Any bad memories with an RC car?

[Saito2]

We often associate are RC cars with good memories, past and present. But what about any bad memories? For me, Its the rerelease Hornet. Way back when Tamiya first brought it back, I was asked by my parents what I wanted for Christmas. Not really knowing what to ask for, I said "the Hornet", never having one before. That's where it started. I got the perplexed looks for asking for a "toy" for Christmas. They shook their heads but I did actually get one for Christmas. When I happily opened it, I was told that it was quite expensive. Now I felt guilty. Why they found the re-re Hornet, being one of Tamiya's cheaper offerings expensive prompted me to dig further. As it turned out, they punched it into computer and bought it from the very first site to pop up, TamiyaUSA. Obviously TamiyaUSA was far higher in price then any other online retailer. Once completed, the Hornet became a favorite runner for my ex-wife.😠

A couple of months ago, I needed to downsize to get more models I want to complete the collection. I thought of all the negativity surrounding that Hornet and put it up for sale. I was asking $45. After a few offers of $15-$20. I took it off the local trade site in disgust. 

Ah, but there was a silver lining, a way to turn it around. My young daughter began to ask about an RC of her own. What better beginner car than the bulletproof Hornet? So, with a much slower motor, the Hornet runs once again with my girl at the controls.

[MadInventor]

Funnily enough...……………

Way back when I had bought a hotshot from my LHS in 1986/7 ?, something like that, I was at school and used to run it along with some friends who also had Tamiya cars. One of which was a hornet with a demon motor in it which was much faster than my hotshot. I eventually persuaded my parents to let me trade in my hotshot to finance buying a new hornet kit. Man, was I disappointed when  ran it for the first time. Although it was quite quick, the handling was awful in comparison with the beloved hotshot, and after a few rollovers the bodywork looked terrible, whereas the hotshot had very rarely rolled in the first place, and when it had the sturdy rollcage had protected the bodywork. Still, I never really settled with the Hornet, and in the end sold it when a second hand hotshot came up for grabs in the LHS store, but that turned out to be beaten up in comparison with my first hotshot. Roll forward 20 years to the re-release of the hotshot and I couldn't hit 'Buy it Now' fast enough when JR-RC had some stock. I paid about £3 more for it in 2007 (including shipping to the UK) than I had done buying the original from my LHS back in the day. I'd finally gone full circle and got a brand new hotshot kit to build again, only taken 20 years 

 

[Saito2]

Good story!

[markbt73]

Not bad memories really, just regrets...

When I was in college, my parents got divorced and my mom was in charge of selling the house. I came down to help her clean out the house, and didn't even think twice about keeping any of my original RC stuff: a Grasshopper, a Blackfoot, a Falcon, a nearly-new, never painted Marui Big Bear with maybe 2-3 runs on it (we decided it was "junk" so it just sat there), and an Optima in pieces. Same with all my old static models, including a few dozen 1/24 and 1/25 cars, several airplanes, and a 1/8 scale Monogram Camaro. I told her, "Just sell it in the garage sale, see what you can get." At the time, I was hoping for enough to get a new guitar amp, which was far more important to me than "my old toy cars." A couple weeks later, she sent me the proceeds from the sale: $50.

 

[Mahjik]

I was going to post this a while ago, but never did...  Didn't think anyone would care...   😜

 

My first hobby grade RC was the Grasshopper back in the 80's.  I believe my dad caved in for the Christmas present expecting it take me weeks to assemble and be out of his hair for a while.  Back then, there were no English instructions included.  At the time, I was huge into Legos and Estes rockets so building solely from pictures was right up my alley.  I eventually upgraded the motor, bought a Hornet top and a few other things...  I then traded up for the Frog, and eventually got the Brat body and wheels.

 

My LHS told me about an indoor track opened up in the area.  I had no idea you could race these things.  When I went to the track to check it out, I was amazed at what I saw..  I didn't know anything about RC cars outside of Tamiya at the time and people were running everything but Tamiya there.  At that point, my sights were set on driving a RC car on that track, but not my Frog.  I wanted something more track oriented.  The Hotshot was now out, but was priced out of my reach.  My father was not going to loan me the money and wanted me to do it on my own.  I was able to scrape up just enough for the Fox.

