New stuff and the good old days

[mongoose1983]

I'm basically in the hobby because of some reminiscent feeling. And very often I go back in my mind to the late 80's/early 90's remembering how incredible these Tamiya cars were, memories of the old hobby store, and those kits stacked all around with that unmistakable and wonderful art showing on its covers. Well, lately I was wondering, if I could go back in time, and bring one modern RC-related thing to, say, 1989... what modern RC kit or device would I be bringing with me to enjoy? Not that easy to say, huh. And you guys, what kit or parts would you bring with you to your own past?

[TurnipJF]

For me it would be my 2.4GHz radio set.

 

The prohibitive price of radio gear was the main reason I never had a hobby-grade RC back in the day. If I could send my current radio back in time to my former self, I am sure I could have scraped together enough pocket money for the rest.

[chevelle]

Ooh ooh, lipo Batteries. I always imagined longer run times as a kid 

[one_hit]

I would probably bring lipo batteries and charger. 5 minute run times were too short and was the biggest let-down for me back in the day

[Fuijo]

Affordable ESC for me.

I really hated the MSC. It seemed you had 2 choices, drive flat out everywhere and risk crashing, or drive slowly and catch fire and melt stuff.

An exaggeration to be sure, but it did feel that way sometimes to me.

[Ian_Gsi16V]

Got to be LiPo batteries and the charger. Overnight charging for 10 minutes of runtime with the speed constantly depleting, no thanks! 

[Dojo Dave]

Affordable batteries and charger, I had one hump back battery for my Wild Willy and that for an 11 year old is not enough run time. Id probablystill have my original. I regret giving it to my git of a cousin every time I think about it.oh well, common sense would have been a good thing to take bak and vacuum bags to put a dozen vintage kits in for in my mums house so I could have them mint in box nowto build,  Blazers, and wheelers and oooooooh im getting carried away.  

[GooneyBird]

I'll have to agree with most here and say LiPo's and a good charger. The short runtime and overnight charging times really cut into the fun-time. 

However, I only started out in the mid '90s, so I bought a quick charger and a good NiMH pack (I still have it! And it still works!) quite rapidly after building the Alpine. So if I were to go back in time I'm sure batteries aren't the first thing on my mind. 

If I were to cheat a bit, I'd say I'd bring my pit bag filled with the TRF419 and TRF102, and all the bits I need on a weekend, including spares. I'd then recruit Past-Me and register the TRFs for a world championship somewhere. Granted the 102 and 419 are only 21.5t and 17.5t stock, but with lipos and 20+ years in chassis and tire innovations I'm sure they can dominate the Corally CCTs and HPI RS4s of their day. I wonder how long it takes before we get DQ'ed due to "Failing to register a frequency on the board" and "overall witchcraft".

[Terz1]

Definitely some lipo batteries and a charger. I remember being a kid and charging the cars up for what seemed forever and then seemingly getting 5 minutes run time. I could live with the mechanical speed controllers and the mhz radio gear. I just remember being so disappointed when my buggy stopped. So if I could pop back that's what I'd take. 

[Hibernaculum]

Nothing  Not a thing.

Many old cars weren't designed for the lengthy runtime of LiPo unless you also changed them to ESCs.

Besides, fast chargers existed since the early 80s if you wanted to run over and over with a cooldown in between. But even so, unlike today's "you can have everything right now forever!" society, some limitations of R/C in the old days were actually character building. Every drive of your Tamiya was something you cherished and looked forward to. I am sure nobody will agree with that statement, but whatever - my point is not everything in life is made better by being unlimited. Try eating unlimited donuts.

Actually there is one thing I would take back. The Internet (and Paypal). It's not specifically R/C. But when cars were discontinued back in the day, your ability to track down leftover stock was limited to the hobby stores you could find in the phone book. Without the Internet, none of us would own half the cars we do today (whether modern or vintage). Would have been great for finding parts too, instead of waiting 6 weeks for a hobby shop to come back to me with "We weren't able to get it".

[Saito2]

I'd take a Traxxas E-Maxx back and run over buggies and crash it into trees and freighten small children and jump it 90 meters in the air and launch it over a house and everybody would be like "WOW, THAT'S  AMAZING!!!" No. No. No. I'm joking. (no offense to Traxxas guys, it is a great truck in many ways).

