Carlson Lap Timing - Home Racing World & Slot Car Garage

Tuesday June 02, 2009

Ok, after months of planning and hard work you have finished your dream routed track. It is running great and everyone is enjoying it. However, now you are looking to add a timing system on it to conduct official racing or maybe just for your own personal enjoyment. Although some of you can build your own system, folks like myself are just not that smart on these types of things. This is when having a reliable after-market source to build them for you comes in really handy.

The last system we looked at was the SensorTrack from Carlson Slot Cars. Back in 2004 we chose this system for our Dixon Hills 4 lane Artin road course. It is important to mention this here as this system is still in use today without a single issue. If you wanted to know if what Carlson builds is high quality, this should answer your question.

Fast forward to 2008 and here we are with our new 3 lane routed wood road course. I contacted Carlson because they were now offering systems designed just for routed tracks. Since we were so pleased with the first product, it was an easy choice.

What You Need

The SensorHarness can be any number of lanes and with the fairly simple installation you can be up and running in no time. The requirements on the PC side are minimal, any Pentium 100 with Dos and a working parallel port can be used.

We like to use Laptimer 2000 for our tracks so we use an old computer with Windows installed. These systems are compatible with just about every popular lap timing software so it should fit most enthusiasts needs easily.

What You Get

SensorHarness Lite
1 x Wiring harness with all electronics, computer connector, power connector and power status LED.
1 x AC Adaptor.
1 x 12' computer cable.

Everything arrived safe and sound ready for installation.

One thing I liked was that the harness end with the sensors is temporarily mounted on a scrap piece of wood. Not only does this protect the sensors during shipping, it also helps show you how to correctly mount them on your track.

The sensors themselves are deep enough to fit just about any home set guide. They also work with many commercial type guides. We tested them using guides from Parma and H&R with no clearance issues.

The only thing you have to do is cut holes large enough to fit the harness in your track. You can either drill from the underneath and leave a very thin layer of MDF to cover the sensors or go from the top down. I chose the top down method as it was just easier.

I used the larger milling bit in our Dremel to shape the hole just the right size. Once the hole was finished I installed the sensor from the underside and secured it with hot glue. When installing it, make sure the bottom of the circuit board where the sensors mount is either flush or slightly below the bottom of your slot. You don't want some of the deeper guides catching it and possibly damaging the harness.

Now I simply taped over the sensor and soldered each end of the tape to make sure we had good conductivity.

Now it was simple a matter of hooking the cables up and plugging it in. We fired up our computer and headed to the track for some testing. (Make sure if using Laptimer 2000 under the options field in the ports settings you check the box next to Trakmate sensor compatibility.)

What can I say? It works flawlessly. We tested just about every brand of slot car we had in our collection and after 300 laps it never missed a lap. The ONLY car that did skip was the older Scalextric with the now infamous blue guide. However this is not the sensor harness at fault. For some reason this color guide has caused issues with many lap timing systems. A black magic marker fixes that.

In the end I am very pleased I chose this product. It works exactly like it should and the quality has proven itself over time. The price was fair as well with our 3 lane system costing $49.99. PLUS all Carlson systems come with a lifetime warranty which I thought was pretty impressive. If you are looking to add a timing system to your track I highly suggest giving this system a serious look.

- Harry

As always feel free to contact me about this article or just the hobby in general at harry@homeracingworld.com, or better yet drop into our Message Forum and share your thoughts with other enthusiasts!

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