Just seeing who else is into RC cars like me. I have 4 right now and saving for a fifth. Here are the ones that I run at this time.
Just bought a HPI Firestorm stadium truck for my kid for xmas with a brushless 4300 motor in it. Very cool stuff with this truck. Love the brushless motor in it. Very fast and stable.
Ken Block edition HPI RS4
Traxxas special edition SST
HPI Rally converted for on road running a 7 turn motor
HPI MT Racer Pro with a .12 cvr race motor in it This thing is fast as hell.
If I ever get more than enough for a sandwich, I want a rock crawler. I was into nitro powered toys for a while. Just a great hobby. No time or money for the bar if you own a nitro truck.
[This message has been edited by Tony Kania (edited 01-02-2015).]
Have a Revo and a HPI Savage I enjoy time to time but I enjoy my helicopters and quad copters more lately. Have a Trex700, Blade 450 3d with about every aftermarket part made and a few other smaller helis. Have a DJI Phantom II I use for video and FPV stuff but have been getting into the micro 3d machines pretty hard with a few blades. I just bought a new SSL micro thats full 3d so I can fly indoors and this little bugger MOVES and is fairly stable inverted
Sounds like you got the sky full. We have a couple of drones that my oldest fly. But he is really into the cars now. The revo is on our list as well. Great running truck.
I've got 2 main rigs, a full built E-Maxx with the XO-1 gear in it. 2200KV motor, Castle Number 1515, with a Mamba Monster 2 Waterproof, 6S Lipo ECS. All waterproof servo's, all the suspension is upgraded RPM parts alone with RPM bulkheads. Truck is easy 60mph on flat ground. I have 4 or 5 sets of tires for it, ranging from low pro street only tires that I run when I lower the suspension for highway speed passes, then various off road tires and finally my crawling tires which are Summit Wheels and Tires. On 6S I can be doing 40mph punch it and do a wheel stand. Its one of the few monster trucks out there that actually NEEDS a wheelie bar on the back.
My other rig is a Stampede VXL Brushless 4wd stadium truck with Truggy conversion. Has a buggy body with buggy wheels / tires and a huge spoiler. Bad thing is WOT the spoiler puts enough down force at the back to lift the nose, then it catches a bit of air under it and its all over. End up with a 60mph roof plant. I only run 3S on the Stampede. I did however decide to have a bit of fun, I picked up a Fiero IMSA body from Ebay, painted it Black and White like my own personal Fiero and mounted it on the Stampede chassis. The body is for a 1/12th scale on road car and I've got it on a converted 1/10 scale off road car, so it does look a bit odd, but I still like it.
I got out of the hobby about a year ago and have not touched them since. However we did my 5 year old daughter a radio controlled Jeep for XMAS that is specially made to haul about Barbies and such. She has a it loaded with her Monster High Dolls and loves it. So I may dust off the Stamped drop the ESC into training mode so it won't go over about 30mph and let her play with that. I've got well over $2500 into just the 2 cars, and to be honest would be lucky to see 40 cents on the dollar if I sold it all. So I'll probably just keep them and play with them as the kids get a bit older.
When it comes to RC and going fast, Brushless with Lipo is the only way to go now a days. Faster than Gas or Nitro any day. If you want to go nuts take a look at the 1/8 scale Mamba Monster ESC and Castle #1515 motors. I have seen guys plug in 8 and 10S Lipo's into that speed control and not blow up. Well LOL, they did blow up their cars trying to harness that much power, but the motor ESC took it.
Those XO-1's are Bad A$$ but honestly where can you really play with them. You pretty much need a 1/2 mile of dead smooth road and no traffic. There is a local guy with a couple of them for sale at about 1/2 what he paid for them. Move all that power into a Giant Monster Truck and then you can have some real fun.
------------------ 857GT Part 85GT Part 87GT Part Caddy, 93 Eldorado 4.9, 5spd Dual O2 Custom Chip, Custom Exhaust. MSD Everything Now with Nitrous. Capt Fiero --- My Over View Cadero Pics For Sale $4000, Yellow 88GT 5spd Full Poly Suspension, Lowered 1/2" in front, Corner Carver.
I <3 RC, but I prefer the old school "kit" type stuff over "RTR". Tamiya, Kyosho, and "lesser known brands" such as the Royal Crusher (4WS Monster Truck, yummy) and Navajo.
