RC Vehicles - other hobbies

msg

Was just in a rabbit hole and looking at modern RC cars after looking up some old 80s Tyco Turbo Hopper models, reminded about them from another thread.

Anyone into RC cars just for fun? I searched and saw mention of a few people talking about different RC vehicle hobbies.

An old roommate had a nitro Traxxas T-maxx that was pretty fun, but I never really got into it before. Kinda thinking about picking something up to play with.

Anyone into that stuff?

stangman67

I raced rc cars for many years. Sold off all my stuff recently after cooper was born. There’s a nice indoor track in Chesapeake

VR3

I almost got into it a few years ago but quickly retreated.

I have a cheap 60 to 80 dollar rc truck that is very fun for what it is but became boring after experiencing the nicer stuff.

The problem with the nicer stuff is you really really really have to dig deep into your pockets for GOOD DURABLE stuff.

The stuff you see around 350 to 1k is absolute garbage!!

Gardenstater

I used to do RC Hydroplanes when I was a kid and had a Hughey 20 Outrigger that did a one way pass at over 60mph at a time trial in PA but the @#$%^ club had a pond with a big boulder in the middle of it and I was so nervous that on my second pass I smashed right into it. One sponson got destroyed and the stanchions were bent. I then got psyched to hop up the motor and go for a world record hopefully but even though I ported the motor out according to someone's instructions specifically for me in Flying Model magazine write in column, life got in the way and I moved onto other things. Still have everything in the basement.

F1nut

Not mine, but one I'd like.

msg

^^^ jeez, dude, that's an RC, Jesse?!? that looks like a full on rock crawler


@Gardenstater - that's awesome! I laughed at your story, as well.

@VR3 - yikes, great info. I don't think that's a rabbit hole I wanna get sucked into, no.

I haven't looked around much, but I thought I could get something to piddle with for $350 to $500. Still a lot for a toy-toy, really. I crashed that former roommate's Traxxas T-Maxx one eve. i'm convinced he set me up, though, because he wanted to switch the frame to aluminum. I crashed it into a stop sign and snapped it in half lol So, he got that wish.

I do remember entry level was still pretty fun. Wicked acceleration, but seemed like everyone wanted to go crazy with upgrades right off the bat. Suspensions, wheels, tires, bearings, solid parts, etc. Not even factoring motors yet at that stage. That's not a level I'd like to get into.

Always wanted a helicopter, though, but I heard people would wreck $3500 worth of flying machine in like three seconds. One of my friends had a neighbor who had one of those in the 90s. He would practice with it in the side yard for a few minutes from time to time. It had a hula hoop around the landing gear. Last time he saw the guy, he was practicing, goosed a control I guess, and it shot up, to the side, crashed into the house, and became piece. Wait, what is it that @mhardy6647 says - experienced unexpected catastrophic disassembly? Can you imagine the feeling? All that money, literally, a few minutes of anxious play, and then boom - hobby over.

I wouldn't haven't the time to go to any tracks or racing so it was really just an idea more for messing around. I think I'd get bored with it after the novelty wore off.

Thanks for the healthy discouragement everyone!

VR3

My experience is all of the mid level stuff used cheap plastic parts thru out and basically the motors have to much power and torque and will shred thru all of it in due time.

I had a higher end truck - was around 400 and literally the plastic drive shaft shredded in 15 minutes. All of the plastic shocks broke in under a hour.

So this 400 dollar truck quickly needed another 200 in parts within the first day.

Needless to say I returned it and never looked back

Hermitism

In college I had something like a jrx2 or jrx-pro, I can't remember the name. It was in the early 90s. All in, was like $600. The guy that got me into RC racing moved away. It wasn't much fun after that. All I could get for it was $150, when I sold it. I remember walking in a hobby store a couple years later, and they had several used ones for sale. Had I known, I would have purchased used.

sucks2beme

Back a million years ago I used to race an Associated rc10 and a 12th
scale carpet car. I joined a club that raced once a week. I stopped after
my 2nd son was born. It can get pricey to be the fast guy. There was
even a group that raced 1/4 scale cars. They played for keeps. They
would toss a bunch of money into the kitty winner take all. We're talking
thousands of dollars. A homebuilder had his crew roll out a banked
asphalt oval track! That's hardcore.

treitz3

It's been a stint and they are both long gone but I used to run the Frog and also had a heavily modified Super Champ. Of the two, I preferred the Super Champ (after mods). That was a lot of fun as a teen!

Now, the son and I only have el cheapo RC trucks we will race in the house every blue moon. Well, that and a drone. His specialty with that is crashing it. Of course, I'm not so bad at it myself from time to time either.

Tom

F1nut

^^^ jeez, dude, that's an RC, Jesse?!? that looks like a full on rock crawler

It's a full on rc rock crawler.

