I’m using standard adhesive backed copper tape for the rails. I did order the tape with conductive adhesive, and I can report that indeed this stuff works very well.
The testbed oval track used 1/4″ wide tape. There was a lot of pleating and wrinkling in the turns, even though they were a pretty large radius. I asked some questions on the forums and had a very helpful discussion with Ed “HO RacePro” who suggested going to thinner tape. So, for the proof of concept track, i ordered 1/8″ wide tape.
There were a few difficulties. The tape applying tool I found on thingiverse worked quite well with the 1/4″ tape. It didn’t work as well with the thinner tape. The OD of the retainer was smaller than the OD of the roll itself, so the roll wanted to unspool over the sides. i ended up applying the tape by hand, which was tedious.
This is a still shot from a video I took of a car running. At this point, I just had the rails hooked up to a power supply.
The crossover took a little thinking, and in hindsight i wish I would have planned it a bit better.
I just drilled holes through the foam with a 5/32 drill bit and ran the tape to the underside of the foam to make connections. Most connections are just the tape stuck to itself. I did solder wires onto the tape where i would need to make connections to the power supply and controller.