I enjoy building them more than using them. I can't wait to start building some kits w/ my son this year.
I have a nice 1:10 Fiero I made using a modified ford GT + a "NewBright" Fiero body.
I used to be but I sold my last one, a TC3, about 5 or so years ago. Every now and then I find myself looking at online hobby stores, e-bay or local classifieds to see what's out there now. Sometimes I even start pricing out what I'd need to get back "into" it. Problem is, so many are RTR now. Half the fun is putting the thing together! LOL. Still, if I can find a off road buggy or truck that I like I will probably own another eventually. As much as I loved my TC3, here in Utah with snow on the ground half the year I barely used it. With a buggy or truck, I could still use it in snow to an extent. That is so long as it's hard enough packed or not to deep.
I find I had the most fun in the snow with my E-Max so long as it was only a foot deep or 2 feet max. The smaller 4wd Stamped kinda sucked in anything more than 4" deep though. You can see as long as it was moving it was fine, but if I stopped, it would just bury itself up to the axles, the tires from a stop vs at high rpm almost double in size and that can usually dig myself out, but well you'll see in the video. I have newer bigger beefier crawler tires that are great for the snow each tires is roughly 7" tall.
VIDEO >>>>> http://captfiero.com/rccars...deos/MaximumSnow.mp4 The clutch and spur melted down after that video. PS. The Mamba Monster 2 is fully programmable with a laptop or for simple stuff a pocket programmer. Top Speed, Max Power, Minimum Power, Traction Control type of settings. Braking Force settings and many other things.
All my gear is Waterproof so snow, rain slush mud, does not hurt it. I have video's kicking around someplace. Click the above link for most of the video's but I'll post a couple here.
------------------ 857GT Part 85GT Part 87GT Part Caddy, 93 Eldorado 4.9, 5spd Dual O2 Custom Chip, Custom Exhaust. MSD Everything Now with Nitrous. Capt Fiero --- My Over View Cadero Pics For Sale $4000, Yellow 88GT 5spd Full Poly Suspension, Lowered 1/2" in front, Corner Carver.
[This message has been edited by Capt Fiero (edited 01-03-2015).]
Back in the late 80's/early 90's, my boys and I raced a lot of pan car asphalt and carpet oval and road course. It was a blast! This past year at the Daytona show, I saw a guy at breakfast on Sunday morning with a Bolink Tee shirt on. Turned out that their Saturday event got rained out, so they were racing Sunday under the scoring pylon at the Speedway. We went over and checked out the cars and the racing. Very, very fast! Makes me want to pick up some new electronics and tires and see what some of my scratch-built pan cars would do....... But I played the Money Pit game already.
I was when I got the equipment I currently have, but the cost/time of upkeep on Nitro RC cars quickly took the fun out of it... I have been considering getting rid of the 2 cars I have(Traxxas Slayer converted to Revo and an unknown HPI car) for a while...
I used to be into them pretty bad. Mostly 1/10 scale electric road race cars. We had a local club and raced every Fri nite on my parking lot. I also had 1/4 scale gas cars with Zenoa weedeater motors. We raced all over the midwest in the QSAC (quarter scale auto club) with mostly Nascar style stock cars. We ran 200-400 lap races with pit stops on go-kart tracks. I even gave the Mini Zs from Kyosho a try for a year or two. I never was interested in the nitro cars at all...too noisy, too messy, and hard to start.
I had a tc3 as well. Loved that car. I used to race it at our local club witch is no longer. They had a nice track and you would get a transponder for lap counting and speed. It was a lot of fun. To bad there is no tracks now by me to race or i would be all over them.
quote
Originally posted by Khw:
I used to be but I sold my last one, a TC3, about 5 or so years ago. Every now and then I find myself looking at online hobby stores, e-bay or local classifieds to see what's out there now. Sometimes I even start pricing out what I'd need to get back "into" it. Problem is, so many are RTR now. Half the fun is putting the thing together! LOL. Still, if I can find a off road buggy or truck that I like I will probably own another eventually. As much as I loved my TC3, here in Utah with snow on the ground half the year I barely used it. With a buggy or truck, I could still use it in snow to an extent. That is so long as it's hard enough packed or not to deep.
He has dropped his price to $200 bucks Canadian, which with current exchange rates is about 165 USD.
