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These showed up at my doorstep. The Frog was depressed so I bought it some stuff. Now it will be like the Hornet.

Your welcome! This knowledge is really only about 3 months old to me! I read a lot about it when I got my Stampede out of the closet! Honestly I would do your own research on the newer chargers out there, and consider buying one. They read the voltage of the batteries during charging so they will not over-charge them. And like I said earlier, most have a discharge/charge function. I used that on some old Nicd batteries I had gotten and it kind of revived them. But the auto shut-off feature is really nice. I happen to find my X1 and a new 5000mah nimh battery on a local classifieds board for $40 for both. This is easily about half the price of new on these items, and they were claimed to be never used, so I feel like I got a good deal. You might be able to find something local to you. eBay and Amazon are loaded with them too, maybe you could find a good price on something somewhere on the net.

That charger has both a quick charge and a trickle charge function. Maybe there is a switch on it somewhere? The quick charge method would take over an hour, but the trickle charge method would take 2.5 days!

Here is a link to the Hobbico 900 Series charger manual... http://manuals.hobbico.com/hca/hcap0125-0150-manual.pdf I was wrong... our chargers (i.e. your 900) are rated at 3.5 amps. So your 3000mah battery would take about 52 minutes on the 900.

Quick charge... 3000/2400=1.25 1 hour and 15 minutes Trickle... 3000/50=60 hours!!! Not even worth it!

That 1 amp you see on your 900 is actually for the fuse, not necessarily the ma rating. I remember now after comparing our pictures. I thought that too when I first starting trying to get a good handle on my charging needs. It might be 3 amps like my 905.

With your 900, your 3000mah will take about three hours! My 905 is rated at 3 amp hours, so it would only take mine 1 hour. Check out below, see if it makes sense to you. I pulled it from another website and altered the numbers to match your stuff... Formula to calculate charge times : Mah (of battery) divided by ma (charger rating, see translations below) equals the hours of charging time. 1000ma equals to 1amps. 1amps equals to 1000ma. mah stands for milliamp hour. ma stands for milliamp Example: your battery is 3000mah and your wall charger is 1000ma, it would take 3 hours to charge it to maximum because 3000/1000=3 hrs The math works. My X1 that is rated to 5 amps does my 5000mah batteries in an hour using peak voltage detection, which is right on par with the above formula. I attached some pics of my chargers for visual aids.

Yes, they both should be able too. The Hobbico for sure. I have a 905 that I have been using for maaannnnyy years to do Nimh. I don't see why the top one wouldn't be able to. Just make sure you know the actual charging amperage each one puts out so you can get accurate charge times. I know you didn't ask, but I recently picked up an X1 charger for $20 (claimed "new"). This can do Nicd, Nimh, and Lipo. It has peak voltage tech so you get a perfect charge on your batteries everytime. It also has a discharge function, and a discharge/charge function so you can cycle your batteries (Nicd and Nimh mainlly) and bring them "back to life".

I am new to Tamiya (if you can't tell ), so is the majority of pieces like this? From what I see most of the pieces are made of plastic, therefore not good for dyeing. So even the extra wheels I have may not be good to try.

Yeah, I have scrapped the idea, because of what you just pointed out. I am more worried about the possible warpage that could happen. Don't want to deal with that. I was really only thinking about doing it because my wife bought the RIT dye the other day. I had asked her if it was in our local store, just to see how available it really was. Couple days later she came home with a bottle of green. Thanks babe, but I didn't really mean I absolutely wanted it!

I am considering trying to dye the chassis of my Frog seeing as how it is completely torn apart right now. Is the material conducive to accepting the dye? I know nylon takes it very well, and I have heard plastic not so much. Not exactly sure what this material is to be honest, original '84 Frog. I am also considering trying to do the wheels at the same time. Any tips on prepping old used parts for dye? I have cleaned them in hot soapy (dish soap) water. Will this be good? Thanks in advance!

http://www.radicalrc.com/category/Adapters-53 (Female Futaba G to male Futaba J adapter) Try the above link. @TurnipJF found this for me in my servo thread. I did not actually go that route as I just bought new parts. But it should work for what you want.

Sweet information! That third color was PS-16. If the cap is a good representation, it seems like a more translucent paint. I would imagine backed by silver or white. I am more leaning towards the PS-59 right now. In my mind some silver accents would look nice against a darker color. So when I do the white on my Frog, should it be backed by silver?

Uuuuhhhh.... the more I learn the more I realize I do not know! @Mokei Kagaku thank you for all the great information! I have bookmarked and saved your post for reference. The body in question is from Pro-Line and is made of Lexan. I had already had some PS colors picked out, so that was good. He wants it blue, so I will need to decide between PS-4, PS-, or PS-59. PS-4 would probably be best seeing as it would be first time, correct? Although the dark metallic could be really nice! I am not looking to get an airbrush. I saw the bottles and thought brushing the bumpers might be easier than masking and spraying. But it sounds like spraying is the way to go. Having a chrome finish is not that important at all to be honest. I just thought if I could come close I would try. "Normal" silver will be fine, it's the contrast that would look nice IMO. If we don't do a blue, I am intrigued by the Pearl White, PS-57. Have you use this? Is it like the pearl white paint I see on real vehicles? That could be really cool! Maybe it is a good thing I have a couple of beat up non-painted bodies to practice on, a Hornet and a Frog. Might have to try that pearl white on the Frog and see how it is. Thanks again for the info!

