What to do with a Golden Arrow

[Saito2 6686]

I picked up an old Radio Shack Golden Arrow without a controller years back at a 1:1 car swap meet. Impulse buy. It sat around and I even tried selling it off a couple times. Well, its still sitting here. Do I use it for a paper weight or strip the electronics and upgrade it with hobby-grade gear, better shocks and tires? I see folks tinkering with these old Nikko F10 clones all the time. I also see horrified collectors terrified that this once top-tier Radio Shack car was "defiled" by being modified. On one hand, I'd hate for it to break after putting work into it. On the other, those horrified collectors aren't exactly lining up to buy it either. Thoughts?

[Snappy1 966]

Mod it and drive it lol

 

[Pablo68 1049]

I'm going to second Snappys motion.

[KEV THE REV 2319]

23 hours ago, Saito2 said:

Do I use it for a paper weight or strip the electronics and upgrade it with hobby-grade gear, better shocks and tires?

I recently modded an old Taiyo Jet Hopper by stripping out the old dead electrics and fitting a new servo / ESC / RX . With your Golden Arrow you could probably go further as it is 1/10th scale  . I did the minimum just to get a drive out of the JH as it is 1/18th scale and tyre options etc are limited

[nowinaminute 2815]

How clean is it?

If it has some signs of use I would go ahead and mod it and enjoy it. If it's spotless then maybe better to sell it to a collector.

You could argue these are essentially hobby grade in disguise, at least to the level of a Grasshopper. They are certainly on a similar level in terms of build quality and the design is pretty blatant rip off of Grasshopper rear end and the front trailing arms are like a Wild one.

They were made for Radio Shack by Nikko and the chassis is very similar to the F10. They even slipped a sneaky NRT (nikko racing team) sticker on there!

The stock electronics aren't too shabby apart from having no brake. They should be able to handle a slightly warmer motor too such as a sport tuned.

The wheels will readily accept bearings just like a hopper/hornet and the gearbox too. You can use a Traxxas Cat/Spirit manual for disassembly reference because believe it or not, the first Traxxas RTR was a slightly altered Nikko F10! 

If you want to go to full hobby electronics it's pretty straight forward. The stock servo is very similar in size/shape to a hobby one so you can make one fit without too much effort. The only difference is the stock one has a corner cut out so it doesn't intrude into the the little compartment for 4AA batteries (the equivalent to a reciever pack on hobby grades) you could either cut a little notch of plastic away so a standard hobby servo will fit it get a low profile hobby servo which should fit without mods.

If it's just laying around doing nothing then why not bung some cheap components in it and make yourself an (alternative grasshopper) if nothing else it will be an interesting project!