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bozatron

So what is it about RC that keeps you hooked?

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I'm still new to the hobby and this forum, but something I'm noticing on here is everyone seems to get something different out of the hobby. Some like painting, some building, some driving, some collecting, and so on. What keeps you hooked?

For me it is 10% driving, 90% fiddling 😂😂 clearly I have issues with sitting still 😂😂 it's not even OCD its just straight up can't leave stuff alone 😂😂
 

Last nights fiddle was removing the electrics and putting them back a bit tidier than when I first built the Blitzer.

 

IMG_4148.jpg

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I have a "collector" personality so whatever it is I end up going overboard (RC, Slot cars, Old school BMX, Bourbon). I decided to cull, so the BMX were the first to go, followed now by slot cars. My RC's will stay though, as they are most important too me, I guess it stems from badly wanting one way back that I did eventually get after lots of hard work and saving compared to school mates who asked and received. 

I love the mechanical aspect of them, so building and restoring takes up most of my interest, followed by competitive racing (mostly 1/8 IC).

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42 minutes ago, bozatron said:

I'm still new to the hobby and this forum, but something I'm noticing on here is everyone seems to get something different out of the hobby. Some like painting, some building, some driving, some collecting, and so on. What keeps you hooked?

For me it is 10% driving, 90% fiddling 😂😂 clearly I have issues with sitting still 😂😂 it's not even OCD its just straight up can't leave stuff alone 😂😂
 

Last nights fiddle was removing the electrics and putting them back a bit tidier than when I first built the Blitzer.

 

IMG_4148.jpg

That’s a nice setup ! How’s the Carson gear ? Been trying to get some but I’m in USA. For me, it’s building and driving equally. Just fun to customize them and make them uniquely yours. Also a good bonding tool with kids or family members. Good way to get them outside and enjoy the elements instead of staying inside and watching the world move when you can move with it. 

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24 minutes ago, rwordenjr said:

That’s a nice setup ! How’s the Carson gear ? Been trying to get some but I’m in USA. For me, it’s building and driving equally. Just fun to customize them and make them uniquely yours. Also a good bonding tool with kids or family members. Good way to get them outside and enjoy the elements instead of staying inside and watching the world move when you can move with it. 

The Carson gear seems good but i don't have anything else to compare it to. I Have the Reflex Wheel X2, TX & RX as well as the servo, definitely lower end of the pricing scale and relatively basic but it works perfectly and the quality feels good so far.

33 minutes ago, mtbkym01 said:

I have a "collector" personality so whatever it is I end up going overboard (RC, Slot cars, Old school BMX, Bourbon). I decided to cull, so the BMX were the first to go, followed now by slot cars. My RC's will stay though, as they are most important too me, I guess it stems from badly wanting one way back that I did eventually get after lots of hard work and saving compared to school mates who asked and received. 

I love the mechanical aspect of them, so building and restoring takes up most of my interest, followed by competitive racing (mostly 1/8 IC).

I have to say I really enjoyed the build but it was way faster than I thought it would be, so I think the fiddling prolongs the build :) I fancy a go at restoring a kit, I'll be keeping my eye out for a suitable project on the local SH market. 

 

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I enjoy the obsession, immersing my thoughts in planning projects, hunting parts. Reading and watching the work of others for research and entertainment. my pleasure is in the mental escape RC provides from day to day life. 

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12 minutes ago, J@mes said:

I enjoy the obsession, immersing my thoughts in planning projects, hunting parts. Reading and watching the work of others for research and entertainment. my pleasure is in the mental escape RC provides from day to day life. 

I couldnt have said it better myself, immersion and obsession. Right on.

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Easy, the endless tinkering. Takes my mind away from everything and I find it hugely relaxing. The driving after is only to really see what effect any changes have made so I can tinker yet again... 😁

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It is multi dimensional  and stimulating on many different levels.

Learning new skills, indoor, outdoor, good weather, wet weather.

Buying, selling, building, pulling apart, driving, repairing, hunting, gathering and so much more.

This forum and all the contributors past and present all add enormously to my enjoyment and involvement as well. 

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For me it’s definitely the satisfaction from building or more recently restoring an old car.  To take something neglected and seemingly at the end of its life and restore it into something useable and presentable again I get great satisfaction from.  And it’s a lot cheaper than doing the same with 1:1 vehicles!

So recently I restored an old S-10, and although I could have just bought a new shell it was really satisfying to restore the original one.

I’ve got loads of hobbies; cars and motorbikes, pushbikes, rc cars and planes, steam engines....it’s always the tinkering part I really like, I find it relaxing.  Most of the time at least!

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For me its 60% nostalgia, 38% building/wrenching, 2% running! RC has been in my life since the age of about 10 (with my first tamiya the Ford ranger) all the way through mortgages, family life obviously it did at times take a back seat when family life gets expensive but I always had a magazine subscription so it was always there! So now my senior years children long flown the nest and just that little more spare time I turn to fiddling with my humble collection and I have my dream rc garage based on what I used to drool over in Beattie's when I used to visit the shop on the Saturday outing with my parents and what I used to want to own when I was in full family mode and didn't have two pennies to rub together! So its definitely nostalgia for me and although my collection is 95% re-releases that's totally fine by me!

