2 replies to this topic

[Spriggan]

Hi Guys,
I'm going to be posting a bit of a running diary on the rebuild of the CMRC track, which is to be found on the Perranporth airfield on the North coast of mid Cornwall. http://www.cornwallmrc.co.uk Its a very basic website at the moment, as the old site and forum was forced to close down due to it being abused by some rather undesirable people when the club was going through some major upheaval.

The CMRC club has been running for many years as a hobby based club, for the enjoyment of RC enthusiasts to meet up and race their models. Although over the past few years, as with all the South west clubs, membership numbers have dwindled and the track has slowly fallen into disrepair.

Now with a new driving force within the club and myself joining their ranks, there is a new will to give the track a good shake up, Modernise and upgrade the facilities, extend the track, build a new drivers rostrum, and improve the health & safety for the drivers and veiwing public. Its quite a tall order, but with the right gear, and the right people, it is all posible.

This is how the track was looking back in June. Since then I have been driving the track, so there is not much of the old tubing left undamaged! My youtube video

The members and a few guests had a meeting to discuss how we were going to approach the project. The rough design of the new Timber framed rostrum was approved. Its going to be double sided as CMRC have on and off road tracks running back to back with the rostrum between, but as the location is prone to taking a blasting from the winds direct off the Atlantic Ocean, the on road side will have hinged shutters to protect the off road drivers from the wind and rain. Its being built as a 6 driver rostrum, but can easily be extended to take 12 drivers should driver numbers increase to warrant it.

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Works started a few weeks ago, The track has been cleared, and a lot of the overgrowth has been cut back and cleared away to expose the full extent of the track and create the space where the new rostrum is going to be erected.

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Bushes have been chopped back to form a new pitting area closer to the action, while still forming a natural barrier from buggy's coming off the final corner and entering the pit area.
The end of the track used to be the blue fencing, which meant that the public was standing watching the racing right up to the edge of the track, which is a serious breach of H&S, to resolve this the whole track is being moved further up the field away from the entrance road, leaving more room to have a decent public viewing area, with a good safety wall and a wide safety zone between them and the track.
Somewhere down the end there, we are also going to set up an area for Crawlers, as there isn't an official crawler track anywhere in the area and it is felt that this is a side of the sport that youngsters can easily have a go at with even the cheapest sort of toy off road buggy, so it will be a good way of bringing them into the club and sport, and once you have someone hocked, you may not have them for life, but you may have them at different stages of their life,

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It goes without saying that the Cornish weather is not being that kind to us and kept everything nice and soggy when we need it to be dry, but weather and transport permitting, we will soon be taking in soil to start forming up the banked corners and improved jumps, That's it for now, Keep you updated.

Sprig.

[Spriggan]

Heck, its been a while since I have been on here and updated the post, still there hasn't been much to report.
After the first initial burst of enthusiasm the works fell foul of the usual problem.... Doing major track works in the winter..... its always twice as hard!

We had a catalogue of problems that prevented us from hitting the Christmas reopening date.

Firstly the machine that was to do the loading of the rough earth on the tractor and trailer was not man enough to handle the heavy compact material, so was taking far to long to load hence we were only getting about 15 tones of earth to the track each Sunday instead of the 50 tones that had been expected, then the weather was too wet to do the job, then it froze for a couple of weeks and even the digger couldn't touch the heap then.

Work days were called off if the weather looked like it was going to be a bit dodgy!

Machinery and workers were not available at key times.

Then when we did get a 40 tone load of good soil dropped in and the right machinery lined up to form up the big table top jump and banked corner on the track on the Sunday, the Club leader decided to take his mate and a JCB in on the Saturday to move the earth for us!!!! Very kind you might think... except we had it planned to take the soil in carefully with a light machine so as not to damage the ground too much and add restraining wires in the jump which would hold the timber walls upright as the weight of the soil was added. Without the wires, the walls basically collapsed as the soil was piled in! Thanks Boss!
To make matters worse, the JCB had been driving around the whole of the soft track geting into position to put his rear jacks down to pull the soil around, messing up the entire track with great big tyre tracks and blooming great holes from his jacks!
Well you can imagine what we all felt when we saw the state of the track when we got there on Sunday morning, there was nearly a walk out!
An extra 2 weeks work had been added to put the damage to the track right, the table top looks like an amateur built it as we just didn't have time to dig it all out to start again. And the boss still thinks he has done us a favour!

Still things arenow looking up, we have put right most of the mess ups, the new rostrum is in place, the ground is looking a lot tidier, and we should be up and running by Easter Sunday which is the new opening date.




In about 1/3 of the garage at home I started forming up the sections to make the new rostrum.



Once it was all machined up and each joint had been test fitted, it was loaded on the trailer to be taken up the track for erection.



The concrete bases had already been put in a week before with steel fixing plates set deep into the concrete to secure the legs preventing the rostrum moving in the gale force winds that can sweep across this site from time to time.



and to everyones amazmement, not least my own, the whole thing was nearly finished by the end of the afternoon.


The roof can wait for a while!

Another post to follow soon as we now just have to set out the track and do all those finishing jobs that take forever.

Cheers,

Sprig

[Rich]

Hey Sprig

Great progress, especially after all those damn set-backs... You guys have got some balls putting up with all that for the love of your car racing

Good on ya'