambient lighting around the track
- Install lighting on the diorama including track lighting and lighting inside bldgs
- Matchbox Speedtrack acquisition and setup
- Hot Wheels Thundershift 500 acquisition and setup
- Diorama expansion: build additional “wings” to tables
- The Heartbreak that IS the “Matchbox Motorway!”
- Getting back to The Get-Backs
Now let’s take a quick look at each of these to see what’s feasible:
1. Improve ambient lighting around the track
This is the most important thing I need to do as quickly as possible. This is going to be expensive and its going to entail a lot of effort, running wires through the ceiling of my finished basement and doing so while the track and table are in place! I can take some steps to minimize the potential damage to the track from the work that must be done, but it won’t be easy and it won’t be complete: its a given that some damage will occur; some of the diorama will be lost, and I will have to do repairs to it after the lights are installed.
To that end, I may descontruct the carnival in order to prevent the extremely expensive 3D Printed carnival rides I waited over 6 months for from getting a light fixture dropped on them! I mean, you can just imagine that happening, right? This means that DC will be closed for a several days – and likely for a week or more – to complete the work.
There are so many different ways to do track lighting its impossible to even consider them all! Some of these can be quite expensive, but its the effort more than the money that concerns me. The thing is, I’ll need help with this; I can’t do it on my own, and I’m not event sure that even 2 guys working together is enough! My main man Patrick can do this, but he’s hundreds of miles away, and coordinating the time and effort with him will be a challenge, to say the least!
Even with all this, I’m rating this as the most important thing I need to do, and the one I want to do first…if I can!
2. Install lighting on the diorama including track lighting and lighting inside bldgs
While this has the potential to be less destructive to the existing track environs-at least a little-its also going to be a lot more work than installing the ambient lighting. However, its also going to be a lot more fun! Installing the ambient lighting is a construction project and nothing more: this is a diorama project!
A while ago I did a post showing my good friend Harrison’s O-Scale model railroad layout and all the fantastic lighting he has been able to add. Of course, finding stuff in O-Scale is much easier than 1:64/HO, and although I’ve found some pretty cool lights for the perimeter of the track, almost all of them are being sold through somewhat sketchy websites in Asia that I’ve never ordered from before. I’ve made the case that this is something you almost have to see in person to know if it’s going to work for you in terms of scale and quality, and every time I see something in person at a show or a hobby store, its either too small or too big, or if I like it, it’s something entirely scratch built. That’s impressive, and I’d like to be able to do something like that and I probably could, given enough time, but see, that’s what I don’t have enough of!
The lighting inside the buildings, however, should be a snap! All I need there is some wads of little LEDs on a wire and I should be able to set them up with no problem. A few small holes drilled in the table here and there to drop them throgh and viola, I should have them up in no time! So maybe this is where I should start! What do you think?
Check out this incredible YouTube channel of a scale modeler who lives somewhere in Europe – Germany? Holland? Denmark? Not sure, but he has awesome taste in cars, music, and is a builder who puts me to shame! Where he gets the time to do all this is beyond me!
3. Matchbox Speedtrack acquisition and setup
This is more a matter of buying than building, although the hard part is going to be finding the space! As big as my haus is, I’ve grown into it to the degree that I don’t know where I’m going to put it, but I believe I will be able to find a space with enough re-arranging, even if its not in the basement with the TomyAFX and Model Motoring tracks! I’ve been wanting about Matchbox Speedtrack and I went into this in detail here and here, so this is definitely on the short(er) list for the rest of this year…although, yes, it may spill into the next year!
4. Hot Wheels Thundershift 500 acquisition and setup
Again, this is buying, not building, but its going to be expensive! This track is clearly a hit with the nostalgia crowd, and good complete working examples of it are selling for hundreds of dollars! I don’t care, I’m going to buy one anyway! Only question is, when? The answer is likely some time in early fall, perhaps September or maybe October. For some reason I always seem to have a little more money around that time, but of course I’m also working my hardest, since the 4th quarter is always the busiest of the year in my industry.
So, I might not have time to play with it, but I would be able to at least set it up, and this is small enough that it would likely go in my living room or dining room! This is going to happen, so stay tuned and I will let you know when it does!