 

Enter the Fox.  Loved it.  However, I kept having issues with the drive shafts breaking.  I had replaced them several times just trying to get used to the car (and Tamiya acknowledged there was an issue with the original shafts).  After running it around the neighborhood getting used to it, I bought several shaft spares since the car ate them like candy, and headed to the local indoor track (keep in mind, I'm not of driving age so thanks to my dad who ran me all over town back in the day!).  Back then, you had to wait until your frequency was available before you could run.  I waited patiently for what seemed hours and then finally, my frequency was open.  I took my car and set it down off the side of the final corner onto the main straight.  Took the frequency flag and hung it up to show it was in use, then made my way up the stairs.  With a grin on my face, I anxiously got ready, and slowly started the car onto the track.  All of a sudden, the car took off and went straight into a wall breaking the suspension into pieces...  I was devastated  Up to this point, the car had done nothing but eat rear shafts and cause me grief...  now this...   

 

I highly suspected someone turned on their radio working on their car (which was a no-no in those days) but I had no way to prove it.  Not that it mattered...  It took all the money I had just to get the car and get to the track.  I was gutted...  After that, I did eventually replace the suspension but never drove the car again.  I was done with RC's....   It's taken about 30 years to get back into the hobby and I'm looking to finally run my first lap around a RC track this summer (with my still-in-process Zahhak/TRF201).  If/when I crash this time, I "know" it will be my fault thanks to progress and technology. 

 

BTW, I recently asked my father to see if my old Fox is still boxed up somewhere.  Loved to get it back and convert to a modern ESC.

 

[ALEXKYRIAK]

Not a bad memory, but a regret as per previous posting. 

When I got my ‘toy’ Hornet as an 11 or 12 year old it was simply the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. The detail, the mechanisms, the engineering - this was a world of complexity and detail and precision I just had never seen, and it literally blew my mind and opened a new horizon of possibility. It was like having a window opened onto a world exponentially bigger than I had even considered possible.

As a young kid, the car was very difficult to put together, but the memories of plastics snapping together and the smell of the grease and the oils (I swear the grease had a different scent back then!) , the springs and the beautiful tyre rubber, and the red paint I used for the shell (had to be red for some reason...) stayed with me all my life  

I loved this thing. I took it everywhere, even if I wasn’t driving it. 

I got older, the car got older, and I lost my appreciation of what it meant and it was kind of uncool as I got to  teenage years. 

The tracks and the cars and the races and the events that I saw in the Tamiya manuals, that I read over and over again, were distant things that only happened in other countries and would never happen to me. 

I then surprisingly got a Terra Scorcher (thanks again Dad!), which I also loved, and the Hornet was forgotten in a box somewhere. 

And then eventually the Scorcher too became an uncool thing as I grew older. 

Many many moons later I found my old Scorcher in my Dad’s place, and from there checked out Tamiya on the web - what?? They’re still being made? -  as I saw a Hotshot for sale, and got back into the hobby now (a little north of the age of 40!) and am loving it in ways I didn’t even know how when I was a kid. Over the years  I searched over and over and high and low, but could never find the Hornet, however.  

So, my regrets: not knowing then what I know now about the cars and the events and the way of all things RC, but mostly, for not having my old friend, the Red Hornet, with me now. 

 

[whahooo]

I started very latly with my Hobby.

 

I`ve got an thrashed Figher Buggy from my Cousain that i thrased down. So i had a wish for christmas and i got an "Blazing Star" as a presant. I`ve driven that Thing a lot and i`ve purchased an old Tamiya Mini with an Sportstuned Motor and had driven that litttle Thing a lot, then Puberty has hitten and that 3 Cars lay in the Attic for Years....

Eventually the Time came that i got new Interrest in RCs and i`ve purchased a "Dual Hunter" witch has a terribele Sell, so i mounted the  Shell with an old Shell of an Stadium Raider.

I've run that little Ting maybe 2 or 3 Times till i had to Move....

 

The Time i had to move in my 23m² Flat there was no room for any RCs,  and i wanted to get serious in Life and find "my Girl" so i decided to get rid of my Cars and the Spares....

What did i do? i threw them little thingys in the Trash!!

 

I reget that a lot, because now i have my wife and she`s really OK with that amount of 'Toys that i have. And now i have more  than enough RC Cars to Play with. (20 finished Models and a bunch of "Projects" to get my Youth back")

[yogi-bear]

not too sure about bad memories, maybe some regrets:

grabbing the wrong end of a soldering iron   that hurt for several days

the usual breakages and waiting to save money to replace parts

using car parts on non-related projects and not putting the parts back so they get lost.

strapping solid fuel rockets engines to a LB Celica Turbo. I don't regret doing it, I just regret the choice of car. I still have all the pieces and will restore one day.

[Wooders28]

First proper rc, tamiya frog, only asked Santa for one as a mate had the hornet, I loved the wheels , but didn't want the same car. 

