If you've come to hear about my (mis)adventures building and messing about with R/C Cars, you've come to the right place!

First, let me blab a bit (a lot?) about how I got into this.

Last year, in the middle of the summer, a friend of mine (the aforementioned Mashi) purchased a radio-controlled truck, and told me about it. This sounded like an extremely interesting hobby, and I did some exploratory calls around the area to find out where I could get myself one of these.

Turns out that there was a local shop which specialized in R/C hobbies. I took a trip over there, and ended up walking out with an 'entry-level' R/C car, and associated yummies, such as radio, 2 servos, some NiCad batteries, and a charger. I was off and running!

Now, normally, I'm not the type of person who likes 'trucks,' but it seemed mightily impractical for me to go buying an R/C on-road car, and require a big, flat stretch of concrete to run it on (this is fairly rare in New England). So, I went for a Kyosho Raider. This is an 'off-road' buggy, and it came 80% preassembled. "Cool" I thought. "I'll just put the rest of the stuff together this afternoon, and check it out in the early evening."

Wrong!

Not having built one of these before, I didn't realize that 20% is still a significant amount of work. Basically, I had to build part of the rear end (mount shocks? Memory fails here), and something in the front end, and then I had to mount the servos and electronics, and get everything hooked up right. Also, I had to cut the Lexan body free from the rest of the sheet, and decorate it.

Anyway, turned out there was no way I was going to accomplish this in the remaining time in the day. The next day, I ended up putting everything together, hooking up a charged battery, and was quite impressed with how fast it was in the living room. Cool!

When I took it outside, of course, where everything is larger and things seem slower...the car seemed a bit slower, but still plenty fast to zoom around with! Lots of fun, drove through grass, plenty of power to go screaming from one end of the lot to another.

Anyway, after a few days of messing around with this car, it seemed to me that 'Hmm...I'd really like it to go faster.' Time to hit the upgrades rack. Unfortunately, the selection of Raider upgrades happened to be rather limited, as it was a discontinued model. I ended up getting a complete set of bearings, as I was told that this was a really good upgrade to get, and it was! Removing (most) of the friction generated by the bushings helped quite a bit. So, this was good for another few weeks...but then the inevitable thought occurred to me...'You know...It'd be cool if it went faster...'

Seems that an engine upgrade was just the ticket to make the old Raider go a bit faster. I ended up investing in a Green Machine II stock motor. What a difference! Much zippier.

Over the course of several weeks, I ended up adding quite a few more yummies to the car, including MIP's ball differential, universal drive shafts, and improved shocks. This made for a well balanced, fairly powerful car. I was happy! For a while, anyway... One day, I thought, 'You know...I'd really like to go faster...'

Seems that I'd pretty much taken the Raider as far as I could go without lots of custom fabrication. The combination of the fact that it was an 'entry-level' model and the fact that it was an older model made my upgrade options pretty limited. Guess what? It was time for a new car...

After poking around through some magazines, I decided that it was time to take the next logical step, as batteries were really kind of a pain in the butt. The next target? Team Associated's RC10GT. A gas (well, nitro, really) powered truck which seemed to have a lot of positive attributes. I ended up buying the car, another radio (which came with an Electronic Speed Controller (ESC) which the Raider got), another servo, and some fuel and some glowplugs. It came equipped with OS's .12 CZ-R. Thus begins the saga of misery that I experienced with my RC10GT.

After spending quite a bit of my spare time building it (probably 30-40 hours, but it's difficult to estimate, looking back. It was last year.), the car wouldn't start. I consulted lots of the local people for help on this, but nobody was able to get it to run reliably. It was a scream to drive when it was working, but I got blisters from pulling the pull-start every time I wanted to run the thing, or trying to restart it when it died (which was often). I changed fuel, glowplugs, oversized heatsink for the engine, anything I could think of. When it did run, it was FAST, though, enough to throw up huge roostertails of dust when run on a dirt surface. I ended up doing a fair amount of upgrades to this car, as well, such full bearings, CVD's driveshafts. With greater power, though, comes greater chances for failure. It was (severely) crashed by a couple of people I lent it to, and I melted a differential down at one point. Of course, this happened during the (relatively) short spans when the car was working, interspersed with many sessions of my tugging at the pull-start cord, and wearing down many glow-plug batteries.

Anyway, after futzing around with this car for over a year, and zooming it around on the rare occasions when it worked, I thought "Hmm, I'd really like a larger car...with a bigger engine...that runs right...that goes faster..."

Enter the Kyosho Inferno MP-5.

This is a one-eighth scale, four-wheel drive buggy, equipped with an .21 OS RZ-B. It screams on just about any surface, and is large enough to tackle most road or grass irregularities. Cool car, and a lot of fun to drive.

Anyway, after driving the Kyosho around for a while, I decided that I really would like to have both the RC10GT and the MP-5 running. I tore the RC10GT's engine all the way down, and discovered that the piston actually had a huge chunk missing out of the piston skirt. How the heck did that happen?? There wasn't any detritus in the chamber, so I think it came that way. I purchased a replacement piston and sleeve for the engine, and installed it, and still had the same silly stalling problems.

