That Was a Really Long “Week”

Remember how I signed off my last post with “See you next weekend”?. I guess I won’t be that precise in the future. A lot of thinking and shopping (not buying) for power went on after my last post. I went back and forth on whether I was going to use battery power (pure DC) or a DC power supply (artificial DC).

I found that hooking up and switching between different batteries to achieve different voltages was going to be more complex than I originally thought. I also talked around with different HO slot car enthusiasts and was hearing that DC power supplies were not that bad after all. I guess I was coming from the world of PC’s where when I shop for a UPS (which is just the opposite as AC is derived from a DC battery), electronics can be sensitive to how “artificial” the AC power is.

Well apparently, the little DC motors in these slot cars aren’t that sensitive to the artificial nature of the DC produced by DC power supplies. DC power supplies would greatly simplify my life so I changed my mind from using batteries to using a power supply. However…

Since I usually go for the best quality of an item that I can afford (or save up for), I settled on a really good power supply that was temporarily out of my price range. So what did I do? I went ahead and bought one 12 volt deep-cycle battery that would more than tide me over until the table and layout were more developed and of course until I could save up the money for the power supply. There is no switching needed with one battery. The only drawback is that 12 volts is not very much power for most of my slot cars. They’ll run, just not very fast. But then, that’s really not an issue while I’m still developing the layout.

Of course, a battery needs to be charged when it runs down, so I had to get a battery charger, one that is designed to charge deep cycle batteries.

Now that I had power, I thought it was time I finally start laying some track. I have a big layout planned with more than enough track. The only problem is that most of the track had rusted or corroded contacts and rails. I have a small abrasive block for the rust that was getting the job done, but at one piece at a time, it was going to get quite tedious. So I thought it was time I tried some Evaporust that I kept hearing about. It works pretty great. You just let the item soak from 1 to 12 hours. That’s it. After that you rinse it off and let it dry. I’ve done two batches which gave me more than enough track to work with for a while. When I get close to using those up I’ll start soaking some more.

I don’t have anything to show you right now other than a cluttered table with just a few pieces of track fitted together. When I have more laid down I’ll post some pictures to show my progress.

I won’t say “see you next weekend” this time, but I do hope to post more often.