Ever have trouble looking at one of your RC cars?

[Saito2]

Ever get so mad over an RC that you just couldn't look at it? lol Sometimes, with its high price tag, I wonder if Juggernaut 1 owners felt that way after their drive trains shredded their teeth bitd.

My little story has nothing to do with anything mechanical. For years, Ive tried running various wheels on my Super Shot to spare the fragile gold plating on the stock rims. Well, none of them looked right. So I broke down and got an extra set, telling myself even if they got chipped up in use, they'd at least "look right". 

A week later they arrived after purchasing them on ebay. I put them on they looked good. All was right in RC-land until I got the bill which was $76 over the price of the wheels! It was an overdraft fee from my bank (freshly bought out by a bigger bank 6 months ago). It seems even though I paid using my PAYPAL balance (which was ample to cover the purchase) ebay chose to use the bank account balance I have linked to Paypal instead, which did not have enough funding, hence the overdraft fee. I have bought things on fleabay for years using my Paypal balance without issue. Calling Paypal resulted in them pointing the finger at ebay and calling ebay resulting in them pointing the finger at Paypal. Needless to say, with Paypal's flawless record for us up until now and their better explanation, I'm inclined to believe them over ebay. No more ebay purchases...ever.

My bank? Well, why I can't blame them for the overdraft fee (it used to be $30 before the merger), the extreme jump in overdraft fees as well as others means I'll be pulling all my money out today and conducting business elsewhere.

So, now I have a Super Shot with gold plated wheels that I can't look at without getting angry, let alone run (those wound up being very expensive wheels! lol). The experience kinda ruined to car for me and if its like the old CR01 I sold once that got "lost" in the mail, I'll never live it down. I don't use the US post office anymore either if it can be helped.

[markbt73]

The only one I've ever really felt like that about was an RC4WD Trailfinder 2, which I sold half a dozen other cars to fund. And it turned out to be a piece of junk. Sloppy, badly-made, parts literally falling off every time I ran it - the thing looked at thread-lock and just laughed. All I could think when I looked at it was how much I wished I had some of the other cars back instead. So I sold it at a loss, and resolved never to spend that much on any single RC kit again.

And hassles with shipping are a huge part of the reason I rarely buy, and never sell, anything any more.

Funny thing about the Juggernaut 1 - I remember when it first came out, the only one my local hobby shop ever had in stock got stolen by a friend of an employee (who quickly became an ex-employee), right as reports started coming out about the gears. We all laughed at the thought of their ill-gotten truck eating its own drivetrain, it felt like karma.

[El Gecko]

The only time I have trouble looking at a car is right after I crash it, broken parts hanging off like xmas tree ornaments 

Seriously though, I get where you're coming from Saito. Struggling and working so hard to achieve something, spending too much time and money, and the resulting object becomes a symbol of everything negative that led to its creation. Sometimes I have been able to power through with sheer determination, i.e. "goshdarnint I'm going to run this car because I bought it and this is what I wanted, regardless of whatever happened to get here", but in other cases I'm not able to get over the connection and end up selling whatever it is, because having it in my presence doesn't bring me joy (in fact the opposite). I'd say both responses are reasonable and acceptable, and only you can decide where you stand, how deeply it affected you, and whether you can ultimately begin to enjoy the car, or end up just selling it on and cutting your losses.

  

59 minutes ago, markbt73 said:

hassles with shipping are a huge part of the reason I rarely buy, and never sell, anything any more.

Yep, pretty much this. It's such a crapshoot. Love the karma story too 

[ADRay1000]

oh man, you remind me of a trade deal I made on a forum WAY back in the Wild West days of the internet (1998). I sent a built, lightly used TA03 to a kid who in turn sent me a box of RC10T trash. Nothing I could do about it. I don’t remember what happened to the RC10T, probably sold it off for whatever out of frustration. couldn’t look at it I guess. 

A good (hard) lesson in business dealings… still remember the $&@#’s name and hometown 😬

[urban warrior]

For me in fact, it's not been a car but a boat model (Graupner Pegasus) that I traded an original old Wild Willy for. I ran the boat two times. The second time it nearly sank in the river Rhine, where I ruined a good pair of Nikes for. Then it got dismantled for some improvements that never happened. Looking some times on it with frustration (and maybe anger) the wreck finally ended in the bin. I often thought, full of regret, that I should have never made that trade.

[TurnipJF]

Fortunately I haven't ever had a trade go as spectacularly wrong as the examples above. Even the TL-01B that I bought as genuine but turned out to be fake contained enough good parts to make the purchase worthwhile.

When I struggle to look at a car, it is because I know that I messed up something when building it (usually cutting the bodyshell or decals), and it frustrates me until I can fix it. If I mess up a bodyshell to the point that I can't fix it, it gets downgraded to runner status and I get another for the shelf. Because I am strict with my hobby budget, sometimes it takes a while to acquire this, so the car sits out of sight in its box until I have it in a state wherein I can look at it without getting annoyed at myself.  

