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How has this hobby changed your life?

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I was think as I sat eating dinner, looking out the window that since I got in to this hobby I am fastidious at keep the grass cut so I can try out mods. It used to swing from Hippy to Jarhead every few weeks but now gets cut twice a week without fail.

Apart from the lack of money and storage how has this hobby affected your life?

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Hmm interesting one.

1. I have less money :)

2. I feel more like a child, no bad thing in my opinion, cant deny it reminds me of my childhood

3. I think I have better craft skills, not good, better :P

4. More patience for sure

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Well, considering I've been at it since I was 13, and I'm 42 now, it's hard to say. I don't know who I would have been without this hobby. But I know these little cars have taught me a lot, about mechanical engineering, troubleshooting, electronics, and art, not to mention patience, control, attention to detail, and perseverance. It has also given me the confidence to attempt (and succeed at) DIY repairs on all sorts of things that aren't supposed to be "user-serviceable." It also helps keep me focused and grounded; there's a meditation-like quality to workshop time that is of immeasurable value. I honestly believe I am a better person because I have such a hands-on hobby, and I wish more people in my life understood why I do it, and I'm glad there is a forum like this for like-minded folks who get it.

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I am completely with markbt3...it has given me the confidence I need to attempt repairs on things I probably otherwise wouldn't attempt....ie: building a shed, fixing a washing machine, replacing belts on my vehicles, adjusting the valves on my motorcycle. I have friends who are completely useless when it comes to fixing anything other than replacing a light bulb.

On the other hand, the hobby costs me A LOT of money... :rolleyes:

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I guess I could say I was born with the RC bug and building models in general. Like most of you guys, I'm 40 and a child of the 80's.

From the time I was two years old, I always spent time at the flying field with my Dad. Some of my earliest memories are me and him in 1977 in Houston, TX with him flying a Sig Ugly Stik and me watching him drinking a lemon lime Gatorade. We moved around a lot when I was kid due to the nature of his job. For me, that always meant having to make new friends and leaving old friends behind. But I always had my father, as he taught me the ropes of building control line stunt planes, flying them, and spending every waking weekend in a parking lot or a soccer field. I learned how to build scale models and developed a passion for anything mechanical and artistic. I would take my toys apart and figured out how they worked and then slapped them back together.

I got my first Tamiya, a Wild One, on my birthday in 1986 from Tommy's Hobby Shop in Roswell, Georgia. There was never any question who would be building it and that would be me. I spent two nights building and painting, and on that third evening was able to run my glorious new Tamiya up and down the street. That car followed me through three more moves and kept me entertained for hours on end. By the time I was 12, I had built a Kyosho Optima and RC10 by myself and got heavily into racing with my Dad. Some of my fondest memories of childhood were competitive racing in the late 80's running pan cars at ridiculous speeds and learning geometry and how to set things up. I learned all about batteries and motors and their electrical aspects, learning to use a voltmeter when I was 13 and soldering wiring like a pro.

To echo Mark and Steelo, it gave me confidence to work on my own cars at home, albeit, smaller repairs and the like which have saved me thousands of dollars over the years. But most importantly, I have a hobby that I love and enjoy. A hobby that keeps me young and day dreaming. I've met so many people from across my country and across the Pond who've helped me out.

When my wife asks me "Do you not have a project going?" and encourages me (to an extent :P ), that means a lot as she knows it makes me happy.

Which reminds me, I still need to restore a Wild One :wacko:

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My fondest memories are those when I was a teenager working at the LHS right in the middle of town. It was a general hobby store so it carried everything; R/C, plastic models, trains, rocketry etc. I had so much fun building my first car (an HPI Pro 2), then learning about nitro cars and owning a few of those, and later on working as a builder & mechanic for customer cars. Helped pay for a lot of lunches and dates throughout high school and well into college. I don't really run my cars anymore. I tend to just buy what I like for nostalgia's sake and remembering old times. Better than pictures in a frame.

