HighTorque ServoSaver a mandatory hop-up?

[simalarion]

I Bought a lot of them now and for all the kit that does not have it already i just install it, for the kit its not meant for i make small mods to make this hop-up fit. 
 

In my experience it is a everlasting tweak to get the steering straight for a longer time, that and the steering feel sloppy, without this hop-up, but is it really a hop-up to be able to have a stable steering? 🤔, or maybe im wrong, i still quite fresh to the hobby and can not call myself i driver just yet…

[alvinlwh]

.

[Willy iine]

I would say yes, unless your factory servo saver does the trick. 

[skom25]

41 minutes ago, alvinlwh said:

No, I believe you can superglue the stock one to have similar effects as well. However, buying from the Far East is quite cheap so I never bothered. It is even cheaper if one get 3R or ABC brand ones which are almost exactly the same as Tamiya ones.

 

If you glue it, will it be ServoSaver still?

[alvinlwh]

.

[Sogogi]

Add several to my cart everytime i order from PJ

[alvinlwh]

.

[Kowalski86]

It depends, on something "vintage" like a Lunchbox or a Frog, I generally use the kit servo saver. You don't want "sharp" steering on some of those!

Anything else, I use an aftermarket servo saver. Usually I use a Kimbrough medium if it fits.

[Kpowell911]

I just use an alloy horn instead these days. Servo’s are cheap enough 

[Nick-W]

I always fit one but I’m beginning to wonder if it’s worth it. They’re certainly much better than the a lot of the kit ones but are they really saving anything these days?
I’ve been considering just a solid connection. A cheap servo low power servo probably costs the same as the saver and if it’s a metal geared and high torque one are my 1:10 brushed cars going to produce the forces need to damage it?
This is presented as a genuine question I really don’t know. 

[Kpowell911]

5 minutes ago, Nick-W said:

I always fit one but I’m beginning to wonder if it’s worth it. They’re certainly much better than the a lot of the kit ones but are they really saving anything these days?
I’ve been considering just a solid connection. A cheap servo low power servo probably costs the same as the saver and if it’s a metal geared and high torque one are my 1:10 brushed cars going to produce the forces need to damage it?
This is presented as a genuine question I really don’t know. 

As I put above Ive gone the opposite way. Id rather have more accurate steering and ‘break’ a servo, as oppose sacrifice steering to save a servo. This isnt the 80s when a servo was a few days wages haha

[Pylon80]

I have changed my approach on this over the years. I admit to having "upgraded" basic cars with the Tamiya HT servo saver only because of the Big Bad Internet telling me to do so, and in hope of some supposed better steering. Then I started removing one of the two small springs (the yellow ones). Then I went back to either the stock one (rally cars used off-road) or a solid arm in everything else. The only exception is my F1 which has been working flawlessly with the HT servo saver minus one spring, so I'm keeping it that way.

What annoys me the most is that the HT servo saver seems to struggle to re-enter if it ever gets an impact. I have tried experimenting with the tightness of the screw and so on but without much success. The stock ones don't have that issue as long as they are clean.

I think more and more that the servo savers were a necessity in the old days when people were running S3003's or Multiplex Nano 's with white nylon gears. These days with metal gears on almost all servos I think it's ok to use a solid arm for casual driving.

Now, the on-road track where I used to drive had very unforgiving boards that would certainly break metal gears if like me you didn't know how to drive properly!

So I guess it depends 😐

[simalarion]

HT Servo Saver seems to fix that i always must adjust the steering forth and back while driving, i never had this issue with Agrios with its 2 servos but this kit already has HT Servo saver. So in my experience it is not the Save part i am after, but in my experience the steering gets smoother and much more reliable  (do not have to adjust on the controller all the time). But as wrote in first post i still consider me as quite new (not only a few year in in but  my kids also prevents me from spending so much time as i would like on this hobby, sadly i can not get them hooked) so i might be very wrong

[OoALEJOoO]

The 3Racing 3RAC-SHAMU is indeed a good option and lower cost than Tamiya's equivalent. They are not very reliable though and have seen a few issues after running a few packs with them, all fixable luckily:

• The innermost metal ring starts wearing the central parts, biting into the plastic. Once you see that the steering doesn't center anymore, especially after bumping something, it is likely to be the ring biting into the plastic and not being able to revert back freely to the center. Something that seems to fix this is to flatten both tips of the inner metal ring with pliers, in a way that they lose the circularity only a bit on each end so that their edge does not bite into the plastic.
• There is quite some friction between the outer cap and the saver, also making it more difficult to reach the center. Putting a 3mm 0.2"mm thick shim below the cap solves this.

Tamiya HT savers although more expensive do not seem to suffer from any of this. Their plastic is a lot tougher and much more resistant to wear.

[Pylon80]

5 hours ago, OoALEJOoO said:

Putting a 3mm 0.2"mm thick shim below the cap solves this.

Very interesting, I wonder if that would help with the Tamiya HT one?

[Wooders28]

On 8/27/2023 at 1:19 PM, skom25 said:

If you glue it, will it be ServoSaver still?

Servo savers are from an age where servos where weak, and full of plastic gears, so needed saving.

These days, metal geared servos are cheap enough (my cheap goto is the CoreRC 9016MG , and for racing Savox 1257tg/ 1258tg), to be daft not to run them.

For the ones I can, I've gone for solid aluminium servo horns.