This is a full on rc farm rig.

msg

Mini RC sheep are not much use.

SCompRacer

Once upon a time I was into standoff scale. Had a P51D with rom air retracts. Pinched the air lines so they would retract/extend slowly. Had a helicopter. Long dowel rods front to back and side to side with ping pong balls on ends, attached to skids, helped getting used to it without putting it on its side. Had a truck, some cars. And a King Tiger tank.

Now all I got now is this SYMA S107H-E helicopter. ~ 50 bucks now on Amazon, lots of fun. Had it three years, haven't had to replace the blades ....yet.

Viking64

msg wrote: »

Mini RC sheep are not much use.

"Do androids dream of mini RC electric sheep?"

Viking64

I collect diecast cars and I have a few RC cars (Ferraris and Lamborghinis) that I bought for $30-$50 each to "match" some of my 1/12 scale cars. The detail is often excellent and it sure beats paying $500-$1,000 for a diecast version. I have never put batteries in any of them and I keep the remotes/controllers/whatever in a drawer.

OFF TOPIC or no?

msg

I'd say on topic. Your use of RC vehicles is roughly 99% identical to that of conventional users over the course of a year.

Jstas

I had a bunch of Tyco stuff when I was a kid and they were a blast but then a friend showed up to a Scout meeting with a Team Associated RC-10 buggy and I wanted one of them badly. But the RC-10T I wanted was, like, $600 to get the kit and the stuff needed to run it and I didn't have that being a ripe age of 12.

So I saved birthday and Christmas money and lawn mowing money and went and bought a Team Losi Junior T and proceeded to learn everything I could about RC Cars.

I ran races at Kevin's Hobbies, Golden Hobbies, Mullica Hill Hobbies and Crafts and a Hobbytown USA track too. Kevin's was around the corner from me so I went there often and gained a reputation. So much so that I was running stock classes and if people saw the orange and purple truck on one of the work benches, they'd asked for their entry fee back and go home because they weren't winning. Kevin ended up moving me to mod classes even though I wasn't modded and I was still winning with my pokey little truck cobbled together with used and hand-me-down gear. I even had one guy, Tim, that my dad worked with who gave me a bunch of stuff at steeply discounted prices tell me "Ya know, I pretty much gave you stuff to get you started. You weren't supposed to BEAT me with it!"





My friends thought the truck was ugly but it was recognizable and it got the snot kicked out of it. I'd spend $20 a race weekend replacing tire rods and tie rod ends. My mom would buy me gift certificates to Kevin's and I'd just use them on the tie rod parts so my mom would go in to the store to get me a gift certificate, Kevin would ring her up for the amount and then just give her the tire rods and ends I used and told her "Here, he's just going to buy these anyway. Might as well beat him to the punch!"

Kevin was awesome.

Years later, though, Tamiya released an updated version of the TL-01 chassis, the TL-01a so the TL-01 was being discounted like crazy to move old stock and there was this guy in Delaware who must have been sitting on a pallet of TL-01 chassis based kits because he had about 30 units of the TL-01 chassis with an SVT Lightning body included. The Lightning body was getting reissued on the less than stellar TT-01E chassis So I bought one of the older TL-01 Lightnings the guy had for about $200 down from his original $750 price and got an RC car version of my Lightning!





I'd like to get back in to it and get the stepson a kit but, there's no place to run them locally and they have gotten VERY expensive for even for the cheap kits.

msg

Dude, that's awesome John. Great stories and history. Thanks for sharing that.

I think the nostalgia and just childish toy play is what got me interested again. I wouldn't want to get serious, or get into something that's going to become a huge time suck. To consider racing makes me channel @DaveHo

skipshot12

Oh hell yea, was into off-road rc 1/10 scale racing. Was a Losi fan from the start.
Can get very expensive once you get into matching cells, but fun as shite!

Damn fun hobby

Raced at nationals a few times…..
Holy crap are the pros amazing!

Loved it.

sucks2beme

https://60years.associatedelectrics.com/rc10-classic-40th-anniversary-kit/
Looks like they re-released the original rc10. Classic kit, but the price sure
isn't classic. It was a real game changer back then.

skipshot12

^ That’s bad ash.
The one that started it all. Still a gorgeous buggy even today.

sucks2beme

Most of the better rc cars back then required some building skill.
The original mechanical speed controls were awful. I happily
ditched it for a Novak electronic unit. You'll notice the retro kit
doesn't include that.

Jstas

We modified our Novak speed controls to get rid of reverse and used it to charge a capacitor. Novak even started making big azz heat syncs for them because people were doing this and frying them, literally.