------------------ 857GT Part 85GT Part 87GT Part Caddy, 93 Eldorado 4.9, 5spd Dual O2 Custom Chip, Custom Exhaust. MSD Everything Now with Nitrous. Capt Fiero --- My Over View Cadero Pics For Sale $4000, Yellow 88GT 5spd Full Poly Suspension, Lowered 1/2" in front, Corner Carver.
That's a really good deal. I would want all the electronics to get it to were it should be. Got to be a blast to drive. I have a ton of stuff for my local pawn shop to help get one home. I just bought a losi micro t for so fun. Should be here in a week I hope. Tons of hopups for that little car. I will post photos when it gets here
thomas all the tracks up there close? I knew of 4 tracks in il when i lived out there.
Ya there is no place to go. Venture ran the best on road track and the one at the collage was good as well. the collage sold out there stuff and venture closed there doors. I am going to use this winter to stock up on cars and I will drive to get to a track for a run. What cars did you run?
Ya there is no place to go. Venture ran the best on road track and the one at the collage was good as well. the collage sold out there stuff and venture closed there doors. I am going to use this winter to stock up on cars and I will drive to get to a track for a run. What cars did you run?
Tom
Yeah this is something I miss. When I was "really" in to RC cars there were shops and tracks EVERYWHERE. The first time I saw a 1/10th scale electric RC was at a mall exhibition. They had set up a track in one of the malls out in Colorado Springs. I remember seeing 3 Tamiya cars, Frogger, Super Champ and a Wild Willy. It was the early 80's and I was hooked!. I wanted one so badly, but for a preteen kid, that kind of money was hard to come by. I came up with some fiberglass sheet and some 3/16" steel round stock that I tried to bend into a roll cage and pan for one. Of course I was still rather young and it never really "got" anywhere near actually being one, but I tried. A couple of years later and I was in 9th grade. I bought into the pig program in our FFA with $50 I had saved up. At the end of the program when we got our profit share, I had a check for just over $300. It was tight, but I managed to buy a Grasshopper kit, Airtronics 2 channel controller and 2 battery packs. I didn't have enough to buy a charger at first and picked one up a few months later, but in the meantime my Dad had made a rig so I could use his car battery charger to charge the RC cars batteries. I had to set a timer on the microwave and not forget to unplug the battery but it worked pretty good as a stop gap. I beat the heck out of that Grasshopper, slowly buying hop up parts to "upgrade" it to a Hornet + some. I replaced the front and rear spring shocks with oil dampened units, although the Hornet had spring front oil rear stock. I upgraded the 380 motor to a 540 and eventaully a Technipower 540. I had friends who sold me their old RC stuff, and I ended up getting and repairing a Super Champ, Frogger, Mauri Big Bear and another Hornet. Then I became old enough to get a real part time job while I finished high school. That was when my RC hobby got a little bit out of control. I had gotten a job at McDonalds, but 3 days after being hired Play Co. Toys and Hobbies called and offered me a job as a Hobby Clerk. I ditched the "fast food" and never looked back. Those 3 days were all I have ever spent working fast food. However, during my employ at Play Co., initially employees could buy things from the store at store cost. Eventually a few months before I had to quit because I was moving to Phoenix to attend tech school, they changed it to store cost + 10%. Either way, what you could buy for $200 if you walked in to buy something, I could get for somewhere between $75 and $100.I bought many more RC cars such as a Boomerang, Kyosho Rocky, Kyosho Ultima and one of the 1/24th scale cars Tamiya came out with (which, by the way, was probably THE most awesome on road car I ever owned). There were other cars, but I don't recall what they were. That was about it though, as I left for tech school in 89 and returned to Cali in 90 after graduating. I didn't buy another RC car until many years later when I bought the TC3. By the time I bought the TC3, I had been selling off all my old RC cars for years and didn't really have anything left except some batteries and a charger. Oh and that little 1/24th scale car in pieces because the gears stripped out on the motor and they were really hard to find because of the limited amount of time and sales those cars saw. So when I bought the TC3, I had been out of RC for awhile but still had a lot of fun with that car.