Loads of bad memories with not being able to run it due to gearbox issues, so having to just watch my mate with his bullet proof hornet.

[Mad Ax]

The car with bad memories would probably be the Kyosho Sand Master II that I bought new back in about 1996, when I was 16 years old.  I'd just managed to trash my very well-abused Grasshopper that acquired second-hand as a non-runner and had been playing with for years, and I didn't have any running RC cars.  I took myself into the big city and found the Sand Master II sitting on the shelf behind the counter.  I had just enough money from my weekend job, so I handed over the cash and took it home to build.

First problem: the boxart makes it look red, but the proper colour is fluro pink.  Back in those days fluro colours were just going out of fashion - we were about 4 years from wearing dayglo shell suits and Global Hypercolour T-shirts - and I've never been one for pink.  I'd bought red paint, but the wheels were pink.  It never really looked right.

Second problem: I'd kind of thought that, being Kyosho, it would be a cut above Tamiya.  A friend at school had told me that Kyosho were much better than Tamiya, and I'd believed him.  Actually it had all the same problems as a basic Tamiya kit: slop in the suspension, bushes instead of bearings, screws that rounded off as soon as you put a Phillips on them (we didn't know about JIS back then).

Third problem: nitro power turned out to be really not that good, especially on a budget car.  Obviously it was noisy - I started it up for its first run on a lovely summer's afternoon.  I didn't realise my dad was asleep in the greenhouse.  He wasn't happy when he was woken up by the noise.  We lived in a rural area but I felt bad running my car anywhere near the houses, and the grass in the fields was way too long.  The only place I could run it was on our driveway near the main road, which felt dangerous.

And it was oily, too.  The tailpipe blew out directly over the rear suspension and wing.  Everything got gummed up right away.  I found a piece of rubber pipe that slipped over the tailpipe and brought the exhaust further back, but it didn't run so well with it installed.  I think it messed with the resonance in the expansion chamber.

And it was just awkward.  It was temperamental to start, sometimes it wouldn't run on full throttle or would cut out for no reason, if it went upside down it would stop.  Oh, and to stop the motor, the instructions said to squeeze on the air filter.  Except the air filter was under the shell - so to turn it off I had to park it on something and take the shell off first.  Later I figured I could stall it by squeezing the fuel pipe.

And finally, it was poorly made.  It took me a while to realise that the chassis was based on an electric buggy - it even had the rounded cut-outs for the stick pack.  The engine mount was bolted to the chassis by 5 little screws which shook loose all the time.  The bolt holes were slotted so the gear mesh could be set, but that meant they just came loose easier.  The clutch housing and integrated pinion were plastic, so when the motor came loose the pinion stripped.  I had to wait a few weeks for a replacement metal pinion.

Then the engine mount shattered from the vibrations - probably because it came loose again.  Another few weeks waiting for a replacement.

Finally, new motor mount and metal pinion and enough threadlock to stall an I7 processor, and we were running again.  It stripped the spur gear.

It was actually the catalyst for ending my rather unsatisfactory affair with RC that had lasted through my early teens.  It went on the shelf and never saw the light of day until I got back into RC about 10 years later.  I tried a couple of times to get it running and finally sold it to fund more NIB Tamiya purchases...

[tamiya3speed]

I had a Traxxas Nitro 4-Tec with the old Traxxas Pro15.  It was so cool looking but was a nightmare to get to run right.  It was before the ez-start days and had a terrible pull starter (or did I convert it to pull start, hmm).  Either way, I could get it to start but never get it to keep running.  One day a friend and I spent a whole afternoon getting it to run.  We finally had it running decent and another buddy of mine asked to try it out.  Within 30 seconds he was airborne over a curb.  The body and air filter were off and when we got to the car the carb was stuffed with dirt!!!  The car never ran right again lol.  A few years later the friend who I had spent the day working on it with bought the car and converted it to a 2.5r.  That was the solution as it ran good for some time afterwards.  That almost turned me off of nitro for good.  Later a TNX and RC10GT2 convinced me nitro wasn't all bad.

[Re-Bugged]

The last to story’s sound very similar to my first experience with Nitro after buying a cheapie HSP of eBay in the 90’s. I spent what seemed like a life time to get to run properly before i’d realized the clutch springs were broken from the start. Once that was fixed curious to see what it would now do I smacked it into the curb snapping the front wishbone and lost a drive shaft.  Nuts.  All fixed again it would  go well for a while even after my son hit a goal post flat out. But in his defense I was interfering at the time ( but don’t tell him that!! ). This prompted me to buy a second hand King Blackfoot with a 15turn double motor in it. What a pleasure that was, but stupidly left it in the UK with a work colleague instead of bringing over to Australia with me. But the HSP came with but with its impending uneconomical repairs a Nephew & Niece finally laid it to rest. 