5. Diorama expansion: build additional “wings” to tables
Now this is one that I’ve been talking about for almost as long as this blog has existed, and one that gets the most scorn heaped on me by the “do it don’t say it” DIY’ers out there…and probably rightly so! A few years ago, for this post, I drew up this little “architectureal elevation” illustrating what this might look like:
The worst part of never having done this is that I bought almost all the lumber I needed to complete it way back in 2020 (and that wasn’t cheap, lemmetellya! Do you remember what lumber prices were like during the scamdemic???) I may need to fill in a few pieces that were used elsewhere over the least 5+ years, but most of the material is already here! So what’s stopping me?
A couple of things: for one, I need to move some furniture out of the basement and up into another part of the hosue which is a bigger job than it sounds like, as it involves moving heavy items in other rooms upstairs to make room for more things and probably also involves removing a door or two from their hinges. So again, these are things I need extra manpower for; can’t do it on my own, and what kinds of looks appear on your friend’s faces when you ask them to help you move furniture around your house?
More than that: the lighting I mentioned in item #1! There’s no point in expanding the diorama if I don’t have proper lighting, so I really have to do that before I do this.
And what else? Here’s the big one: FEAR! Fear of the future, fear of moving! That’s something I know I’m going to have to do some day no matter how much it will suck, and the most sprawling, costly, and awesome the Drag City Raceway project becomes, the more I’m going to hate it when that inevitable day comes that I have to break it all apart.
The way real estate prices are going, I’ll probably never be able to have a house this size again, so its unlikely I could ever reconstitute it elsewhere, which is probably an argument to just go ahead and do it and enjoy it while I have it! So, once I can get the help I need clearing out some of the obstructions, I can start nailing and screwing plywood and 2×4’s together! If I do this, I’m going to add a whole neighborhood and probably a S-scale train as well. And that brings me to the most contentious of the items I’m listing here, which is:
#6: The Heartbreak that is the “Matchbox Motorway!”
I’m going to just skirt the edge of what is a very very deep well here! This is a subject that requires not just its “own post” but its own series of posts! Virtually every 1:64 die-cast car fanatic out there must know about this famous, infamous toy! It is, at the same time, the coolest and the most frustrating model car contraption ever invented by man: both brilliant and maddening! This is the project that I was working on with my dear departed friend Dale after we finished the Model Motoring project; he got sick just as we were about to tackle this, and the rest, as they say, is history…that is, the history of things not happening. Whether or not its realistic to ever come back to this is something I will be discussing in great detail in future posts! For now, leave it at this: way back in 2020 when I first built Drag City and its diorama, the expansion I mentioned as item #5 was primarily planned to accommodate this! Once again, I reference our European friend Ricardo’s stellar work:
…while a slightly cheeky “intro” video to how this thing works can be found here:
Believe me kids, it’s not easy!
6. Getting back to The Get-Backs!
At the very end we come to something I’ve essentially tacked on, as this is another item that qualifies more as acquisition than construction. If any of you readers are wondering whatever happened to the Get-Backs project I blogged about so lovingly last year, the answer is that nothing happened to it; I just did exactly what you would expect: picked the low-hanging fruit of re-acquiring all the cars I once had that are actually obtainable, and left the very expensive and difficult ones unfound!
There is still quite a list, though! A lot of the Siku models, in particular, have been very elusive; I can find them for sale on all the usual online sites, that’s not a problem: the problem is that those sellers are always in deepest darkest Europe! And if you’ve seen the prices on postage lately, you know that buying a vintage die-cast that’ already expensive and then doubling or tripling the price with $30-40 or more in postage makes it an expensive proposition to rebuild that childhood collection!
More puzzling is the case of the many Majorettes I want to recapture, which seem like they shouldn’t be too hard to find, but they have been…which can only mean that I must have had some rare ones as a kid without knowing it!
Well, I’m getting them back one way or another, so I just have to remember to budget for some of these in the coming months instead of spending all my toy money @ CO Diecast every month! That’s also easier said than done but I should be able to do it if I put my mind to it: after all, not buying something should be pretty easy compared to some of the other things on this list!
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