LongRat

Consider fitting a flywheel on the motor shaft to increase the rotor inertia. That might be a good way of simulating car mass on acceleration. Personally I would use a silver can.

I've raced it on AstroTurf and grass tracks both in the dry and wet. Probably the most noticeable improvement from the kick up is the speed at which the car settles straight when exiting a turn under power. This is where the lack of nervousness really helps.

I am considering producing a racing suspension set, including the geometry and strength upgrades here. I'll post here if that does become a reality.

Thought I would update the thread with some more info on the other mods on this car. I have run it at every IconicRC Revival since 2019, it's now quite dependable and I have won several B finals over those years, I don't think it's made the A yet but I'm still pretty happy given the level of competition now at these events. One durability upgrade is the aluminium top link mount at the front. Stops the need for ball studs being screwed down into the gearbox and removes the slight binding at max travel it had before. I've also added a photo of my front kick-up mount system. Raising the height of the front arm mounting increases kick up and caster. This method would actually only work properly with an Avante, taking advantage of its 'balls everywhere' suspension design. Anyway the mid setting I think works out at about 25 degrees, I have tried it with more but it doesn't feel right, and less returns the geometry to standard - a much twitchier feel especially with such a short wheelbase car. Way slower over the lap.

For racing, you would want to be running a soft insert in the rear, for the kit Black Special tyres you'd probably be ok without in the fronts. You realise how much the tyres contribute to the suspension of the car when you start messing with inserts. You want the tyre to feel compliant but 'dead' and not bouncy. No springiness.

Thanks. This car is built to look more standard than it actually is. Didn't want to lose the Avante vibe and literally turn it into an Egress, for example. I run JC Racing Egress wheels, original Egress wheels or kit Avante wheels depending on track conditions and tyres fitted. I have won a couple of heats on kit Avante tyres when it was very hot and dry (AstroTurf). It still runs the kit aluminium parts in the suspension, but the front now has adjustable kick up, up to 30 degrees where the standard car is locked at zero. The shock geometry is modified to allow more travel at both ends with custom towers and the chassis bottoms out before the shocks do, a major improvement. Shocks are Tamiya Aeration dampers. The drive line is modified with a custom made slipper clutch and permanent locked 4WD, and 48DP gearing. Motors vary but in the video I was using a Yokomo Super Wing 12T and a Novak Cyclone ESC. Driving it is a balance between aggression and heat management, another reason it goes best in the wet because power draw is lower. It makes 5 minutes but the motor needs looking at after each run and I don't do more than one practice lap before any race.

My ultra modified Grasshopper. Scratch built, only the body remains from the standard car.

Here's mine at the Revival meeting last year on grass. It took the win in the B final. This year I would really like to get into the A, it is the only car running a brushed motor as well. The grass was wet, the lower the grip is the better these cars will go, against the 'better' cars in the field.

The original Avante also looks pretty good doing the same trick. Don't be too put off by the 'terrible off road' performance. In standard form it's very fun to drive, if not the best handler. With changes, it can be quite competitive, if that's what you are into.

In my view there will be a tipping point when battery energy density reaches something around double what we currently have. At that point, the continued rate of fast charger installations will stop almost totally, because you will never have to charge in the daytime or mid-journey. Hydrogen ICE will never have enough of either range or safety to do anything at all, but mainly are unlikely to ever be cost-competitive. Fuel cells don't make any sense at this tiny scale no matter how efficient they are, because the game is already lost before the car starts moving. If we had an excess of renewable power that required storing, I think you would do it at big scale, never into a tiny vehicle. This is what they are starting to do in the Scottish Isles. For fixed installations or slow and heavy movement I can see lots of potential with them. So I think in 2044 there will be very little but BEVs around, with enthusiasts using ICE and petrol. The amount of expertise and knowledge needed to run ICE to a good level might end up being the limiting factor for them in the longer term. If you think about how engine knowledge, terminology etc is ingrained into society now and what we would do if that wasn't the case, cars are simply too complex and fine-tuned to be sustainable. Even enthusiasts would likely get fed up when they can't work out an issue, and the people that maintained them back in the day are long gone.

Great job, fantastic looking car. What a stance.

Once you have the moulds set up, the actual production time for a plastic sprue of parts is very low. You can get thousands of parts per hour (have a look at Lego factories). That makes plastic parts cheap. The RC hop ups you are talking about are almost always machined, that's a comparatively slow and expensive process. Plus, it requires multiple post-processes such as deburring, surface finishing, cleaning, anodising and some of those are almost as slow as the machining step. Whilst the volume of material is also more costly than plastic, it's the time they take to produce that drives the cost mainly.

I share this sentiment. A key point for me is that what we consider 'normal' use of these cells in RC models is probably considered to be abuse by the cell manufacturers. I believe this is a key reason not a single RC LiPo battery has the cell manufacturer named on the packaging.

Capacity can be the same with both batteries and the lipo can put out more power and for the same or even longer time. There is more stored energy in every mAh of capacity in a lipo battery than in the same mAh in a NiMh, because the voltage during discharge is higher.

More current doesn't mean more power. More current at a given voltage, yes. In the NiMh case, because of the greater internal resistance of these packs, you need to pull more amps to get the same power because of the greater voltage sag. A 30 amp discharge on a LiPo might give you 210 Watts (30A x 7V). A 30 Amp discharge on a NiMh might give you 180 Watts (30A x 6V)