[Saito2]

Glad I'm not the only one with feelings like this sometimes. As for my Super Shot, at best, I can blow it apart and make a Boomerang out of it. I have all the parts in my collection to do this. I don't want a Boomerang because I like the Super Shot, but I can at least look at a Boomerang without feeling disgusted. Maybe if I put the gold wheels away for awhile until they become "rare" again, I can get my money back selling them, lol j/k.

[Mad Ax]

I feel your pain, this is one of those modern world problems where you do everything right but still get screwed over by everyone else's mistakes.  And the everyone else in this case hides behind a gatekeeper support service or just blames another party, and everyone else has so much power there's just about nothing you can do.  I've had similar situations, and the frustration is overwhelming.

Non-RC related bit

A few years back my bank card got cloned - oddly, it happened the day after I read out my card number over the phone to pay for my car insurance, coincidence much? - and I had around £3000 worth of charges put onto my account, for all manner of random things.

My bank were very good (this was before they put the £100 excess on all fraud-related refunds) and refunded 99% of the transactions same day.  The only one they quibbled over was a PayPal transaction for a gym membership in London.  That's over 2 hours drive from me, and I won't even walk 5 minutes to a gym.  They said it was a PayPal issue, and I should speak to them.

I messaged PayPal who said it simply wasn't possible that my card was used in this way, because my card number was tied to my personal PayPal account, so the only way to use PayPal with that card was via my personal PayPal account, which had no record of that transaction and did not appear to be compromised.  It was only around £30 (pretty cheap for a gym in London, I'd have thought) but still annoying.  However, it was less annoying for me to let it go than to continue to fight two financial giants who will happily keep passing me between them and keep me on hold long enough to rack up well over £30 in phone bills.

RC-related bit

Anyhoo - in terms of RC stuff, I think it's happened to me a few times.  Not necessarily for that reason, but still related to cost.  Mostly working on custom projects and having to buy parts in the hope I can make them fit, then finding out I can't.

Big6 went that way when I was trying to get 6 powered axles close together.  I'd bought 2x Element Enduro Scale Builders Kits to get enough axles, but mounting them close with an up-and-over was proving very challenging.  I figured I'd be better with a pass-thru.  Axial and Traxxas both had 6x6 scaler axles with pass-thrus on the rear, but they don't supply the axles as a complete set and buying parts to make them costs a small fortune.  They literally never come up used, either as an axle set or as a complete car, and new prices were way over what I wanted to spend.  The project was stuck and I couldn't progress at all.

I decided to go budget, and found a 6x6 pass-thru axle set on Aliexpress for £50.  Quality might not be perfect, but it would get the project going again.  I paid my money and waited 2 weeks for delivery.  When I opened the pack, I'd made a mistake - £50 was the price for one axle, all I had was a rear.  Quality was awful - it was metal, badly made, the crown wheel was out of true and it wouldn't turn.  I wasn't prepared to spend another £100 for the remaining 2 axles, so I was £50 short and back to square 1.

I eventually got it working with an up-and-over using a bearing carrier that required a lot of manual filing to get to fit right, but the shaft angles were steep and I kept snapping shafts.  I've had to pay a premium for Boom Racing driveshafts, which have proved to be extremely robust, but I also had packaging problems with the transmission, and since getting it all together, I've found gearing to be problematic.  I have to use a tiny pinion, which skips easily and ruins the spur.  I've had to gear it down so much that it can barely reach a walking pace, and I've still managed to cook several motors.  Last time I ran it, I had an extended run through long grass while towing a broken-down rig, and the (3 month old, barely-used) 5-pole motor let the magic smoke out at the bottom of a steep hill, so I had to carry both rigs back to the van.  Despite that motor being rebuildable, they don't supply a new rotor for it, so it's yet another can with a burnt out rotor that will sit around doing nothing until I can find a rotor that fits.

My hillwalking truck is going a similar way.  It was a big ask to make a truck that does what it does, it's also cooked a couple of motors and shredded a few driveshafts.  I've had awful problems finding wheels and tyres that work together and also fit the axles without binding, finding transfer cases that don't mess up the gear ratio, getting the transmission to go together without binding, and a host of other small but awkward problems that stall the project while I figure out how to proceed.  Right now it's off the road while I decide if I want to suffer the funds for another Boom Racing driveshaft to replace the cheap one that failed on the front last time I ran it.

What's really annoying is that a used FTX Outback 2 that cost me next to nothing and was assembled using half-broken axles and random spares left over from other projects has actually taken over hillwalking duties and is doing a way better job than my custom hillwalking truck ever did.  I've got to be over £1000 into the hillwalking truck right now and I don't see me bothering to make it drive again until winter, when I'll need the proper roof lights.  But I could probably fit proper roof lights to the FTX for less than £50 - a little more than the cost of a Boom Racing driveshaft.  Plus it still needs many, many hours of custom fabrication to finish the body, plus a whole load of prep and paint, 3D printing, and custom parts from online.  Meanwhile, the FTX looks great with a used Tamiya FJ40 body that I bought from a friend a few years ago.  Figures 

I'm sure there have been others too - I've got a couple of SRBs that never seem to run for long before something goes wrong.  My intro to SRB ownership began with Gold Edition Buggy Champ which came with a generous discount.  It looked so good that I built it as a shelf queen and very light runner, and gave it a special San Miguel beer logo.  I also painted the hard body from my Brat re-re in the same gold San Miguel livery, and fitted it onto a custom scaler chassis, with the intention of building a trailer to tow the Buggy Champ, and also my TA05 club race car that also had a San Miguel livery.