Seriously, I'm going to totally agree with Hibernaculum on this one. While there are some great Tamiya vehicles produced after 1989, I could live without them. Everything I truly need or want comes from 1989 on back. I would run more Nicads today if they were still plentiful. I've never touched a Lipo and hopefully never will need to. I give in to ESCs because they're cheap nowadays, but still enjoy MSCs. I love the sheer simple mechanical/electrical aspect of them as opposed to the "mystery" going on inside an ESC. I know how ESCs work, but like watching an MSC work. I still use AM radio gear with the huge receivers if possible. Brushed modified motors certainly need upkeep, but they sure did look cool and aggressive. I miss all the little tricks racers did and the effort it took made winning all the more satisfying.

Like Hib, I agree the internet is great for bringing us all together and making parts hunting a bit more successful. 

[Theibault]

The only thing I'd want to take back would be my smartphone so I could get good pictures and video of my friends and I playing with our RCs. I don't have any pics or video of me with RC from back in the day and it kills me seeing some that you all post.

[berman]

Thought about this over and over and some of the above comments make some great points, we all wanted longer run times etc, but I especially like Theibaults considering as we get older our memories fade. I have a few photos, but nowhere near enough.

I suppose the best I can come up with, is if I could take something back to the 80s when I was enjoying Tamiyas Golden Era, would be the knowledge to hold onto those first RC's and not sell them off.

You can buy NIB's, you can buy Rereleases, You can restore someone elses hand me down... but nothing can touch that flogged out, beaten to death, worn bushings, stripped screws, insulation taped up nicad (because you left the charge leads on dads car a bit long while waiting for your Commodore 64 to load "*" ) bald tyred first Tamiya and the times you spent with it.

Tamiya... you can sell me nostalgia, but you can't sell me my childhood.

[Wooders28]

For me, a brushless setup (does that count as one thing??)

I know you could get quick brushed motors bitd , reedy red dot was always my wish list, just could never afford it (as that and the esc to power it cost more than my dad paid for his 1:1 car!) 

Racing,with a then top of the range 1800mah SCR Nicad (8wks paper round money plus Christmas!) was all about getting the right gearing for the track for the battety to last.To finish first, first you must finish. ( but a brushless set up AND lipo in a fresh ultima on the start line would have been something else 😀) 

 

I'd bring back my mid , but , like berman, tell myself not to sell any of them! (still chasing up the possible whereabouts of my ultima) 

[Hibernaculum]

On 20/08/2016 at 9:50 AM, berman said:

I suppose the best I can come up with, is if I could take something back to the 80s when I was enjoying Tamiyas Golden Era, would be the knowledge to hold onto those first RC's and not sell them off.

You can buy NIB's, you can buy Rereleases, You can restore someone elses hand me down... but nothing can touch that flogged out, beaten to death, worn bushings, stripped screws, insulation taped up nicad (because you left the charge leads on dads car a bit long while waiting for your Commodore 64 to load "*" ) bald tyred first Tamiya and the times you spent with it.

Tamiya... you can sell me nostalgia, but you can't sell me my childhood.

Well said berman.

I may as well confess. I still have every worn-out battery (Tamiya, Saft, Radio Shack), every bald tyre (I have a 60L container that is almost full of them), every used sprue, every empty oil bottle, and every burnt out MSC I used in the 80s...

You guys are the only ones who know about this. My wife has no idea. Sometimes I'll look through the "used tyre container" and find the very first tyres I ever had. All the used tyres are even sealed in pairs, in bags, the memories preserved from 'dry out'

I did throw away a Tamiya staple the other day though. It was broken and beyond restoration. My therapist says I'm making progress.

Back on topic...

Another great thing to take back to the 80s would be any smartphone. We all have so few photos of our R/C childhoods, due to the expense and hassle of film and photo developing. My Dad had a Polaroid at one stage, along with a home video camera from 1985 onward (which literally recorded to VHS and consisted of a over-the-shoulder VCR in a carry bag - of course I still have this as well!). But I have precious little footage or photos of the toys and cars I had. Imagine the wealth of 1980s memories an iPhone could have recorded...

(edit: my apologies @Theibault - you had the same idea about smartphones, 4 posts earlier!)

[Wooders28]

The only thing i have left, is Bridgestone sand super tyre marks on my parents garage ceiling! 😔

[Mad Ax]

On 20/08/2016 at 1:10 PM, Hibernaculum said:

my point is not everything in life is made better by being unlimited

Except bacon

 

On 20/08/2016 at 4:42 PM, Theibault said:

The only thing I'd want to take back would be my smartphone so I could get good pictures and video of my friends and I playing with our RCs. I don't have any pics or video of me with RC from back in the day and it kills me seeing some that you all post.

