Spiel

Porsche 906 Yellow Aurora Slot Car in Box -- HO-scale Porsche 906 slot car from the 1960s (in its original box) sold for $2.98. Like its real-life counterpart, these slot cars have appreciated about 1000% Slot Cars OCTOBER 2013 45 www.pnwr.org My indoctrination to racing came naturally as a result of the mid1960s slot car craze. Being a newly-minted man of means as a result of my paper route, I had sufficient funds to finance and develop my own slot car track, complete with a lighted pit area, trees, bleachers, and even a 1/64 scale balsa outhouse behind the bleachers. I also built and installed a relatively sophisticated control panel outfitted with phone jack or alligator clip control hookups, reversing switches, and a transformer pilot light made from a repurposed doorbell button. New cars with almost any body style could be purchased for $2.98 each, but their performance out-of-the-box left a lot to be desired. Every car had to be heavily modified to make it suitable for competition. First, the rear wheels had to be swapped out for larger wheels and fitted with stickier silicone tires. New, lighter plastic bodies had to be fabricated out of thin plastic sheets using a toy vacuum-former. And the tiny electric motor armatures had to be stripped of hair-thin coil wires and rewired with a proprietary number of turns of a different gauge wire, carefully soldered into place. Lastly, a 1 ½ volt battery was wired backwards into the brake line of the hand control to provide electrically-resistant "power brakes" -- threshold braking at 1/64th scale. All this high technology was gleaned by voraciously reading the monthly slot car magazines, which also carried articles about real-life race cars, drivers, tracks, and races. We mostly ran solo time trials, but occasionally we held spirited races. For kids new to my track, I had a secret "nuclear option" if the race got a little tight. Pressing the doorbell button on the control panel would cause the little balsa outhouse behind the bleachers to flash in a brilliant blue-white light with an audible "pop" and heat wave, followed by a wisp of smoke as the concealed photo flash bulb went off. The normal reaction was a moment of shock and confusion, followed by gales of laughter. (Remember -- we were in junior high school at the time.) I am still learning life lessons from my slot car days. The cars we bought for $2.98 in the mid-1960s currently sell well-used for more than ten times that amount on eBay, especially if they are (ahem) still stock. Appreciation on these toys is as good or better than most of the real cars they represented! And I threw all mine out years ago.

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