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Well I'm also a child of the 70's and 80's, immediately fell for a WW back in the early 80's and to this day I get P.O'd. at myself for "giving it away". Since I've gotten back in to the hobby, I find myself content..... Now I am a 25 year veteran of the martial arts 6th degree black belt and Master instructor, I train big nasty individuals and little women how to destroy big nasty bad guys.... that is a stress release, but nothing gets me calmer than 2 hrs at the work bench....I no longer drink socially( maybe a beer at the bench). My wife gets great pleasure out of how happy a beat up chassis brings me..she laughs at my school boy guilt when I tell her I won a batch of cars..I have even consdered starting a build club at my martial arts center... I encourage friends and their kids to buy or build, sharing my limited knowledge... its a pleasure beyond my true comprehension. Hope this makes sense.

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I emigrated to Japan because of my hobbies, those being model kits and RC cars.

Dorvack.

Now that is a life change. From where, if I may ask?

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Reading these comments is awesome. It's like meeting long lost siblings. As for me, I went from building tamiya 1:10 on road cars in my teens to building and fixing 1:1 cars for a living as an adult.

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It is defiantley reassuring to know there are people just as obsessed about RC as I am, sometimes I wonder if its normal to spend so much time thinking about RC stuff. I think it comes down to being car mad when I was young and also growing up where Tamiya was the big in thing and everyone had one or wanted one. These days I like to think of it as channel to build, create and race some wild automotive creations with sinking huge sums of money into 1:1 cars

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This is a great thread and Ive loved reading the fantastic stories that all made me smile. I too am also a child of the 80's and spent many hours at the LHS dreaming of one day owning a Tamiya. Unfortunately my parents at the time couldn't afford one and it seemed like all my friends were getting them except me! The moment I could afford one I did and the rest is history, racing restoring and collecting. With all the stresses of life I find that RC calm me and I truly find it relaxing to head of to the man cave work on my cars, I always leave with a smile :)

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I emigrated to Japan because of my hobbies, those being model kits and RC cars.

Dorvack.

It's, more or less, what happened to a guy from my birthplace.

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I was think as I sat eating dinner, looking out the window that since I got in to this hobby I am fastidious at keep the grass cut so I can try out mods. It used to swing from Hippy to Jarhead every few weeks but now gets cut twice a week without fail.

Why's that?

Did u RC your lawnmower??! :P

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Why's that?

Did u RC your lawnmower??! :P

Are you trying to give Nobbi ideas for the next project?? :D

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This is very much a Hibernaculum type question/post..

How has this hobby changed my life??

To be honest, I could not imagine my life without RC cars...

I was one of those kids that wanted to know how everything electrical/mechanical worked.. I'd often pull something apart, just to see what was inside that made it work.. I was always fiddling with my toys, adding more batteries to my slot cars sets to make them faster, or making battery powered cars remote control by running a long wire from the car up to a larger battery pack so I could run them in forward and reverse..

My introduction to RC came when I was about 12, my family had stopped off at a fete at a local High School that happened to have a local RC club putting on a display of their cars.. I can still remember one of the drivers showing my Dad and I a car that he had crashed and it had bent the chassis.. (I can still remember it as if it were yesterday, it had to be a Kyosho Scorpion...) From the moment I saw that first race, I was hooked.. I had to have one, and did everything possible to save enough money to buy one...

The skills and knowledge that I have learned in this hobby, I feel have enabled me to be a better electrician.. The need to make running repairs on my race cars has helped me to develop the ability to "think outside the square" when it come to fault finding and repairing electrical items in my trade..

During my electrical apprenticeship, one of the tasks that we apprentices were given was to build a small electric DC motor from scratch.. This task was to be graded on 3 things, overall build quality, current draw (the lower the better) and its ability to start running 10 out of 10 tries.. I was able to apply the knowledge that I had learned from reading about and messing with RC motors directly to this task.. RC had given me a good understanding about motor "timing" or the relationship between the windings and the commutator segments, and this knowledge allowed me to tune my motor and lower the current draw, as well as still having enough torque to start 10 out of 10 times..

