Question on running Scaley cars on wood

[Pault86]

[mikeinclover]

The magnetic effect you will get from a wood track with magnabraid will be quite a bit lower than that of a plastic track. It will also depend on how much of a recess the have for the braid. The lower the recess the lower the magnetic effect.
Mike

[DrumPhil]

The best thing to do is just remove the mags from a couple of your cars, put on good tires, and drive them. The only way to see if you like no-mag is to try it.

My little wood track uses copper tape, so no magnetic force is available. The cars run great as long as I put on urethane tires (some prefer silicone) and true them up a little with sandpaper glued onto a wide putty knife. On some cars I add a little weight for traction. The driving feels very smooth to me, with fewer catastrophic fly-offs at unnaturally high speed.

Digital systems let you adjust speed settings for each car. With analog, you just adjust the voltage to the track. With a bit of well-planned wiring, you can adjust the voltage to each lane as needed.

[Nor Cal Mike]

I have had great success running most Scaley cars without magnets. I have run them on analogue wood tracks and an SSD plastic track. I think they run better on wood no mag because wood is so much smoother than any Scaley plastic track will ever be. Without magnets, the cars do have a little wheel hop under acceleration due to the sloppiness in the bushings required for using splined axles. There are ways to fix that but if you are running these cars on dialed down power as you mention, you may not notice the hop nearly as much.

[RichD]

One of the Shoreline Model Raceways tracks has Magnabraid, the rest have either tinned copper braid or copper tape. Magnabraid is not plain braided steel, it also includes some copper, I would estimate that you will get 70% of the downforce that you would get on Scalextric Sport track and about the same downforce that you would get on Carrera track.
Tuning most plastic chassis cars to run well without traction magnets can be tricky. Rather than going cold turkey a track with Magnabraid would allow you to more gradually ease off on the magnets. Before we switched to wood tracks we had already moved the traction magnets forward in many of our cars so they would slide more and that made the transition to no magnets easier.

[Pault86]