Why I Started This Hobby and Blog

It’s the flame that never died. Of all the hobbies I’ve had and stopped down through the years, this is the one I’ve always had the deepest passion for restarting. Yes, I said restarting. This is the fifth iteration of this hobby for me. I guess we could call it my HO slot car hobby 5.0.

1. The first time was when I was introduced to the hobby back in the early 60’s. I played with it whenever and wherever I could which wasn’t very often.
2. The second attempt at the hobby was after we moved to a new house. I was in the third grade. I was still pretty young and wasn’t too serious about it. I can only really remember putting up some track on a ping pong table every once in a while. My Dad had a train table for his Lionel O-gauge trains. It’s possible I may have put some track on that table but I really don’t remember.
3. We moved to where I live now when I was in my 20’s. My dad helped me build a table . I get the dimensions of this one and the next one mixed up but I’m pretty sure this one was 9′ X 16′ utilizing 4-2.5′ X 8′ plywood boards and 2-4′ X 8′ boards. My dad helped me put together a custom control box and 3 electrical boxes on 3 sides of the table where I could plug the control box and controllers in if I wanted.
4. Time marched on and during that time I met a girl I fell in love with and got married. We bought a house about 40 miles or so away and lived there for about 3 years. While I lived in our first house my dad figured I was done with the table and dismantled it. I guess he thought I had other things on my mind. 😛 After about 3 years I came back and bought the house I had already lived in with Mom and Dad. They went traveling and eventually moved to Arizona. When I came back I built one more table. This time it was 8′ X 16′ using 4-4′ X 8′ plywood boards. I remember setting up a big layout on it and had fun running the cars on it. I never did have anyone to race with but I still enjoyed it. I never got serious enough about it to do any landscaping although that was in the back of my mind as something I would like to do sometime. It was during this phase of the hobby that my wife and I decided to start a wedding business. I would do the photography and she would do the cakes. In order to use half the walk-out basement for the business, the health department told us it had to be dedicated to the business. So that meant moving everything personal from that half to the other half. In order to store all the personal stuff in the other half of the basement, I had to give up my hobby, pack everything away, and dismantle the table. It was a sad day for the hobby. That was roughly 20 years ago.
5. Fast forward to 2018-2019. The wedding business had long since been shut down and I found myself talking more and more about how I would love to resurrect the hobby again. My wife encouraged me. The encouragement was enough to get some momentum going and start cleaning up the half of the basement that used to be for the business. By the end of 2019 I was ready to start on the table. October 2019 was when I acquired my first batch of lumber, tools, hardware, etc. Between family issues with my children and other priorities we had for clearing parts of our property, it took me 2 years to finish the table. It’s an “L” shaped table. The long part is 4X16. Another 4X8 table was bolted to the first table at one end to make the “L” shape. The construction of the table was patterned after the late Greg Braun’s blueprints. I took his idea and beefed it up with bigger lumber, etc. I finally finished the table about a month ago and have just finished opening up all the boxes I packed away 20 years ago. It was like Christmas morning when I did that.

I started this blog because I wanted a place where I could tell my story, show my progress, etc. I wanted something dedicated to the hobby and also wanted something that would be a lot easier for people to follow than Facebook.

This time around I am going to go serious with landscaping. The only problem is that I know absolutely nothing about it. I do belong to several HO slot car groups on Facebook which I will still use as a valuable resource. I have a “real” friend or two from those groups who have also gotten serious about landscaping. I hope to glean a lot from them.

While I’m learning what I need to know to get started in landscaping and what I need to know simply to get some cars running again, I will make some blog entries showing the details of my latest table construction for your enjoyment.

Welcome to my blog!

P.S. I should probably explain the picture that goes with this post. At the time I wrote this post I had finished table construction and had unboxed all of the HO slot car stuff (onto the table). That’s it. I didn’t want to use a stock photo. I wanted it to be genuine.