From Scalextric to E. L. Moore

The E. L. Moore eBook is in the final stages of development - ok, well, the manuscript is almost done, and I'm revising it like crazy.

Early on in the book I talk about how I 'discovered' E. L. Moore by way of a youthful slot car obsession. A friend and I played with Eldon cars and Scalextric track in the summer of '73, and I went all out making buildings for our layout. In my search for building models I stumbled across the work of E. L. Moore, and the rest is history :-) 

A couple of weeks ago I started to wonder if a small Scalextric course for 1/32 scale cars could be built these days. By "small" I had in mind something around 2m x 1m that could be built on a thick foam base.  

PaperClip 7 using Scalextric Classic track

I looked around for a planning tool and came across RailModeller Express for the Mac. It has templates for Scalextic track, and only cost 99¢ at Apple's App Store for a version that can handle up to 50 pieces of track, which seemed like plenty for the little layout I had in mind.

I'd been doodling a paperclip shaped layout so that's what I tried to build. 

It turns out there are two types of Scalextric track: Classic and Sport.

Classic was discontinued years ago, but I remember it from childhood, so I tried something with it first. I was able to fit a layout in 2m x 1m without too much effort.

PaperClip7 using Scalextric Sport track

Sport is the current offering, and can be used for digital or analog layouts, whereas Classic was apparently only good for analog. Any layout I'd build would be analog.

A problem I found is Sport doesn’t offer a crossover on a straight section of track, only on an R2 curve! For reasons of geometry this forces all curves in the paperclip to be R2 and makes for a bulkier layout. Lengthwise the course just squeezes into 2m, but widthwise it's a good 20cm or so too wide.

I used 4 crossovers in the Sport version instead of just 2 to try and make the race as fair and equal as possible, but I wonder if it is too difficult. Clearly I need to keep experimenting with this tool.

Yes, RailModeller Express does allow you to design railroad track plans too as its name suggests! The full version of RailModeller doesn't have the 50 piece limit, so you can dream up a huge empire. It's a great tool if the Scalextric part is anything to go by and I'm looking forward to trying model railroad track planning with it.

Buzz-A-Rama

"I run a tight ship here."

Looking at William Nordner's How To Build books

Back in February 2020 I wrote a post on Vince reminding me about an old book called How to Build Model Cars by William Nordner. At the time I couldn't find a copy online, but did come across another Nordner book called How to Build Model Ships, which I bought. Recently I found a copy of the Cars book online and bought it, although it wasn't in my usual 'reasonable price' category :-( It seems to be much rarer than Ships, and commands a corresponding price.

I took the Cars book out of Cedarbrae library many times in the early '70s. Although I clearly remembered the cover, I couldn't recall anything inside that made it so compelling. Back then anything to do with model building meant I'd read it many times regardless of quality. Interestingly, I don't recall seeing the Ships book at the library even though both indicate they were published in 1969.

The copy of Cars I bought came from the Sheffield Township Library in Sheffield, Pennsylvania. From the due date record in the back it was only borrowed 8 times between 1970 and 1990. If this had come from Cedarbrae library, it would have been borrowed at least 8 times by me alone in 1970 :-)  

I think these books were aimed at boys aged 9 to 14 or so, and I was in the targeted demographic. I remember Cars filed in the children's section in the library. 

If the price tag on Cars is actually from 1969, that $2.95 converts to around $22 in today's money. Seems a little pricey for a children's book, but maybe it was mainly for libraries?

Both books are jam packed with excellent black-and-white pen and ink drawings. There are no photographs at all in either of these books. The back covers say Nordner illustrated them as well as writing the text, so he was clearly a top notch illustrator. 

The Ships book seems to have registration problems with the illustrations on many pages, so their overall impact is somewhat diminished. There are no such problems in Cars, but Cars seems to have a lower density of pictures, and they don't appear to be as detailed and numerous when it comes to the construction sections.

Even by the publication standards of 1969, both books seem like throwbacks to hobby books of the pre-1950s when drawings were the primary way of illustrating many of these sorts of mid-range guides, and photographs were sparingly used, if at all. By the time we get to the 1960s we're seeing hobby books with black and white photos on nearly every page, some pages with several photos. Louis Hertz's The Complete Book of Raceways and Roadways from 1964, and Paul Plecan's Model Car Handbook from 1965 are good examples of high end, photograph dense, hobby publishing of the time. I assume the publisher of Ships and Cars, Meredith Press, had an eye on keeping production and licensing costs low.

Although the illustrations in both Ships and Cars are excellent, the impression I got was that Nordner's heart wasn't in Cars as it was in Ships, and I'd say Cars isn't as good as Ships. 

Not as good?

If one were to test the books' titles by trying to build a model car or ship from the contents, I think one could build a ship model using Ships as a guide, but I don't think a model car could be built from Cars. I think Cars is misnamed. Although it does discuss things like static models, and various types of powered models, it's really an introduction to the slot car hobby. The paragraphs and illustrations on model car construction are somewhat perfunctory, unlike Ships were there are lots of detailed illustrations. I speculate that Cars was written to try and capture some piece of the slot car hobby market, which unfortunately was in decline by 1969.

Did I figure out why young me was so entranced by How to Build Model Cars? No. I suspect I was just enthralled by the existence of a book purporting to explain how to build model cars and studied the pages with religious fervour in an attempt to puzzle out whatever secrets were in its pages. 

How to Build Model Ships

Got 'em

Awhile back Vince was testing my knowledge of slot car books published in the '60s and '70s. He mentioned How to Build Model Cars by William Nordner and sent along a photo.

The title didn't ring any bells, but as soon as I saw the photo I instantly remembered taking it out many, many times from the local public library when I was a kid. I even remembered exactly where it was shelved. Actually, the layout of the entire library and its contents flooded back in photorealistic detail. It was a strange experience. 

I immediately went online to see if I could find a copy. No dice, but I did find a copy of Nordner's How to Build Model Ships for a couple of bucks and bought it. I don't remember seeing this at the library, but it's never too late to experience what I might have overlooked :-)

Need 'em

And, strangely enough, I wondered if there was an E. L. Moore connection - being I'm a man with a hammer and all that. Mr. Moore wrote 2 articles, one published and one not, about projects where boat models were prominent. The unpublished one, submitted to MR in March '69, was called A Pair of Canal Boats, and the published one, add a Harbor to your Pike, was published in January and February '68 in RMC. In the introduction to the RMC article he mentions that a chance buy of a marked down copy of a book on ship models was partial inspiration to get going on the project. Was Nordner's the book? No, it was published in 1969. Maybe Mr. Moore eventually saw it at his local library, but we'll likely never know. The search continues for that inspirational marked down book.

Aurora Rolls Out The A/FX

The model car parking garage got Vince and I talking about diecast and slotcar scales. Naturally, the topic of A/FX came up, and I had to go look for an old ad.

I came across this one in the July-August '71 issue of Jack Kirby's Challengers of the Unknown - I think it was a reprint issue. 

It's full-page and it seems to leap off the page. I didn't own an A/FX slot car set, but this ad does a great sales job.