My son wants me to do a new body for my truck. I would like to paint the bumpers with the Tamiya chrome silver before spraying the rest of the body. The small bottles of paint are acrylic, but the spray cans are lacquer. Will this be a problem trying to use them together? From my experience with full-size vehicles this is a problem, so I am assuming it will be here to. I also see talk to doing a "backing" color. What is the purpose of this? Thanks in advance for your replies. I have never painted a body before, but am looking forward to giving it a go!

So I have my son to thank. Yesterday he inadvertently gave me a reason to purchase a radio system. He was handling (playing really) one of the Tx. I wasn't really paying attention because he has been doing really good with them. Next thing I know he is tapping my on the shoulder and says somethings wrong. I turn around and he is holding a broken half of the antenna! Whoops! From what I can tell he bent it over trying to collapse it, and then in trying to straighten it broke it right off. Oh well. So I bought a FS-GT2B for a good price, and it should be here Monday. Also when I was cleaning up the small mess I had created over the last couple of weeks, I found an extra servo from the MSC that was on my Stampede. Sweet! That will be the new steering servo for the Hornet, combined with the extra cheap ESC I have laying around doing nothing. So it looks like the Hornet will be running first. It was half torn down anyway so I will just throw these parts at it. Speaking of radios, I was researching the Futaba FP-T4L that came with these. 4-chanell, 72Mhz frequency, typically used for r/c airplanes. I was reading something about legal and illegal AM frequencies. What is that all about? Do I need to worry about that? The nearest airfield to me is about 15 miles away, so there shouldn't be any reason to worry about that.

Went to my LHS yesterday. Figured they would have some 3003 or 3004 servos in stock. Nope! They did have a nice Arrma servo they wanted to sell me... for $35! No thanks...

Ha! I just found that site. They are actually harder to find than I thought they would be. Or my interweb skills are diminishing.

Did not know there was such a thing! Thanks for pointing that out. Are these readily available most places?

I just checked mine. They are all S28.

Thanks guys! I have been thinking about this at work today and realized the ones that are in these buggies are the original ones put in about 25 years ago. They went through many years of hard use and were fine. They are just plastic geared analog standard servos. I was looking at the Futaba 3003 as suggested. I think they are $12 a piece. That's not bad IMO.

I know virtually nothing about servos. It looks like if I want to use my buggies I will need to update my radios, and with that the servos also What would you recommend for a good budget steering servo for a Hornet and a Frog? These will be driven by my kids (4-7 years old). I am not going to spend big $$ for top of the line, but I don't want bottom of the barrel junk either. I am thinking lower-middle-road, if you know what I mean. Also help educate me here. By that I mean don't just tell me what to get, tell me WHY to get it. Thanks guys!

Darn. I cleaned the corrosion out of the battery area on one of my Tx last night. Used vinegar on a q-tip to break it up, rinsed with water, toweled dried what I could, and let it set open over night and most of today. Put some new AA batteries in so I would have known good power source, and they still don't work. Something else has got to be internally wrong, I assume. I am at the point of buying a cheap Flysky Tx/Rx combo off ebay for about $30. It will be updated 2.4 stuff and will eliminate the need for a Rx battery. Problem is from my research nowadays all the Rx contain the male side of the connection and the servos hold the female. Mine are the opposite. So servos would be required too. I found that out by the idea of having my Stampede donate its radio system just to see if the servos work. I can't even test those. Oh well. I guess if I go to an ESC I will only need one servo per car. Two radios, two servos, at least one ESC... starting to add up $$-wise. If those brushless motor/esc combos I was just reading about weren't $90, that would be a very cool gig for these. Thanks for listening to my rant.

One other thing I forgot. Do the diffs need to be oiled regularly? Or can you bypass the oil with today's silicone grease? My m.t. just uses grease so I figure maybe these could too.

Good info, thanks! I do like the correct switch location you pictured, I will probably look at moving it once it actually works. In looking through my extra parts I did find an original black MSC with the resistors you showed. I hooked it up on the Hornet, and it works, good too! The motor and diff work on the Hornet too. I have a cheap ESC in my m.t. right now that will probably make its way into the Hornet once I get that far. Need to get the Frog going first though. Worked on the radios a little bit today. The charger works as I see the LED light comes on when I plug in the Rx battery. Nothing for the Tx however. I used some vinegar to clean the corrosion inside the battery compartment, hoping it will help. Also cleaned the ends of the batteries themselves with vinegar. Never tried vinegar before, seems to work pretty good. Rinsed and dried everything and am letting it sit overnight to get completely dry. I am going to throw some AA's in the Tx tomorrow and see if it works. If not, may think about picking up a budget Flysky or Hobbyking radio. I thought that for years too man. Then it happened when I least expected it. Keep your head up and a smile on your face!