RC Bashers

I was up in San Antonio this past weekend (thats where I'm from originally). Anyways, I was visiting my parents & my youngest bro has this little RC moster truck sitting there. I get to looking it over & it looks pretty decent quality. He bought it at a Target there in SA.

Stay away from these things. In my opinion, they're junk. It looks great, but its pretty delicate. I brought it home so I can try to fix the busted front spindle- and this is his 2nd truck w/ the problem. I emailed thier website to ask about parts, but haven't heard back yet. I'm taking it to the LHS next time I go so we can see if its a Chinese knockoff of a better brand.

Got any shots with the body off or the tires off and the broken spindle?

I do now:

Pic of the side thats not broken:

Looks similar to an Associated RC18 clone with too large of a tire.

1st one he broke, he hit a tire on my moms car. They returned it to Target for another, & it got broke when he hit a plastic trash can.

I told him to quit running into things! LOL

I hit a concrete block at near full speed w/ my Electrix, & it did no chassis damage at all. I paid $100 for mine, my bro paid like $70 for this monster truck. I'd expect a little more durability out of his, but it is just a department store Chinese RC.

well you can see the difference right there is hobby grade plastic and metals.

i would recommend taking a look at RC18 parts, you might be able to make some of them work with some tinkering.

next step would be to start buying hobby grade RTR stuff from the LHS. they will have replacement parts and will be easy to NOT break

Dunno about RTR, but maybe for people new to the hobby it's ok. RTR just means extra junk electronics to me though. Bring back the kits, haha.

My bro is 14, so this is just a lesson for him about dept store quality. I'll check out the RC18 stuff next trip to the LHS.

Then you watch for deals like this
fords-garage-sale-t699.html

$30 bones more you have a hobby grade rc and parts readliy available

Just got off the phone w/ thier customer service. I'm supposed to get the parts to fix it, along with several extras for future failures, in the mail. If they do mail 'em to me, I'll be plenty happy. I'll update here when the pkg arrives.

That's great, and surprising for a toy-grade company. I was in target today and saw a fairly cool thing. Looked like they were trying to copy the traxxas style and maybe a 4wd tamiya touring car style chassis. Like a TA02 or something similar. I was also in ToysRUs and saw this.
http://www.rccrawler.com/forum/showthread.php?t=275927

thats pretty cool looking.

Whats that other toy store crawler everyone was all giddy about and started modding them to? Seemed to be pretty good really, saw one once in person the huge one.

Nylint or new bright?

Ah nylint!

I had both sizes of those, gave away the large one recently. It wasn't bad for toy-grade and they had good customer service also.

I saw that Jeep yesterday. Darn near bought it, too. After my Maisto experience, not quite sure, though.

Not sure on quality, but that's the right design. Looks like a scaler made from a losi MRC and the 2-speed tranny is cool too.

Yea, I was thinking as I looked it over that it might be a good chassis/body donor for an MRC based scaler.

Back on topic:

My replacement spindles arrived today! They sent me several of them, just like they said. Its cool that they sent the parts out at no charge. I was really worried the company would tell me tough sheet.

Well, I replaced the bad spindle & ran this little thing outside at about lunchtime.

Son of a gun- its a no drivin', no handlin' pile o' junk. It is awful. I guess its the 4 wheel drive & the super short wheelbase, but it'll flip over in a tight turn & the steering has massive play in it. I brought it in & pulled the front dogbones, & that was a big improvement. The steering play is just poor quality of components, but I've got an idea for a cheap fix.

I think I'm gonna slap my bro in the back of the head next time I'm up there visiting!

So I dismantled the truck last night to see about a front end fix. Turns out it had screws backed way out & a really sloppy link. Tightened up the screws & swapped a good link from the rear (all links are identical). Front susp fixed!

I took it out this morning- well, its a lot more controllable. Thats not sayin' much, though. It still handles horrible & will still flop over if you turn at any type of speed other than creeping along.

Another thing I looked into while it was apart was the slipping problem I discovered. Squeeze the throttle hard to hop away fast & the truck gear slips bad. You have to gently apply it until its up to a decent speed, then you can go full throttle. I did not see any reason for this, as all gears (yes, plastic) seem to engage OK from a visual inspection. I guess just sloppy tolerances that become apparent under hard acceleration?

I picked up a New Bright at a rummage sale & stripped the cheesy rollbar & the huge grille guard off of it. I got to looking at the guard, then at the Monster XX RC, & I decided to see if I could adapt the guard to the truck. Its about as wide as the RC, so I'm hoping it'll help protect the weak spindle assemblies.

Pic of the guard (up on the top of the cabinet) & of the donor rig:



I hacked it up & came up w/ a plan to mount it:

And a pic of the new tire protection assembly on the truck- LOL:



Its HUGE, but this junker needs something up there to provide a little protection since its so prone to breakage.