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1 hour ago, J@mes said:

I enjoy the obsession, immersing my thoughts in planning projects, hunting parts. Reading and watching the work of others for research and entertainment. my pleasure is in the mental escape RC provides from day to day life. 

100% this. Researching, building lists, ticking things off, working out which kit parts you can flip now you’ve planned an alternative route...then finding your own way through a build now you’re 50% off book. This is what I love most, to the point I have more planned builds in the garage than actual built cars. I really need to stop shopping and get building! 

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Yep, tinkering mainly. Running probably a couple of times a year (usually on holiday somewhere with a nice sandy beach). There's something satisfying about taking one to bits, fixing broken parts, making modifications, etc. A bit of wheeler dealing is good too. I think most people like to think they could take a wreck and add some value to it. I'm pretty sure I'm massively in the hole after 20 odd years of being back into the hobby though...

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My reasoning is pretty simple really.

Much like @Gruntfuggly, I like to tinker. I would much prefer to be working on a 1:1 car, but where I am in life dictates that not possible. I have a company car (hybrid, to save those tax pennies!) and my wife has a boring SUV. I have 3 daughters and therefore very little capital :lol:. If I could afford a 1:1 project car I'm not sure I would completely ditch the Tamiya stuff, but it would certainly take a back-seat.

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I'm a bit-of-everything kind of person.  Building, modifying, tinkering, designing, racing, chatting, bashing, the great outdoors...  It's hard to pick one single part that I love more than anything else, or one thing that I could live without, or not live without.  I've made a point over the last couple of years of getting out as much as I can and doing as many events as possible, be it regular club racing, drifting once or twice a month, lorry meets, vintage buggy races, vintage touring races, national scale off road events and open bashes.  I always find something on the calendar every month and get out to it, often combining it with a relaxing overnight in a cheap hotel or a night in the van, just to get a change of scenery.  Much as I love my home, I feel I was born to wander and there's nothing I love more than loading up the van and setting off for a 3-4 hour drive to some faraway place for a weekend of playing with toy cars or lorries.  RC has given me more opportunity to do that than any other hobby, although in the current climate I'm having to settle for going cycling.

Now that I'm stuck at home and the calendar is empty, I'm putting more attention into custom projects.  I love most aspects of kit-building and modifying and scratch-building - even painting, which I usually complain about - but it's only while I've had time to put into it that I realise how time-consuming it all is.  I have a habit of buying and collecting project after project, part after part, sometimes just having one set of chassis rails left over from another project will set me on a path of purchase and creativity that ends with a totally new model that did not even use those chassis rails.  So I have project upon project waiting for me to work on - somehow I expected I'd get these things done.  The pandemic has showed me that I would never have got them done.  However my habit of buying "rainy day cars" that would keep me busy if I got sick or injured has been a major boon - I've built several NIBs already this year while watching TV with my toddler.

Usually necessity fuels invention.  I have a vintage buggy race booked, so I spend my spare time checking over my vintage buggies and setting them up.  I have a bash planned, so I get out all my runners and make sure they're good to go.  I have a lorry meet, so I hurriedly hack that latest mod into place so I can show it off.  I didn't always enjoy these jobs if I felt like I had to rush them.

Now my Sundays are spent giving these things the time they deserve.  To an extent I'm enjoying it way more than I did, but on the other hand, I'm getting bored.  Every Sunday since April has been spent in my workshop, cutting, drilling, measuring, painting, sanding, whatever...  I don't really enjoy driving alone, so when things are done they get a quick blast around the garden to prove the concept, then they go in a box or on the shelf.  I can't wait to get out and actually run my stuff again in company.  Sadly I don't have any local mates who are into this kind of RC, so I'm waiting for the bashes to return whenever the track owners feel it's safe and appropriate to do so.

What is really keeping me into RC at the moment is the fact that it distracts me.  While it can be a creative process, it's mostly just mechanical.  I don't really need to think too hard about what I'm doing.  I know what I have to do, so I get on and do it.  Unlike my other hobbies - creative writing and electronic music - where I need to be in a particular zone.  I need to be relaxed, unstressed, I need to open up my mind to the world and let the ideas flood in.  Just recently I haven't been able to do that.  Even video games are frustrating me, and I've never been one for online multiplayer.  So the escape of RC is where it's at right now.  For one day a week, I can forget about everything and keep my hands busy.

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It's something very innocent and gentle (Racing and 8s bashing perhaps less so) that I can piddle about with at my own pace doing my own thing and bar some very loose guidelines (must have some wheels and a hint of propulsion) there's no wrong way of doing it. My other RC hobby is combat robots which is really involved as you have to engineer a  very heavy (30-250lb) remote controlled vehicle from the ground up, design transmissions, work out your gearing and fabricate it all from scratch  with very little off the shelf and then it can all be over in 10 seconds when someone builds something better and smashes it to pieces. Ten years of this,  RC cars are a bit of a welcome break. 

