Tips for building astroturf track?

[Jukka-san]

We are planning to build a astro track for 1/10 cars...What kind of advice you would give? What is the best type of turf, what about the fillings (sand or rubber), how to build jumps etc...

[blue_pinky]

Blimey...now there's a question!!!

PLANNING....Research existing tracks and designs really carefully, design and plan a good landscape/shape to your ground....prep the land well, and choose your building materials carefully. Don't end up with a flat area with hard edged, badly designed features, and grass growing through the joints!!! It'll be more like an obstacle course than a race track, and will need mowing as much as a field does!

PEOPLE....Astroturf is REALLY heavy, you need a lot of help and manpower to deal with it! We found we needed a minimum of 7-8 people on site to even think about moving/manipulating it...any less and it just stays put. Lifting machines will help to if you have access to them, telehandler would be ideal to cope with the terrain.

PATIENCE....It's not a quick or easy job. Don't expect anything other than a lot of very hard back breaking work. But the rewards are high with the right planning and people involved

We made a blog of the WORM track build (actually missing the last post or 2 still...too busy now we're racing on it lol) ***CLICKY***. Start at the bottom of the page to see the full thing. Build took us from April til September this year to get to where we are now. Not totally put all the finishing touches on it yet...but bills needed payed so we had to get racing on it.

As for Astroturf...we blagged ours off a local college that were relaying their hockey pitches. Most tends to be sand filled...but it's a case of finding whatever you can. They'll give it to you for free, but you'll need to move it. It took 2 loads on a big hi-ab truck for us to get our lot moved.

Good luck with it!

[James]

Most important thing - you need planning permission to build a track, make sure you get it otherwise a lot of hard work will have gone to waste!

[burgie]

Hi

One of the most important things about building a modal car track is that the area of land you are above the water table as if it rains it seeps through the land and it does not hold and the filed does not flood

James