30 years on, and I will admit that RC does not have the same influence on my life that it once did, but it does still provide me with a great outlet for the normal day to day stress that life brings, and still gives me the opportunity to keep my hands and mind busy...

As I said, I could not imagine my life without RC being part of it....

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I'm also a child of the 80's, mostly dominated with transformers, He-man and the like, but I've always had a huge interest in cars. I like knowing how something works, how it comes apart and what makes it tick. My earliest remote control car was a large scale Porsche 924, bright red with a steering wheel on the remote. I loved that car and I was heartbroken when it was too broken to fix and ended up in the bin (that wouldn't have happened now though!) I remember going into Beaties and watching the Tamiya videos at the back of the store, wishing I could afford to have one. So when I finally had a job, I decided I was going to have one, so off to the local model shop, which sadly isn't there anymore (Reigate Toys And Models). I chose the Lancia Delta Integrale as my first kit, the shopkeeper put it to one side for me, and once a week, my dad would take me to the shop to pay a little off. I was so excited I couldn't wait to get home and build it. The following weekend, my mate who had bought a Super Hornet, and I both took our new toys over to the golf course for a blast, my mates Hornet happily jumping in and out of the bunkers!

Its all out of control now, R/C cars everywhere, I spend most evenings tinkering, although until recently, I lost the spark a little, but the release of Willys Wheeler has ignited it again, now I'm often frantically scanning ebay for R/C bargains!

I think I have slowly become better with some of my modelling skills, although I still suck at painting, mostly due to being too impatient! I enjoy the building the most though, or even tearing down a model just to rebuild it again! This hobby is one of a few I dabble in, my VW obsession, retro games consoles, vintage Sony Walkmans and vintage hi-fi all a big part of my life. But its something I get genuine pleasure from.

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This is very much a Hibernaculum type question/post

He don't live here no more A

To all you guys that are a more bareable person to live with because you have this outlet to take your mind off the stresses of life, work, bills, mortgage, depression or whatever, that's how this hobby and TC changed you !

For those of you that read this and thought...... Speak for yourself buddy, well I just did that too !

#Edit#. Alcohol fuelled rant right there ! My first one though..... Sorry 😃

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It is great to hear all the stories. I had a truck as a kid but not a Tamiya one and it cracked and smashed every time I ran it. Couple of mates had grasshoppers and hornets but I was never that in to it. I was lucky I had real 1:1 motorcycles to build and cars to fix on the weekend with my Dad so I only got in to this recently.

A guy at work brought in a Hornet and I thought it was cool so I got one off eBay and started striping and modding it. To me it is an outlet for the things I cannot do 1:1 as much. I still have motorbikes to run and restore but this hobby is more flexible on time and commitment so it fits in to the family life better. My son will learn the mechanics I learnt with my Dad just on a 1:10 scale and that for me if the key, less TV more hands on skills

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Since my first tamiya m03, I took up racing in club... now im into RC off road racing. it was a real mini cooper that started all. I got m03 to match my real mini./

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Like many others on here, I have been into RC models since childhood, so it is hard to imagine how life would have been without them. I daresay I have learned a lot from the hobby though.

I started out with RC planes while at school, financing my hobby by building aircraft kits for others, so I suppose this helped develop my work ethic and money management skills.

I flew competitively for a while, in the F3B, F3J and G2K classes, and this taught me a fair bit about the psychology of competition, keeping a cool head under pressure and all that. On the practical side, I also learned a lot about composite construction and aerodynamics.

I started the transition from planes to cars during the mid-'90s, with my first hobby-grade RC car being an FF-01 which I raced at an informal carpark-based "club". It was around this time that I finished school and started working at a bicycle shop to pay my way through university, so I suppose the hobby helped refine my budgeting skills even further! :)

Between degrees, I decided to take some time out from my studies to travel a bit, which I could afford to do thanks in part to being able to sell off my fleet of RCs. It was while travelling that I met the woman who was to become my wife, so I suppose this is the biggest way in which RC benefitted me.