 

[TurnipJF]

These days with torquey metal geared servos, I think servo savers still have a place, not to protect the servo, but rather to protect the rest of the steering mechanism from them.

[Willy iine]

On 8/27/2023 at 8:56 PM, Pylon80 said:

I have changed my approach on this over the years. I admit to having "upgraded" basic cars with the Tamiya HT servo saver only because of the Big Bad Internet telling me to do so, and in hope of some supposed better steering. Then I started removing one of the two small springs (the yellow ones). Then I went back to either the stock one (rally cars used off-road) or a solid arm in everything else. The only exception is my F1 which has been working flawlessly with the HT servo saver minus one spring, so I'm keeping it that way.

What annoys me the most is that the HT servo saver seems to struggle to re-enter if it ever gets an impact. I have tried experimenting with the tightness of the screw and so on but without much success. The stock ones don't have that issue as long as they are clean.

I think more and more that the servo savers were a necessity in the old days when people were running S3003's or Multiplex Nano 's with white nylon gears. These days with metal gears on almost all servos I think it's ok to use a solid arm for casual driving.

Now, the on-road track where I used to drive had very unforgiving boards that would certainly break metal gears if like me you didn't know how to drive properly!

So I guess it depends 😐

I think you may have over torqued the screw holding the servo saver to the horn.  I use thread lock and only tighten it snug.  I do not use any star lock washers on it either.  The horn needs to be able return to center on its own.   I test this each time with my fingers with power going to the servo to massage the springs to ensure they recenter the horn before installing the servo onto the car.   I have probably over 50 high torque servo savers in my collection of cars.. they all work flawlessly so I might be onto something.. or just super lucky.   

[Pylon80]

1 hour ago, TurnipJF said:

These days with torquey metal geared servos, I think servo savers still have a place, not to protect the servo, but rather to protect the rest of the steering mechanism from them.

Interesting point. I could see how that would be the case when rocks and pebbles jam the steering bridge on a rally car!

[one_hit]

3 hours ago, TurnipJF said:

These days with torquey metal geared servos, I think servo savers still have a place, not to protect the servo, but rather to protect the rest of the steering mechanism from them.

Totally agree. I’ve seen a guy at the track with a solid aluminum horn snap a steering bellcrank screw on his TT-02. If that happened in a race then that’s a DNF and he probably would miss the succeeding heats because it would have taken a lot of time, and that’s if he had a drill, which nobody ever brings to the track. He could replace the tub, but again, nobody ever brings a spare tub to the track. 

[El Gecko]

On 8/27/2023 at 8:30 AM, alvinlwh said:

Superglue will break on an impact so yes. There are lots of thread on this and other forums about it.

I found that during normal running, glue is almost worse than an untreated servo saver, because it's single use... once the glue breaks (which doesn't take much force), it binds up and won't recenter, so it's back to the garage anyway.

This is my preferred method now. Use the smaller plastic spring on the normal servo saver, with a recess dremeled into the outside for an additional metal spring to sit in. This is a single coil cut off an old bicycle brake spring. Works just like an HD saver at a fraction of the cost

[skom25]

Question is, if it will save servo.

In my build, I few times negated Tamiya solutions and always heard: Tamiya has engineers who know better how to design things.

Is it not the same in that case?

[alvinlwh]

.

[skom25]

E.g. play on hub axles

[OoALEJOoO]

2 hours ago, skom25 said:

In my build, I few times negated Tamiya solutions and always heard: Tamiya has engineers who know better how to design things.

Is it not the same in that case?

 

1 hour ago, alvinlwh said:

In what ways? Hop-ups will not exist if things are designed properly.

Things are never black and white. I understand that feeling there is a need for hop-ups can be frustrating, but at the same time it is a choice.

Not to say engineers are godly beings , but I am sure they did what they did for a reason. There is a small chance of design screw-up or oversight, but most of the time we as consumers of their product are wholly unaware of their internal constraints, objectives, schedules, etc. We simply don't have enough info to judge fairly. We can't say we know better. We as individual consumers do not have the same objective and expectations as the manufacturer. Yes, we all have a point of view, but that will be specific to our expectations, budget, understanding, etc. 

Other RC companies include way more hop-ups because their sales strategy is different. Does this mean they are designed better? Not necessarily, they simply have different business strategies. Is the company that is more profitable the one whose strategy is "proper"? Even here the answer is also not necessarily because, unless we have someone who is part of the board of directors of such company commenting here, we have no clue on their objectives (short and long term), business goals, social goals, etc. Even tougher to gauge if it's a private company.

For example, kits come with plastic bushings not because they were not designed properly. They do probably because Tamiya decided it made economic sense for them to lower the cost of the kits and also to potentially drive hop-ups purchase. It's not a bad design, it has intent. We may disagree with such strategy, but we can't argue it had intent.

Back to the original servo question, I can see that the crappy plastic servo is probably included for two reasons:

• Same as the plastic bushings: cost savings with an aspiration from the manufacturing to sell a hop-up.
• Many legacy kits come with savers that were originally intended for the weak servos of that era and are therefore no longer relevant on many cases. While Tamiya includes such savers on older kits, most of the newer kits seem to have high-torque versions.

The HT saver it's not really mandatory, i.e. the model does work without one. It is for the consumer to decide whether an improvement makes sense. There is no right or wrong. In my case, yes, I have HT saver on all my models because it makes sense to me. I haven't done a world-scale market & manufacturing analysis to conclude weather it makes sense for Tamiya to include one on all their kits. I could, but for not for free!!