Interesting point - these days almost nothing goes unphotographed or unvideoed.  Everyone carries a tiny camera with them that is of way better quality than most of the monsters our parents had in the 80s.  The sad thing is that there are now so many terrible photos on Facebook, Photobucket and the like that it's actually hard to find good ones.  Not only are we filling up our landfill sites with non-bio-degradable trash, we're also filling the internet up with it too.  Backed up and triplicated a hundred times across the cloud.

I was clearing out last week and I actually found a load of photos of my cars from the 90s, I've put them up on my "inspiration board" that covers the wall in front of my monitor but I'll have to get them scanned for posterity, or the morning sunlight will claim them forever.

 

What would I take back, tho..?  Despite what everyone says, it would be those LiPo batteries and charger.  I lived in the middle of nowhere so I always played alone, so no need for 2.4GHz radios.  Well, apart from this one time when another kid showed up who had the exact same crystal as me.  In fact I think it was 2003 before I realised there were crystals other than red!  But I never had any kind of budget few batteries, spares or anything else.  "Can I have another battery?" was met with "What's wrong with the one you've got?"  As long as it was still in one piece and there was no smoke coming out of it, that was all I was allowed.  By the end of my childhood RC experience I'd managed to cobble together 3 second-hand Tamiya batteries, all of them in terrible shape, none would hold a charge longer than 3 minutes through a silvercan.

In fact I was just about to give up on RC completely in the late naughties when I finally took the plunge and spent the value of a new kit on two LiPos and a charger.  And I never looked back.  I threw most of my NiMHs in the recycling plant a week later and just made do with 2 LiPos until I could afford to buy more.

I'd have happily had a box full of new NiCads in the 80s or 90s, but if I could take those LiPos back with me, hmmm...  yeah, that would have been fun!

[Fuijo]

1 hour ago, Mad Ax said:

...

 

Interesting point - these days almost nothing goes unphotographed or unvideoed.  Everyone carries a tiny camera with them that is of way better quality than most of the monsters our parents had in the 80s. 

....

That's not actually true. Harder to use for sure. But the lenses in particular were way better quality back then. Digital doesn't mean better image quality, in fact quite the opposite at the more expensive end.

[Mad Ax]

14 hours ago, Fuijo said:

That's not actually true. Harder to use for sure. But the lenses in particular were way better quality back then. Digital doesn't mean better image quality, in fact quite the opposite at the more expensive end.

Hmm, you're totally right about that.  The lens on my "smart" phone is terrible quality compared to the fixed lens on my parents camera back in the 80s, and the sensor is tiny too compared to the 35mm film that was manually wound through that old thing.  But I was going through a bunch of photos from the 80s just last week, and the majority of them were over or under-exposed.  Partly I supposed because there was more manual work required to get a good exposure, and I think more so because people (or, specifically, my parents) would buy a camera in 1982 and still expect it to be taking it on family holidays in 1992 without ever having it cleaned or serviced.  By the end of its life it had probably been dropped on concrete, dropped in sand, dropped in seawater and thrown around in hold luggage on a dozen international flights.  It was probably leaking more light through the casing than it let through the aperture.

Then again my parents never had high-end cameras; my first experience with proper photographic equipment was with a mid-range Nikon D70S in the mid-naughties, and since my photographic skills basically amount to turning it on and pressing the button, I'd say the photos off my budget smartphone are just as good as the ones I take with the D70S.

But I still stand by my original point that most of us now carry around the ability to take photos and videos in our pockets, and have the ability to share those photos immediately with the rest of the world.  In the 80s (for most of us) film was expensive, development was expensive, getting new film meant a bus ride into town, getting photos developed meant a bus ride into town with the exposed film and another two days later to pick up the photos, and once we had them we flipped through them quickly, complained that they were all terrible or that they made us look ugly or stupid, put them away in a drawer and never looked at them again.  Hence, the camera was only allowed to come out on special occasions.

The exception to this rule was my grandfather, who always bought a posh new camera every year and took it with him everywhere and took hundreds of photos a month.  Unfortunately his skills didn't match his budget, and as a result we have several dozen photograph albums full of blurred smudges or people with their heads cut off