My Childhood AFX Track

Bellator Bellator 12 years ago

Thought you guys might get a kick out of seeing me and my brother's old slot car track from when we were kids.  We spent many an hour playing with this during the dark winter days in upstate Pennsylvania. (When we weren't out sledding, skiing, or hiking.) He pulled it out of storage over the holidays, set it up, and sent me the following pictures and video.  Amazing to me that it still works.

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Short video of a car running on the old track.
AFX Layout

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Autorama Autorama Mod

Haha!! Nice.

I'm surprised you haven't asked your brother to ship it to you.

Mitleid Mitleid

As I was looking at the controllers I started to wonder if you could just set it to a speed and let go

Edit: Then I watched the video and answered myself

BarkingSpyder BarkingSpyder

When I was kid we had a king track on the 2nd floor of a roller-rink.  By the time I had the money for a car they closed the track!  So I got a small Aurora track for Christmas when I was about 12-13.  It came with a white Mustang and some other passenger car.  I immediately got the defacto "hop up" kit with a new pinion and truck hubs with 4 tall rubber Aurora truck tires.  One  day I was doing burn-outs with oil and suddenly the car went from slipping around to shooting across the room; the oil ate up the tires a little (like lighter fluid we use today) and was a traction fluid!

I soon got a Gulf Ford GT40 and performed surgery on the chassis, removing any piece of plastic that was not needed.  I soon had a lightened and air-cooled chassis that looked like the AFX; which came out a year later.  I drilled out the idler gear, changed the pinion and crown and got some new hubs and sponge tires.  Eventually I got some silver pickups and brushes.  Both the Mustang and GT40 smoked all of my friends who had much bigger tracks. My cars created showers of white sparks as they chattered down the track, bouncing on the pickups as they wheelied from the torque!  Eventually I got a white porsche and another car, both AFX with all the hop-up parts out of the box.  I still modified what I could though!  I only ended up with about 5 cars but they were prizes I spent several hours with.  The GT40 and at least one of the other cars is in a momento box at my parents house ... but its driving me crazy b/c I cant find them!

**  At least I now have an HO drag strip - and the cars (from AW) are very close to the Pancake-AFX spec.

chapracer65 chapracer65

Thanks for posting the AFX photos; it brings back a lot of memories.  I started with the Model Motoring A/C "Vibrator" set in 1961 before moving on to T-Jet and then AFX in 1969.  The Vibrator cars had a controller that looked similar to the controllers in your photos; the A/C wreaked havoc with TV reception whenever I ran the cars.

It seems we cannot post photos in replies, so I added a separate post with photos of a Tyco track I built in the Eighties.

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