Things first went wrong while testing the scaler in my lounge.  The radio glitched, it jerked backwards and slammed into the TV cabinet, taking the paint off the tailgate and damaging the brackets, so the tailgate never fitted properly after.

Then I decided to run the SRB very carefully at the Tamiyaclub swap meet back in 2012.  I took it out to the car park and drove it around real slow.  On the way back it hit a stone and flipped over on the tarmac, smashing off all the lights and putting huge scratches down the pristine gold paint.  After that I made it a runner, but on the next proper run it flipped upside down and totally trashed the roof.  Such a fragile body!

I decided to make the Brat body a runner too, and put it on a King Blackfoot to make a sort-of Mud Blaster.  That body didn't last long either, the roof got all smashed up and the bed collapsed.  It seems whatever project I put that body on, it just doesn't want to work.  I thought I had a plan for it 6 months ago, but I ordered a wrestler figure as a driver (an essential starting point for the build) and lo and behold, it was too small.  It seems that somehow, overnight, every single wrestler figure in the universe (including vintage ones) has shrunk by almost an inch, because I used to buy a lot of wrestler figures and they were perfect, and now they're too small.  My local bargain store, which used to stock genuine wrestler figures and was always my first go-to, no longer stocks them.  So I'm back to buying stuff off eBay and finding it's no good, and having to get rid of it or repurpose it.  This particular project has been sat on the shelf for a few months and I'm not feeling much inclination to pull it down and continue work, even though I'm really excited to share the project with the world.

[JimBear]

46 minutes ago, Mad Ax said:

Right now it's off the road while I decide if I want to suffer the funds for another Boom Racing driveshaft to replace the cheap one that failed on the front last time I ran it.

Too bad about the Hillwalking truck, by now it's almost a trademark Mad Ax creation, but I can see the "20 there and 50 there" adding up (looking at Socky the CR-01) - not to mention the "bits falling off" dilemma. But I have the impression that you aren't much of an RTR (Royal Tea Ranger for anybody who doesn't recognise that shorthand) fellow, either. So there is an obvious risk that you'll end up coming up with a Hillstalker Truck 2.0 down the road if you abort this one.

[Mad Ax]

2 hours ago, JimBear said:

...I have the impression that you aren't much of an RTR (Royal Tea Ranger for anybody who doesn't recognise that shorthand) fellow, either. So there is an obvious risk that you'll end up coming up with a Hillstalker Truck 2.0 down the road if you abort this one.

I'm not an RTR fan, I have very few RTR rigs.  The FTX actually came to me as a well-used donor and got broken up for parts, then reassembled out of spares, so it's not much of an RTR now and is very much a custom rig.

I doubt I'll abort the Hillwalking truck, I'm just taking a break from working on that or any other RC stuff right now, and I'm focussing my finances on non-RC stuff (for the first time in many years).  Frustration over the hillwalking truck is definitely part of the reason I'm stepping back, but it's far from the whole story.  How soon I come back and how much I can focus on the expensive Hillwalking Truck project depends on how much of my finances these other projects swallow, whether or not my side-hustle continues to make money, what happens financially at home and whether or not I sell off any RCs that I haven't used in years.

[Kowalski86]

On 6/23/2025 at 8:05 AM, markbt73 said:

The only one I've ever really felt like that about was an RC4WD Trailfinder 2, which I sold half a dozen other cars to fund. And it turned out to be a piece of junk. Sloppy, badly-made, parts literally falling off every time I ran it - the thing looked at thread-lock and just laughed.

I don't think I'll ever see the appeal of RC4WD, FMS and WPL do the whole "incredibly scale yet delicate" thing at a lower price.

The only RC of mine that I have a hard time looking at is this, and it's nothing to do with being a bad RC (its actually good!), it's just crude.

Outside of that, I have a hard time looking at Traxxas Slash's. I associate them with hardcore "bashers" who love to beat the snot out of their expensive toys, then sell them for the low price of $200 and ship them in a box with no packaging.

I cringe a bit when I see blinged out TT02s or cheap off-brand cars, it defeats the whole point of buying a cheap RC from the get go. Anyone with cash and poor self-control can "bling" up a cheap RC car.

[MadAnt]

I had a Helion Dominus short course truck that I bought for a discounted price due to some missing parts that I replaced. This thing was awful, slow, noisy and had a chassis that was too thin. Now of course looking at its layout would trick you into thinking it could be a competent basher, but the metal chassis would bend and twist and it seemed like the drivetrain had too much drag. After bending the chassis on the lightest of curb taps, I have had enough and wanted this piece of trash out of my life, so I bent the chassis back into shape and gave the car away.

Waste of money and I definitely did not want it in my line of sight ever again.