Any R/C Car or Truck people out there?

[NutmegCarrera]

Not sure that I have seen much chatter about the topic here.
….but I may have missed it.

My son got a Traxxas Slash 4x4 at the beginning of covid, as we were somewhat house-bound and looking for things to do (it was his birthday, and he had collected and saved up the funds….)

He has enjoyed running it around our yard and driveway - but we recently ‘found’ a local venue that holds some indoor races on the weekends.
I was not aware of the group until a couple weeks ago.

We went saturday night, and he had a pretty good time.
Unfortunately, he’s almost 16 - and I think feels a little conflicted between a hobby like that and ‘other stuff’.

In any case, I just ordered a transponder for his car along with a couple other performance-type parts. He did pretty well driving, and he’s willing to go back. They do this weekly during the winter. It’s a good alternative to sitting around and doing ‘nothing’ here in WI in Jan/Feb/March.

Just curious if anybody else out there has gotten into this. I’m thinking maybe I should offer him some ‘friendly competition’, at risk of getting carried away.

Cheers, everybody!

[mgatepi]

Worlds most addicting hobby!
I have spent a small fortune on RC cars and trucks over the years...... finally my wife made me go to rehab. (Took the Discover card away)
Crack is cheaper and less addicting.

[NutmegCarrera]

Additional perspective:
This “saturday night league” seems pretty nice - at least on the surface.

There are some pretty well defined classes. A couple of ‘starter’ brackets - which is great. Encourages people to get out there and race without spending ridiculous money.
The first few are aligned to brushed motors, 2nd, generally pretty stock setups.
That opens the activities up to people for pretty low investment.

….and then there are ‘modified’ and ‘open’ classes.
Looks like there are a couple guys with bigger investments there.
This coming week is going to be a ‘normal’ race - where they will be running brackets and actually competing.
Last week was more or less a practice session, and as I understand it - was not that heavily attended.
As it was, there were a pretty good number of folks there.
The low ‘buy-in’ is nice, but by the same token - there were a lot of people out there who couldn’t avoid crashing with every surface they could find. So, you probably aren’t going to spend much time on the track until your bracket - if you actually care about your setup.

From what I understand, there is a track in Milwaukee that is more like I would expect. Some really fussy characters with high-$ toys that get bent out of shape if you bump into them.

It’s always a balance between having fun and “that’s why we cant have nice things!”

Again - just curious what others have seen in this ‘sport’.

I can see that it could get addictive. Not sure that I want to spend a couple hours in the car going to these things, but like to get some kicks locally.


Oh-
The track we went to is a small town municipal building where they set up a carpet surface with a course laid out in PVC pipe. Apparently had been doing an oval track until last week - when they set up a road course.

Heading to the closest hobby shop with a track - those guys have got an oval and a clay buggy course. Sounds like fun.

[NutmegCarrera]

Mgatepi-
Your input is what I was afraid of.

My kid looked at me like I was mental when I offered to buy him a set of carpet tires.

Another father looked at me last week and said “I can see where you’re going to be spending saturday nights for the foreseeable future”

I’m just trying to avoid diving into the Losi / Associated pool - along with the endless purchases of electronics, tires, suspension parts, spare cars, tools, chargers.

….better chargers, better batteries, different suspension setups. Different tires, etc….

And I thought messing with old 911’s was bad!

[asphaltgambler]

From experience, as long he's into it and you show interest as well joining him, it may last awhile even at his age. When / if he loses interest it will be very apparent.

For me personally, I got into scale Planes in 1985 when I saw a local guy hosting a club with flying events. He also ran a hobby shop out of his basement. I went to a few demonstrations, was immediately hooked. I bought a glider kit with an electric motor / prop. It was a semi component not a stick / piece by piece construction. I assembled it learned how to taxi, fly and glide, then moved to gas scale Cessna high wing which I crashed more times than a demolition derby car.

After some time and a fair bit of money, I could usually take-off, fly and land in 1 piece. But that's when the whole thing got kinda smooth. There was no (obviously) sensation when flying to me other than accomplishment of doing so. Sorta like a 3 dimensional video game.

The initial enjoyment was spending money (on something ridiculous), assembling the aircraft and fine-tuning the electronics. So after @ 1-1/2 years in, I sold everything and haven't looked back at all.

Did I enjoy it, was it worth it = YES! Would I do it again = Probably not. It's a hobby that I looked at from afar as a kid, then got to experience as an adult.

[Ayles]

Yep!!

Bought my son an Associated race truck (Pro SC2) for Xmas. He's 8 and loves driving his RC cars. This is the first one he has really been able to take to the track. The only problem is that the track is over an hour away so it makes getting there a bit difficult.

I am into it a bit myself and am in the process of building a large 1/8 scale hydroplane, which has been a huge undertaking.
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/off-topic-discussions/1062695-scale-hydroplane.html

[Eric Hahl]

It's easy to get carried away, lol. My stuff...

The Mini Z track

Modified Slash


A Traxxas crawler with a Land Rover hard body.

[NutmegCarrera]

Oh, boy.

Looks like I’m screwed.

[Eric Hahl]

Lol

[aschen]

yes my whole life, cars trucks, planes, helis, quads

Full credit to rc for sparking my interest in engineering and science.

Racing can get super expensive, but any aspect of the hobby is still much cheaper than full sized toys. Its also cheaper than its ever been by a huge margin.


1980's you were spending several hundred bucks all in to get a plane fully in the air or even build a tamayia kit with remote and supporting stuff.

I consider modern RC relatively good bargain all things considered. Goes out the window if you have to buy 3 sets of 1/8th scale tires a weekend and go through a half dozen 200$ motors to find the fastest, but racing to win in anything is never cheap.

