In this video we will look at the different power supplies I have used and also run some laps on cars with different ohm values ranging from 20 ohms down to 3 ohm motors and see how much current each armature draws.
Terry really did find a useful solution to those anemic wall warts and he did it without breaking the bank. I ended up with one 120w supply on each lane (4 of them).
Note; Magnatractions red devils are 14.5-15.5 -red tip/copper wire 14-15 ohm armatures. Early AFX red tips/ green wire are 6-7.5 ohm, AFX Mean greens (copper or green wire as stated 6-6.5. Another very good informative video.
GREAT video! Very informative. Agree 110% that the stock wall-wart power-pak and the stock controllers are not all that great. The kids find it frustrating when one car de-slots and the other go's flying off the track,,so much so that they get discouraged. I never really paid attention to what ohm different motors are, this changes that. Did you do anything to your track besides slide it together? It sounds really Smooth, with no real "click-clack" Look forward to more vids! 🏁
Thanks! I did tune some of my connections that were really loud. You can carefully bend the plastic tabs to make a smoother connection. Also my grass mat helps reduce noise otherwise I did not do anything special.
I don't think that would work, you need a controller hooked up to complete the circuit. As long as you hook up a controller it would work. You can do one power pack and controller per lane with the terminal track but that is still only one power tap per lane.
Before I had the power tap tracks I was just using the stock AFX terminal tracks. I have some pictures posted on Instagram of the track before I added the power tap tracks. My Instagram is also Mark's Slot Car Garage.
The brakes work by basically shorting out the motor to slow it down. There is a 100 ohm variable resister that is only active when you take your finger off the trigger. The resistance set is applied across the rails of the track, the lower the resistance (closer to a short) the better the brakes will be. In very strong magnet (high down force) cars the brakes don't really do as much.
That should be fine for most stock cars. If you plan to run lower ohm motors like 3 ohms or lower you may want to consider a 10 amp supply if you are doing a four lane track.
