Whats the best way to wire....

Hello hodragracer
Over the years I have seen Some very ridiculous size wire used on tracks and controllers.
Your power supply outputs 10 amps which enough, Your cars will only pull what they need no more.
Your house uses 14 ga wire for many feet in its walls and are conected to a 20 amp breaker. if you use a hair dryer or vacume it can easily pull 15 amps or more and the wire handles it fine.
As for the jumpers I need to know if you are using wood or plastic track? Some time jumpers are more trouble than they are worth unless you use braded rails.

What do you mean by a jumper in the track? Sorry just curious so when i do get my track I will know. thank you

Hum... SlotCarsInc.com's track is plastic with a wood core. I'm not sure what the wire is but it isn't piano wire. From what I understand their rail is much lower in carbon which lowers the magnetic downforce. They do use the magnetic taps which are pretty cool.

Since I don't have any intentions of moving my track I have soldered my taps to the track. One of SCI's suggestions is that is you want to use additional taps to do so by drilling holes from underneath so as not to go through the surface and, use the magnetic taps from there. They will not be seen and that should work fine.

My track is 1/8th mile and I see no reason for jumpers.

yup that's what we call (power) taps . It's like slotman said. You have power taps at different locations of the track so you keep the power up through out a lane. I don't think continuous rail drag strips have as much of a power loss like you find on home built tracks using the plastic Tyco, Tomy or Aurora style 15" sections. Say if you have a scale 1/64 scale 1/8th mile. With sections of track that are 15" long your going to end up with at least 8 (9) sections of track. Each section has to make good electrical contact with the next or you'll lose a little power. I'm sure if you've messed around with home sets when you were little, you probably remember dead sections where you had to bend the end of the rail over to get it to contact the next section. This usually happen when the track started to get a little bit worn from changing layouts. Power taps are just a good way of ensuring you have good power all the way down.

Some of you know that I've had months and years of frustration with not being able to run t-jets on my track due to timing problems. In-line cars are fine, but t-jets were bad. This is what happened and I hope nobody else goes through what we did to get it fixed... Bear with me cause those of you that know me, know I'm long winded. Sorry.

First off, I'm not complaining in any way about my Fulltiltspeedway.com track. It is everything I wanted and Kevin is fantastic carpenter and craftsman and did exactly as I asked when he built my track, so none of this is his fault at all. I should have figured this problem out a long time ago. It was easier to just run the in-line cars as we had no problems with them.

When I sat down and planned the track I wanted, a powered return road was on the list after seeing Carl’s on the HOHRA website. Then I thought the ability to run the track as a long skinny oval track would also be neat in case we became road racers too. (It never happened... once ya go straight; ya never "turn" back.) I asked Kevin to also wire the track since he had done so many and I had not wired one ever. He ran the insulated power lines threw the same 3/4 inch holes in the cross 2x4" boards under the track that he ran the timing equipment wires through. It all looked very professional and well done. When I talked to Daniel at Trackmate about my glitch problems with t-jets a year or more ago, we both believed the individually insulated wires next to each other wouldn't cause the problem I was having since the in-line cars worked well. He suggested make sure by adding a shield to the wiring with some shielding mesh. I did that and even added some additional insulation at locations where the wires met the track rails.

Since then I have changed the controllers numerous times and cleaned them, moved or changed numerous other items to make sure they were not the problem. I added another power supply to have one unit for each lane, disconnected the big screen TV that acts as a big monitor to go with the flat panel at the starting line. I switched from the Trackmate Economy Timing system to the Trackmate 2000. I changed out three different computers and other stuff that I can’t even remember anymore. I would get weird MPH numbers but good ET’s and then maybe good MPH but weird ET’s. Sometimes the computer would freeze and have to be rebooted. You name it, it happened. We then just kept running in-line cars and every once in a while I would tackle another potential fix for the t-jets but to no avail.

About 6-8 weeks ago we changed a few things and all at once it worked. We thought it was fixed and I volunteered to have the race moved here since there was a problem at the original race site. We thought we were ready and as you know, I wasn’t.

This morning, my son, Mike and I agreed to spend the day attempting to identify the problem by eliminating the track power and running “hand cars” threw the timing beams and make sure the timing wasn’t the problem. It wasn’t and when we added the track power back, the problem came back. We then rerouted the power wires to the track totally away from all timing wiring. Since the track is permanently mounted on 6 kitchen cabinet bases, it wasn’t easy to make the changes, but we did. Then with many, many runs later and no glitches, we knew we had fixed it. The times look good and are repeatable.

At one time during today’s mess, we worried that the times were coming up wrong. Mike came up with a good cure for that too. Just take two boxes we use for mailing our cars. (Or clip boards or something wide enough to cover both lanes) Have one guy hold one box above the track a couple feet from the finish line sensors and the other guy stage a box at the starting line with the track power off. Start the tree and at green move the box evenly away from the starting line. Then the finish line guy does the same and it will register a very close to identical ET and MPH in each lane. The reaction times are also pretty even. Great check.

That’s it. The problem was having even well insulated track power cables next to well insulated timing wires. AUGH!!! I’m very glad it’s over! Now I can spend more time on trying to catch up with you guys with my cars and not working under the track. I’m too old for that stuff!

:)A good bit of information for those building a new track they now know to allow plenty of separation from power and timing systems.great report

When you say "across each tap" I understand that to mean: "at each tap you run a capacitor from that tap point to ground." What size caps did you use?

BTW this solution sounds exactly right to this reader. The same issues exist in audio electronics, where I have some background. Noise is noise whether it is audio noise or informational noise.

The input is greatly appreciated.