And now that we are happily married, well-settled and financially stable, it is thanks to my wife's active support of my hobby interests that our fleet has grown to include all the models I had sold previously, and more besides, since she now enjoys taking part in RC activities with me. It has given us something to enjoy as a couple! :D

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I was once into static models - RC cars probably did a lot to get me outside while still following a similar hobby. I have become more hands-on and now possess a very basic knowledge of vehicle dynamics. It is still a bit of a shame that this passion for RC cars and their workings did not get me into mechanical engineering (I ended up in civil instead), but perhaps it will manifest itself further in life.

This hobby burns a hole in all my imaginable pockets, which I suppose keeps me out of the bar but also limits my ice hockey. The latter is not necessarily bad as I do find enough to play; rather RC cars keep me from overdoing it.

I have noticed that I tend to think and act differently from my peers, none of whom are into radio-controlled vehicles except for the odd electrical engineer who builds a quad-copter and calls it a day. Maybe correlation does not imply causation, but who knows? It is not as if I have become entirely anti-social; it is more that I do tend to spend more time working (or aspiring to work) with my hands than most of them. It has kept me out of extensive video gaming or spending money on new electronics - I may get more out of a low-turn ESC than the latest smartphone, anyways.

Without this hobby, I am unsure what I might become - probably not necessarily a worse person; however being in this hobby has made me a more interesting one. Every now and then I still feel 15 years old (no younger because I started at that age), which at this point in my life is sometimes degrading but in the grand scheme of things is not entirely bad.

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I can see that my RC hobby/addiction has had both positive and negative effects on my life. But I think this thread justifies a trip through memory lane...

From a very early age, I loved cars and everything about cars. At 4 years old, I wanted to be a mechanic - but my parents steered me away from it. (Who knows, maybe if I'd kept at it I'd be a mechanic for a major race team? Or maybe I'd be scratching a living working for a penniless boss in a corrugated shed doing oil changes and clutch jobs on 20 year old wrecks).

I was always playing with Matchbox cars, then making cars from Lego. I got my first RC (a Nikko Turbo Panther) at 6, but the terrain near me meant it didn't get the use it deserved. I lusted after bigger, faster cars that would go over the grass in my garden.

I saved my pennies to buy a second-hand King Cab from my cousin when I was 13. He was the ubiquitous Destroyer of Toys, the Ruiner of Everything. He was Sid from Toy Story. It was wrecked. I don't think it ever ran without spitting another part - in those days it was a 6-week wait for a part from Riko, provided I could persuade my mother to lend me her credit card. I remember the joy at my first childhood NIB, a Mud Blaster: no more broken parts, I thought! No more long waits for replacements! And then my disappointment that, despite being new, it was far inferior to the King Cab. Plus, of course, monster trucks have a habit of rolling over and wrecking the shell...

I was lucky enough to come by a (very) used Grasshopper for free and, for a very short time, I had two functioning RC cars - but it wasn't long before one of them broke, shortly followed by the other.

At 16 I dabbled with nitro (a Kyosho Sand Master), bought on special offer from my local hobby store, but it offered neither the reliability nor the additional build quality that I had expected from a nitro, plus the noise annoyed my father and it got consigned to the shed.

At that point I became more interested in 1:1 cars and motorbikes, I began to earn my own wage and threw most of my money away buying old wrecks and promising to restore them into show winners. As is so often the case with 1:1 cars, my ambition far outweighed my talent (and my determination, enthusiasm, skill, time, money, tools, space, etc) and my money usually rusted to nothing in a distant corner of the garage. I moved out of home at 24, a broke and broken man, with nothing to show for years of spending bar some oil under my fingernails and a bunch of boxes full of worthless car parts.

