Welcome back

I really had no place to set up the new AFX track except for in an oversize 6 ft x 14ft walk-in closet/storage room that an under construction HO scale model railroad set up on 2ft wide panel on shelf brackets. The around-the-walls with duck-under access is fine for trains but but kind of crummy for a race track but it had to do. I promptly removed all the train stuff, set up the AFX track along with extra Tomy 18" curves and had something that was a lot of fun to drive on.

When I surprised my son after he came home from school with what I had done, he was amazed. We raced for hours and at one point he said "I WAS BORN TO RACE!"
Uh oh...I think I created a monster
We spent endless hours racing, tuning cars, and reconfiguring the track over the next few weeks. I found my old collection of model car magazines from the '70s (Car Model and others) and read through all the slot articles. I bought as many back issues of Model Car Racing I could get and quickly brought myself up to speed

I returned to Joe's shop very frequently to but old and new HO cars from Aurora (AFX and T-jets), Tyco, Auto World, Johnny Lightning, Bauer, MEV, etc. Each time I found myself spending more and more time admiring 1/32 scale cars. One day I finally bought that SCX Renault Alpine "just because". I had no place to run it but Joe had a large public 6 lane HO track that was I found out was set up for 6 months at a time to be replaced by a 1/32 scale track for a following 6 months.

As soon as I spent some time racing my Alpine on the newly set up track there was no turning back. Since that time I have added a heck of a lot of cars as well as a Scalextric track set but that's a story for later.

Thanks for visiting

Welcome to my blog.

I don't necessarily know what I'm doing so please bear with me dear reader as I learn by doing.

Although I joined Slotforum several months ago I just started to become active in the past few weeks. I've been reading many, many threads and blogs to get a feel for how this all goes.
Slot cars has only become a hobby of mine in the past couple of years. About 3 years ago I discovered a wonderful place called NJ Nostalgia Hobbies in Scotch Plains, New Jersey. Out of curiosity, I wandered in and was awe-struck by hundreds, maybe thousands, of cars in display cases, on racks, and on shelves. Now, I had one of those Jackie Stewart Aurora AFX sets in the early/mid 1970s and as many as 30 cars (all but one yellow Dodge van are long gone), but I had kind of forgotten about slot cars because all that I would see were those lame Life-Like Nascar sets in Toys-R-Us. I had absolutely no idea about 1/32 slots. I've been a collector of diecast vehicles in all scales since forever but didn't seem to cross paths with slot cars.
Joe, the owner of the shop, indulged me in my multitude of probably very obvious questions. Even though I was thinking about getting an AFX set (yayyy for Tomy!) for me and my then six year old son to share and broaden his interests from trains, trains, and more trains, I kept being drawn to the 1/32 scale cars.
After a looonnng time in the shop I walked out with the biggest AFX set there was, a couple of vintage cars like my long lost ones, books, Model Car Racing magazine and a ton of enthusiasm.
What I didn't walk out with was a 1/32 scale car. But there was this odd tingling of desire for a certain SCX Renault Alpine A110 rally car that was just like a 1/25 scale diecast Alpine made by Polistil that I had gotten on a Christmastime trip to FAO Schwarz in New York City in the '70s.