Our small slot racing club is moving to new premises, and we want to plan a new 4 lane Ninco track.
In this case we'll choose Ninco track and a 4 lane configuration
In the View menu we'll switch on the Zoom, Room, Autoshapes, Display, Drawing and 3D Camera toolbars
Before we start thinking about our track layout, we're going to layout the room, it's size and shape, the access areas and the furniture. So after carefully measuring our room, we can use the Room toolbar to set up the plan.
Our room is T shaped so we click on the T shaped Room button, which enters a room into our layout.
Now we need to change it's shape and size. So first, we grab the corner points and drag, to create the general shape we want.
Now we can adjust the size.
So now we've got our room accurately laid out, we'll add in the furniture, the doors and the space we'll need around the track for drivers, marshalls and for general access.
We can use the Rectangle tool to plan the objects and spaces within the room. Here we've added two red squares to represent the two doors and the space they need to open, and two black rectangles to show the tables, shelves and cupboards which occupy two of the walls.
We've set the dimensions and colours by double clicking on each rectangle to open the Object Properties panel. We could alternatively select each object and go to Circuit > Properties. Here we have set the width, depth and fill colour
Then we've used the rectangle tool again to plan the access areas. Obviously it's a matter of opinion how much access space you need but our club members wanted generous access all round the track, so here we've set the green rectangles to a width or depth of 90cm.
This leaves us with the space we have to use in the centre of the room.
At this stage we'll save our layout and call it "Room layout".
We will probably work on several track designs, so it's useful to have an empty room layout that we can start with for each separate layout idea.
In the next stage we'll start to design our track layout