Make sure to budget about 30k for a camper mobil RC workshop

[aschen]

I didnt know mini z was back until recently. That track is awsome.

A hobby shop in town opened up with mini z, thinking about checking it out and buy a few cars for me and the kiddos to race each other there.

[mgatepi]

My last build

[Tim Hancock]

The owner of the company I work for let some of his RC friends and I to build some tracks across the street from work.... We occasionally run 1/5 scale gasoline powered short course trucks but mostly run Traxxas 4x4 Slash VXL's on the big track. Last year I took my compact tractor there and built a dirt oval where we run Mudboss, Street stock and occasionally our 4x4 Slashes. One of the other guys built an awesome crawler course there too. Another guy in our group put in a Mini Z track complete with electronic timing in one of his warehouses for us to use on Tuesday nights in the winter. He also built a large indoor 1/24 scale crawler course. I also have built a min Z track in my shop. I have a pretty good collection now of RC vehicles for casual racing/crawling with the gang. Most of the other guys also belong to a RC flying club, but I don't venture over to their club field as I can simply fly my old RC planes at my house if I get the urge.

For most of the other guys who are in their 30's to 60's it is their only hobby. Some of them spend stupid money on the hobby. I constantly have to remind them that I have other hobbies/interests to feed when they try to talk me into buying another latest greatest RC racer.

[NutmegCarrera]

Cool stuff, guys!
Keep it coming.

This has progressed a long way since the 1980’s with my Tamiya Frog.
(And I recall spending big $$$ to get that setup rolling).

I think if anything, a 2WD brushed Slash seems like a REASONABLE expenditure.

That way some of the parts are common with the kid’s.

[mgatepi]

I have a vintage Tamiya Clod Buster also... really a cool piece and lots of fun. Clod Busters were very common in the 90's. I will take a picture tonight and post.

[aschen]

Ordered a clodbuster right after the were released for my 12th birthday (spoiled I know). 1988 really amazing how long their popularity lasted into the 2000's. From a tower talk flyer of course!

I still maintain that the greatest toy ever released in the history of the world is the original gold pan rc 10. A bit of a diservice because it was closer to a machine than a toy, especially when next to your buddies hornet or fox.

[Ayles]

Originally Posted by aschen

Ordered a clodbuster right after the were released for my 12th birthday (spoiled I know). 1988 really amazing how long their popularity lasted into the 2000's. From a tower talk flyer of course!

I still maintain that the greatest toy ever released in the history of the world is the original gold pan rc 10. A bit of a diservice because it was closer to a machine than a toy, especially when next to your buddies hornet or fox.

The gold pan RC10 were so cool!
https://www.ebay.com/itm/153837114447?hash=item23d168144f:g:s3wAAOSwU7JeS9a o

[Tim Hancock]

Of the many different rigs I have, the best has been the Traxxas Brushless 4x4 Slash with TSM. They are about $400 new, but theses 4x4 variants with stability management a very easy to learn to drive compared to 2wd rigs and are a blast when we have informal races on the dirt track with up to 10 trucks at times. Not too many places likely have a class for these, but we just race for fun and these things are pretty durable and most hobby stores carry spare parts in stock.

You can see a few of my toys in this video from when I was making bumpers for Traxxas crawlers.

[Jeff Higgins]

My now 31 year old younger son and I raced R/C cars together from the time he was about 7-8 years old until he was about 15. We had a blast. It was a great way to spend time together, and for him to learn something. He learned how to work on things but, more importantly, he learned sportsmanship and cooperation.

We raced at a local indoor carpet track in the winter, running the classic 1/12 scale pan cars, four cell with stock motors. We ran the 1/10 scale touring car class as well, with six cells and stock motors. Our cars were all Associated.

We ran outdoors in a Lowes parking lot in the summer, running 1/10 scale gas touring cars. That's where we really had fun, with 45 minute mains that required pit stops for refueling, something we couldn't do with the electric cars.

I wish I had more photos. Here are our gas touring cars, mine is the blue one. We were restricted to three port .12 ci engines, but I wound up adapting a .26 ci four cycle airplane engine. That thing sounded just absolutely awesome.





At this point we were well down that "slippery slope", and it was costing me a good deal of money. We were looking at stepping up to 1/8 scale, which is really the pinnical of R/C car racing. Looking at the costs, however, it struck me that it would actually be cheaper to put him in a go-cart. Fortunately, we never got that far, with him having purchased his '68 912 at the ripe old age of 14. As we worked towards converting it into a 911, the R/C car racing fell by the wayside and I sold everything to a buddy at work who had three young boys.

[NutmegCarrera]

Great stuff, guys!
Eric, Tim - I wasn’t even aware of the “Mini Z” thing. Those look pretty cool.

My kid also has a mini Losi truck that seems to have become obsolete. Something is awry with that one - either battery, ESC, or motor. Cannot seem to find parts (I think it needs other stuff too) - but it was a pretty cool truck at the time (probably 2013 or 2014).

Tim-
You’re right about the Slash VXL. I have not tried TSM, but the brushless 4x4 is pretty cool.
Unfortunately, it puts him in the Modified class. I think carpet tires will help a lot - so stay tuned.

You’re all also right about which hobbies we commit to.
During the non-crappy part of the year, my kid and I do a lot of MTB riding. He started racing last year, and I expect that to continue. I’ll probably do more of them this year myself - but it’s hell getting old! I guess if I’m close to him when he’s 15 and I’m 51, life isn’t horrible though.

Let’s hope this covid thing is getting wrapped up someday soon and we can get together, drink beer, drive our ‘big’ toys, and do everything we would like again.

I’ll put up some photos - probably after this weekend’s event.