Anyways what I was initially getting at is, back then in the 80's and into the very early 90's RC car stores and tracks were EVERYWHERE. There was even 2 stores in Yucaipa where I lived which as of then was still an unincorporated town with a rather small population. Now, I can think of only 2 in my area which encompasses all of Ogden and it's surrounding burbs and neighboring cities. 2! Both of them are pretty much Traxxas stores. It seems like when you walk into one of those stores 90% of the RC they have are Traxxas. Not that Traxxas is bad, they are not, but it's all Traxxas trucks with a couple of other brand trucks. I went looking for a buggy or another on road like the TC3 and no dice. RC has passed it's hayday sadly. I wish there was still more options out there and tracks to go to but there just isn't. If I want a buggy, I'm either going to have to buy used or order one online. The other parts (batteries, motors, speed controllers, chargers and such) are swapable between the different chassis types, so those I could get local new, but the cars itself and parts to fix it when they break? If I don't want a Traxxas truck, it online ordering. I just wish that while the popularity has waned, that there was still enough interest in different types to support more than 2 almost brand specific shops. Oh well. My wife is bugging me because I didn't let her or the kids get me anything for Christmas this year, so maybe I'll go ahead and find a buggy they can get me.
Originally posted by Khw: I bought many more RC cars such as a Boomerang, Kyosho Rocky, Kyosho Ultima and one of the 1/24th scale cars Tamiya came out with (which, by the way, was probably THE most awesome on road car I ever owned). .
Khw , remember this model ? Has all the upgrades offered back in the day. I have a customer begging me to sell this to him, He tells me they are still highly sought after. I remember building it many years ago, filling the shocks with fluid, installing every last nut & bolt. Painting the clear body from underneath, starting with masking off the area that would end up sliver & clear, then shooting blue, removing mask for silver, shoot silver, then removing mask for clear. Basically you paint the body backwards. Photo makes it look so small, it is 15" long.
[This message has been edited by CoolBlue87GT (edited 01-07-2015).]
Oh yeah, the Turbo Optima. I was looking at an Optima when I bought the Rocky. Should have got the Optima... They even made one of those called the Turbo Optima Mid that had the motor placed forward of the rear wheels like in the Rocky. One car I would still love to get my hands on but is super rare is the Kyosho Maxxum. It was a FWD electric off road buggy.
That's one thing I wish I still had, pictures. The ones I took were lost in one of the boxes I never got back from my divorce. My guess is when she got kicked out of the duplex we were renting at the time we split up, that she just threw away boxes of my stuff that I hadn't been allowed to come get yet. All my pictures of my RC cars, dirt bike, mini truck and other stuff from my teen to young adult years are all gone .
[This message has been edited by Khw (edited 01-07-2015).]
I used to have a Tamiya Bruiser. The thing weighed about 20lbs and it was a neat feeling shifting through the gears while you drove it. I ran it full speed into one of my chairs and it sheared off the leg. I miss those days.
I used to have a Tamiya Bruiser. The thing weighed about 20lbs and it was a neat feeling shifting through the gears while you drove it. I ran it full speed into one of my chairs and it sheared off the leg. I miss those days.
I used to have a Tamiya Bruiser. The thing weighed about 20lbs and it was a neat feeling shifting through the gears while you drove it. I ran it full speed into one of my chairs and it sheared off the leg. I miss those days.
I remember seeing the Bruiser for the first time. It was about as close to "lifelike" that a electric could get for the time. Frame, leaf springs, rear axle and driveshaft. I never did get the opportunity to own one of those.
[This message has been edited by Khw (edited 01-10-2015).]
I remember seeing the Bruiser for the first time. It was about as close to "lifelike" that a electric could get for the time. Frame, leaf springs, rear axle and driveshaft. I never did get the opportunity to own one of those.
Tamiya still sells them new. They have a few improvements in the clutch for shifting but the price is still almost $800......and thats just for the truck.
Tamiya still sells them new. They have a few improvements in the clutch for shifting but the price is still almost $800......and thats just for the truck.
Yeah. They brought a bunch of the old kits out as re-releases. They have the speed controllers upgraded to electronics but other than that they are mostly the same. I was looking at the Bruiser kit... but I just can't bring myself to spend that much on one. Especially when I "could" get a little truggy/buggy kit with radio, motor, batteries and charger for half that. Makes me wonder though... In my TC3 I had a Speed Gems 2 Opal motor, and that thing was something like 39,500 RPMs or so when a regular 540 was only about 22,000. I wonder if the transmission in the Bruiser could handle a higher RPM motor like that.
[This message has been edited by Khw (edited 01-10-2015).]
Wow!
I was into nitro powered toys for a while. Just a great hobby. No time or money for the bar if you own a nitro truck. 