One weekend, I ended up going out to Raynham to Hi-Tech Hobbies, and checking out their store and track. (I like these setups, as you can buy stuff for your car if you break stuff at the track. See the R/C resource page for further information.) Unfortunately, they won't allow 1/8th scale cars to run on their track. So, I ended up screwing around with the 10GT again.

I bought a Traxxas glow plug from Hi-Tech, put it in, and the car started, and didn't quit. I had a lot of fun driving it around the (fairly challenging) track there.

After a few (fun!) days of racing both cars around...it started to get cold here in Massachusetts, and it gets dark too early to be able to get a full afternoon of messing about in. So I started visiting local indoor tracks. Unfortunately, nobody's set up to run nitro-powered cars indoors. I found myself wanting a better electric-powered truck for use in indoor situations...

I visited New England RC Headquarter's indoor track down in Fall River. This was a pretty cool track, with a small store attached. The store owner is a cool guy, and we chatted for a while, as the the races progressed. Only problem is that this place is a pretty serious haul from Boston (probably 50 miles or so). Seeing these guys race indoors only made me want an indoor-capable R/C car more, though...

After mulling it over for a few weeks, and scanning the used car listings on the web (links are on the the R/C resource page), I ended up getting an RC10T2 Team. My RC10GT was a nice piece of engineering, and I thought it would be handy to be able to swap parts back and forth between the two cars. As I got it used, it came with a few extra yummies (which I would have purchased separately, normally), such as MIP CVD's, Lunsford Titanium pins, and an extra pair of tires. After getting this, I ended up getting busier at work, though, and didn't really have a chance to really run it anywhere, aside from a few sessions knocking the car around indoors.

On New Year's Day 1997, I ended up going down to Hi-Tech Hobbies' indoor track in Brockton, and seeing what the racing scene was like down there. It turned out to be a really excellent time. The group there was very easy-going, and helpful to one another, and there were some excellent drivers there. The experience of the crowd seemed to run the range, from true novices to really hard-core experienced racers. I ended up spending the entire afternoon there, well into the night, just chatting with people, and generally messing about on the track. The folks there gave me some really helpful tips on setting up my truck's suspension for the track, thus allowing me to make it around the track once or twice without crashing into a wall. This seems like it'll be a pretty neat thing to do every so often during the winter, when the R/C bug bites.

However, since I've gone and invested the bulk of my R/C money in nitro-powered cars, it seems that some of my electric-powered stuff is a bit 'lame' in comparison with the nice batteries/charger/motor setups some of the other folks at the track were running. Seems some other gear purchases may be in order....

Naturally, I couldn't leave well enough alone. I purchased a set of four nice motors (Reedys Sonic series) from a fellow netizen, which I've been playing about with. Naturally, I needed a range of pinion gears to go along with my new power, so I acquired these, as well. Finally, it seemed truly lame to run such nice gear with those sub-par connectors which come with speed controllers and batteries, so I've upgraded the entire system to run with low-resistance connectors. Specifically, I now use Dean's Ultra Plugs for the batteries, and Lightspeed plugs for the motor connections. This allows me a certain amount of versatility, and insures that I'll never mis-plug my battery or motor connections!

I also ended up picking up an Indy 16x charger. This charger's way cool, as its tiny, self contained, (no separate 12V power source required), and AC/DC enabled! I've adapted this charger to work in my car (a Mazda RX-7, funnily enough) as well, so I can charge batteries while on the way down to the track.

This summer's been extremely busy for me at work, so unfortunately, I haven't had a lot of time to mess around with the R/C cars. I've been out a couple of times, but once it drizzled, which did an undescribable amount of damage to some of my gear, rusting many of my Allen (hex key) wrenches, and my little tool kit, and did some damage to some of my cars, as well. Cleaning the rust off of the gear is a huge chore, of course.

I have gone down to Hi-Tech Hobbies a few times to check out the racing action. It seems to be a really good time, with some really excellent driving talent.

Needless to say, I don't qualify in this category.

Their races on Sundays are quite well attended, and highly competitive. In addition, lots of people show up (like me!) just to watch the action.

I'm uncertain as where I'd like to proceed with this hobby. Although extremely satisfying when everything works properly, I've begun to get a bit discouraged with the 'gas' cars, as they are a lot of work to get running. Of course, I now have two friends who also own gas rigs, and their setups always seem to work flawlessly.

Maybe its just me.

Also, I understand that Losi's XX4 (4-wheel drive buggy) is really a beast on the track, making 2-wheeled stadium trucks look almost 'slow' in comparison. Team Associated's also come out with the RC10T3, which promises improvements on their T2 model, not the least of which is the new plastic tub, adapted from the RC10B2.

Technology's always advancing, and now my gear's starting to become obsolete again?

I'm also considering combining my interest in R/C cars with my interest in rotary engined cars, and trying to build an on-road R/C model which is powered by an O.S. Wankel rotary engine, with an RX-7 body, of course.