Carrera Strax Track

This is my present version of the Carrera Strax track part. 

Status:

I'm still not satisfied with this. The printed parts are not as easy to connect to each other and the original ones than expected. And the resulting track is not as flexible.

Todos: 

• Work on the thickness of the tracks
• The position of the middle round connector part is not precise enough
• Side rail connector is not yet good enough
• Work on supports (I decided to add own support constructions, because the automatically created ones do take to long and waste to much material.) 

Background story:

I had this as a kid and some time ago I gave that set to my daughter and now my son. Sadly the plastic seams to be degenerating over that long time, so about half of all track parts I owned did break. 

So it was on X-mas 2020 when I started to try to recreate it. Over the holidays my kids did play with this again and that motivated me to ask the question: Can this be printed? How can I construct that in FreeCAD? … I wanted to learn about FreeCAD anyway. So I started this.

Fun fact: Since 2020 I “restarted” dies project every X-mas ;-) 

This X-Mas I found a clone on Thingiverse - thanks Psy185!! - and that motivated me again to look at my own creation. So here it is.

Is this smart?

Is this a good idea to print this parts as opposed to getting some second-hand parts? Probably it it is not. To build really good tracks you anyway need a lot of them. I would say that the cost is almost the same, but the time is not worth it. 

I primarily did this to learn FreeCAD and to possibly use the connectors for different other parts that are also broken in my existing set.