Fast forward a few years to my 40th Birthday & my Dad bought me a Thunder Tiger EB4 Nitro Buggy while visiting, which is a hoot to drive & tough as nails giving hours of pleasure & entertainment for just an odd glow plug now again, clean air filter, copious spare tyres and its always ready for action.

 

 

[Juggular]

I ate about 60 gummy bears while reading through all these wonderful bits of memories... (but I'm rather uncomfortably full now)

I have no regrets.  Oh, I missed a chance go buy DT03 for about $60 on ebay. But that's fine. Something else always comes along...  

For some 20 years, I thought I should have asked for a really cool RC car when I was a preteen.  

My dad was one of those really brusque army officers.  He did not have "gift" in his lexicon.  He didn't even like us playing "Monopoly" because it would encourage "something for nothing" mentality in children.  well... children don't really work for their room and board... One day, out of the blue, (and out of character), he said he would get me something for my birthday.  "Gift" is a strange concept in our family.  I get him bottles of L-carnitine that's good for memory (and autism), or chlorella to remove mercury (or other toxins) from all the tuna he ate, or lutein for his eyes, but we still don't do "birthday gifts" per se...  

Anyway, few days before my 11th or 12th birthday, we went to a LHS.  I asked for a Futaba radio set.  That was it.  The LHS owner was keen on selling a car too, but what could he do?  I wouldn't ask for it.  I was out of practice.  Never before and never since was I told to pick something I liked.  The radio was already way more money than I could imagine.  (Later on, I realized that we were not poor, it was just that my dad was very disciplined about money too)  I still remember a Marui jeep in the shop.  I'm sure there were Frog and other cars too.  But the way I got to know RC was through an older teen who built a very strange contraption. Imagine robots from the old TV program "Robot War," only palm-sized. He didn't have money for a proper RC.  So he converted a 1/24th scale car kit into an RC, running on double AA batteries.  It had no shell.  It was a pile of servos, batteries and a motor.  it could run only for 5 minutes. But I was mesmerized.  I thought I could build one of my own design somehow (of course I couldn't).   

So the radio set was in the box for a couple years (that's a lifetime when you are at that age)... until I could finally save up enough money to buy a Grasshopper.  

Why don't I regret not asking for something when I had the chance?  I think the lack of it made me want RC more.  If I got it then, I wouldn't have valued it so much.  Instead, "I want Tamiya RC cars" was seared onto my teenage brain forever.  I also got a lot of mental workouts, trying to convert every toy I had into RC.  I was 26-27 years old when I started to collect "vintage" RC from my early years.  Oh, did I have fun!  Through my school years, I did collect all the Tamiya catalogs.  Finally, I got to play with many of the RC cars I dreamt about for so many years.  I thought I would prefer getting new kits, but I loved getting beat-up vintages and fixing them up to a good working order.  Around that time, I thought, "this is better..."  So, a bit of nagging regret turned into a blessing of a sort.  

I have a couple of other hobbies, I cycle through them every few years.  But RC is always at the top of the list, perhaps owing to the fact that I could not ask for a proper RC car back then... All good memories, I think.  

 

[Palfertronic]

Like many others here, its not so much bad memories, more regrets...

I had a Porsche 935 back in 1979, ran it around for a year or 2, and then lost interest...I so wish i had kept it! Only got one phot0 of me with it in background to remind me of it...

Very primitive even by  Grasshopper/Hornet standards, but a shelf queen for sure!

In 1990, i had an Astute too...similar story...

So now i have 25 RC cars, and I will not part with any, just in case!

[TurnipJF]

Being a late starter in the hobby, I have no RC memories from my youth, bad or otherwise. My younger days were dominated by sports such as rugby, cricket and hockey. 

So now instead of a loft full of interesting vintage restoration projects from my youth, all I have are arthritic knees and a box of old sports gear that doesn't fit anymore.

 

[yogi-bear]

I just realised I do have one other regret with my RC car, not taking any pics! Not that I really had easy access to a camera, but I wished I at least had the thought to take pics after a build or a modification, or on the odd occasion a few of my mates got together for a bash.

[Mad Ax]

22 hours ago, TurnipJF said:

all I have are arthritic knees

 

"leading an active life is good for you" - hmm, sure...  Which would you rather buy - the vintage HotShot that got raced at club level every weekend, or the vintage HotShot that got put on the shelf beside the TV for 20 years..?