Adding the capacitor and jumping the reverse would give you this extra punch at the beginning of the race and if you could manage to lay off the throttle enough to get the capacitor to charge again in the race, you could gun it right before, say, a series of whoops. You hit that first whoop with the capacitor boost just right and you could sail right over them.

It would save you a couple second per lap which isn't much but when you're on a track with 30 second lap times on average and you're cutting 2 seconds off each lap time, in a 5 lap heat, you're 1/3rd of a lap ahead of the guy who has to deal with the whoops. Get to a 10 or 15 lap Main and you're lapping the slowest and at least half a lap ahead of anyone who doesn't have it.

The other thing having that reverse removal would do is it made the braking stronger because you had a higher current trying to spin the motor the other way. Well, higher than the governed level that the stock controller provided. Reverse wasn't full power. It was something 60% of forward so the braking wasn't super aggressive. That was ok if you weren't running super aggressive tires and could slide the car around the track but if you were like me and running those gnarly super spikes in the picture I posted, you weren't sliding anything.

So when you hit the reverse on your controller, it jumped the reverse circuit completely and sent 100% of forward power to basically braking. But you wouldn't hit reverse because you weren't actually engaging the reverse circuit, you were just flipping polarity on the forward circuit. This is why you needed the big azz heat sync because the generated A LOT of heat. Enough to melt plastic bits that were touching that heat sync. It got way more aggressive with the braking, though, so you could dive into a turn later, bleed off a bunch of speed and with your super aggressive rear ties, just punch it out of the apex and take off like a shot. If you could be super smooth and not have to brake real hard into, say, a hairpin immediately before a straight, you'd get the boost from the capacitor and it was like you got squirt out of a hose.

Running in the stock class against guys with 2nd hand JRxT's, Tamiya Blackfoots and Tamiya Lunchboxes and watching my stupid little Junior-T picking up the front wheels as it accelerated up the straight would just make the rest of them apoplectic!

But the thing was, the second year I started racing, Novak came out with the Super ROOSTER which was the Novak T4 with the reverse delete mod everyone was running as a jumpable option PLUS it had the ability to control TWO motors too, either simultaneously or independently. The Clod Buster guys with two motors LOVED them. The entire front end of the speed control was a heat sync too with only a small corner having any kind of badging and lights.

So a bunch of the Tamiya Blackfoot and Lunchbox guys trying to race switched to the Super ROOSTER and they couldn't control the trucks because they would pop wheelies at the start of the race and either roll on their side or end up with the nose straight up in the air and none of the wheels touching the ground. That necessitated an immediate need for a "MARSHALLLLLLL!!!!!" The rest of us that were running Losi, Team Associated, Traxxas, HPI and Kyosho "Truggies" were running circles around them.

Milito

Raced 1/8 scale gas from 1976 to 1981. I did a 24 hour race in Florida, Florida Winter Nationals and Texas Biggie (National race). Engines were 3.5cc running 25 to 40 % Nitro turning around 40,000 RPM. Member of Southwest Series which consisted of approx 120 members in 3 states.
Cost me about $350 to $400 back then to get in it, not including spares of course. Use to carry 2 extra engines with me and 3 different compounds of front and rear tires.

Viking64

Milito wrote: »

Raced 1/8 scale gas from 1976 to 1981.

Is the red #16 a 512BB?

Milito

I believe so as it's been awhile since I had that one.

stangman67

Some of my rides over the years. Most recently raced 1/10th 2wd buggy here in Va up until two years ago or so. Fun, addicting, and expensive hobby

skipshot12

Milito wrote: »

Raced 1/8 scale gas from 1976 to 1981. I did a 24 hour race in Florida, Florida Winter Nationals and Texas Biggie (National race). Engines were 3.5cc running 25 to 40 % Nitro turning around 40,000 RPM. Member of Southwest Series which consisted of approx 120 members in 3 states.
Cost me about $350 to $400 back then to get in it, not including spares of course. Use to carry 2 extra engines with me and 3 different compounds of front and rear tires.

When I was obsessed with the hobby we would go to Tampa for our big races. Was easy for us as we lived a couple hours south in Naples.

Milito, what years were you at winter nationals in FL?

skipshot12

Also used to modify our Novak controllers.
Can’t remember what size wires I installed on the Novak speed controller but, was either 12 or 10 ga.

We’d cut cooling flaps in our lexan bodies to make an air scoop to flow over the Novak’s fins for cooling… actually helped.

skipshot12

Can’t remember if this was stock/mod award in Tampa but, I didn’t stink at it 😬

sucks2beme

If I was to jump back in to rc, it would be to fly helicopters. The big exotic ones.
There's a ton of traing you have to do before ever doing free flight.
There's a flight traing simulator for the PC, and "crash gear" you put on the unit
to prevent tearing things up on landing. No batteries for me. Nitro all the way.