Our December meet, last meet of the year a lot to get through and a super busy one!
Basically this is our Christmas meeting, we wanted to make it a bit special so lined up a few things. Jenny organised some Christmas food, the committee organised our Christmas draw AND we decided to have some judging plus Stu had arranged with Darren Dennis for a full size Scania Nexgen 650s to come and grace the proceedings (we decided to have that as truck of the month this time around so pics of it are elsewhere :)
We expected the meeting to be a bit busy but not as busy as it was with over 50 drivers of which 5 were juniors, 17 spectators and ourselves there were over 80 people on site. Lin, Jenny and Clare were on the refreshments and were kept busy all day. Nicola was overrun looking after booking in AND the draw whilst Stu was booking in for the judging. You couldn't swing a cat in the Cafe at some times. Paul and I stooged around trying to make sure things ran smoothly.
The layout this month featured a roundabout, we have had it since the beginning of the year but have not fully decided how to mark it up and connect to the rest of the layout. Time to have a try (marking out will have to wait until it is warmer). The flat layout created a more open layout and seems to have gone down well. By the way we could not have achieved this without the help of Rich Skuse Mike and Danny Brooks and Dan Evans helping with the layout. Since last time the club has invested in some different rubber, this is between 4 and 10mm in size and coloured. We did this so that everyone can use it (so long as they bring it back), we have 40kg so plenty to go round. Once again the hopper and conveyors were set out and open for everyone to use, A few wrinkles to sort but I did see a few people using them. I think we need a hopper to load the trucks though. I have some more cover material coming to extend the sides as they did spill a bit but worked really well with the rubber. Advice on how we lay this out would be appreciated.
The next on the agenda was the Grand Draw. Those of you that visited last month will know that we had a Tamiya 770s kit for the primary prize but a lot of others. Zoe wanted to make the prizes up to a round number, so donated another prize! So a great many thanks to those that donated and I hope those that won were happy with their prizes.
Following on from the raffle we had the results of some judging. We wanted to keep this as simple as possible so there were only 4 categories. Junior, Judges choice, best concept and best scratch build. We of course had some visiting judges who did the not so simple job of choosing a truck for each category. They run trucks on a daily basis and have been known to visit a full size truck show or two ;), so a huge thanks to Stefan and Gav for coming up to Weston and giving up their time to do the job. The meetings go from strength to strength and we are getting some cracking builds come along so thank you all for that and pushing the limits of builds.
Well Enough from me and on to some pics.