Living in a new home, I was able to better explore my other great loves: writing music, and writing science fiction. As a musician and a composer I'm barely average, but my real love is writing. If I could spend the rest of my days writing fiction and getting paid enough to feed and house myself and my family, I'd be very happy. For a while, that's what I set about doing: I forgot about cars and bikes and spent all my spare time writing fiction.

But the RC bug bit again as a substitute for playing with 1:1 cars. At last I could live out my dream of building, modifying, styling, tuning and racing all the cars I'd wanted in 1:1 scale, but this time, in 1:10. It was cheaper, cleaner, could be done in the warm, things didn't depreciate or deteriorate if they sat on the shelf for 2 years... But as the years progressed, it became another obsession.

So here I sit in my 35th year, looking back on 10 years as an avid adult RC collector / builder / basher.

What has RC cost me in the last 10 years?

A lot of money - but far less than I would have spent on 1:1 cars if I didn't have this outlet.

A lot of time - but equally, far less than I would have spent on 1:1 cars. Same with space, aggro, injuries... RC has been a passion that's kept me away from more expensive and time-consuming hobbies, but it's also had its own impact, of which I'll list the key issues below, in reverse order of severity:

4: Space: my obsession has a significant footprint in my garage - space that could be used to store camping gear or other useful things. It also fills my "studio" - I have the master bedroom in the house as my personal creative space, supposedly as a peaceful area for writing music and fiction, except it's anything but peaceful. Boxes of parts, half-finished projects, tools, handsets, batteries, chargers, paint, in fact all manner of things fill it and take space (and tranquility) from my working area. I'm sure this prevents me from fully relaxing and making better progress on my stories.

3: Money: it doesn't matter how many RC cars and parts I buy, I'm always wondering what I'll buy next. This seems to be a disease of some sort. I would rather buy a new NIB at £150 and not be able to afford to build it than spend £150 on bearings, paints and radios so I can build all the other NIBs sitting in my garage.

2: Anchor Effect: It's long been a belief of mine that every single thing you own, from a cheap wristwatch right the way up to your house, whether it's a pointless toy or a genuine necessity, requires an emotional commitment. Not just the stress related to financial (cost of maintenance and upkeep) and time (cleaning, servicing) but an actual commitment on an emotional level - and we only have a finite amount of emotion to go around. If we own too many things, we reduce the amount of emotion we have available for other things, like family, friends, even ourselves. Therefore it's important to maintain a healthy balance between satisfying the human urge to hoard and maintaining enough freedom from material things to have the spare emotion to enjoy life. Right now I feel that I have committed my emotion across too many things, and I would feel a lot happier if I let go of a lot of my collection.

(As an interesting aside, I am beginning to realise that there is another angle to the Anchor Effect. Buying something new (an RC car, a cheap wristwatch, a house) requires commitments of time, money and emotion. Buying an "event" (a holiday, a journey to see an old friend, a walk in the countryside) requires commitments of time and money but do not require a commitment of emotion. Hence why I'm always saying to my wife, I don't need more money so I can buy more stuff - I need more money so I can go and do the things I want to do without having to save up for them. This logic seems completely at odds with the garage and house which is absolutely crammed full of my stuff)

1: Time: RC is supposed to be an escape, when I don't want to write music or stories, when I need a break or I'm suffering from a block. But sometimes I get so deep into a project that I don't want to do anything else. As Orbital were once quoted as saying, when talking about video games: "We'd probably have written another album or two if we didn't have the Playstation." I think the same applies here. There's a huge part of me that says if I'm really, really serious about being a writer, I'd get rid of these distractions altogether and turn my studio into the oasis of peace and creativity that it's supposed to be.


From Cornwall, in the south-west of England. Japan is a bit of a head-trip but you get used to it and I never plan on leaving.

Dorvack.

When the sun is shining and the wind is low, the south-west of England is simply the best place in the world :D

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I totally agree with you on the anchor effect.. I have recently thinned out my collection quite a bit and I'm much happier, I don't really like having boxes and boxes of unfinished projects. I would rather just have a 5 or 6 good chassis and lots of nice bodies.

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