They're not heavy, dirty sharp or dangerous and I can work on them on the kitchen counter or even on the coffee table. I get to create a little piece of art which nobody will intentionally try to break or scratch and I get a cool little toy to play with. I can have a RC car project, finish it at my own pace, no competition deadlines and when it's done I can decide what to do with it, it can sit on the shelf for years if I so wish. I'm definitely more of a builder than a driver, slowly getting more into making things pretty and learning how to take my time with things like painting. There's a lot of history to learn and a lot of skills to get to grips with, I'm looking forward to see how far I can take it. 

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8 hours ago, Grumpy pants said:

It is multi dimensional  and stimulating on many different levels.

Learning new skills, indoor, outdoor, good weather, wet weather.

Buying, selling, building, pulling apart, driving, repairing, hunting, gathering and so much more.

This forum and all the contributors past and present all add enormously to my enjoyment and involvement as well. 

+1 to all that 👍

Maybe add the fairly strong allure of jigsaw puzzle / bargain hunt finding rare bits you need to start a build 😂

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I enjoy the building, modifying, customizing, tinkering on what improvements can be done but in a clean way. Also finding/hunting down parts especially old/rare ones. Of course there's the racing and bashing too. It would be senseless to build without driving.

I know guys who build and sell. But their build is very mediocre. Just to make money out of it. Then there are guys who just enjoys collecting in numbers. But majority of their builds are just box stock which doesn't really give any challenge as a builder/modeler because they are simply by-the-book assembly. Then there are those who are very serious about racing too much and kills the joy of RC. They tend to treat the hobby always as competition which makes it stressful already. 

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I don't know if you've read any of my posts on this forum, but they usually follow a pattern of my buying something, often for a bit too much, finding out it's crap, often as a fixer upper, then complaining about how difficult it's all turned out to be, and all my **** ups on the way through the project.

In a weird way that's what has got me and kept me hooked. It's quite possibly also the working car at the end of it all and how that makes me feel.

Strange but there it is....

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It's changed for me over the years.  When I first got into RC aged about 12 I was just interested in driving them, the build was something that i just wanted to get done quickly so i could use them.  I then wanted to modify the cars but being young I didn't have the knowledge or money to do it properly, I'd do things like put a faster motor in my hornet but still with plastic bushings and MSC.

When I got back into the hobby in my 20s it was for nostalgia.  I collected models that I always wanted and restored them to new condition. I wouldn't use them tho as I'd be worried about damaging them.  I bought a couple of modern models to bash but ended up hardly using them. 

Now aged 40 I like 90% building and tinkering and 10% driving. I dont think there's any tamiya I'd be happy with straight out of the box.  Now I enjoy fixing all the flaws and modifying them to meet my requirements. I'm currently working on my old wild dagger, by the time its finished it'll contain about 10% of the original parts. It's been great making parts from scratch and trying to work out which parts from other kits will fit.

I've sold some of my nostalgia models and everything I have now gets used, some more carefully than others.

My monster beetle was my first ever RC that I got for Christmas in 1990. I rebuilt it as a shelf queen nearly 20 years ago but now I think what's the point.  I have so many fun memories of using it when I was young so I have started running it again.

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Like the OP building, fixing up, growing my skills, sharing the skills I’m learning, the childhood retained memories and finally driving :)

B8ptNlw.jpg

im building a vaillant Porsche at the moment - sourcing the SW chassis, buying the vaillant kit, and working the best way of painting and application of decals 

JJ

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I'm not quite sure, really. I like all of it, from the modelling aspect to the social. I really enjoy the industry side (r&d, sales, supply chain, etc.) and the constant evolution of the hobby, but also love the vintage stuff. I've been involved since the mid-'80s and haven't gotten bored or burned out yet. Nothing else has hooked me like this.

Last night, we had a night crawl at a local park. In a couple of weeks, we're hosting a crawler comp and swap meet. We're planning to build a tenth scale outdoor off-road track this summer. New kits are dropping, new vendors are opening, new customers are coming in. I've got projects coming out of my ears around here and my friends are cranking on a million different builds too. I'm having as much fun now as I did as a kid, so I don't see myself quitting anytime soon.

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22 hours ago, Pablo68 said:

I don't know if you've read any of my posts on this forum, but they usually follow a pattern of my buying something, often for a bit too much, finding out it's crap, often as a fixer upper, then complaining about how difficult it's all turned out to be, and all my **** ups on the way through the project.

In a weird way that's what has got me and kept me hooked. It's quite possibly also the working car at the end of it all and how that makes me feel.

Strange but there it is....

You win the best answer yet @Pablo68 whilst I'm new to RC I can relate to this life dilema :D :D  

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From all the answers, it's a multi layered hobby/sport! 

Being involved with a club is one of the big motivations for me, not just the racing, (there's a handful that don't race competitively, just come along, run their cars, and have a laugh), but spending an evening with 10-15 like minded RC car nuts (now mates), is just brilliant!! 

Racing at a, big race meet, is a different buzz, you meet other RC nuts from another county, some with the same car, swap notes etc, then try and beat each other on the track. If of a similar skill level, and you can have a wheel to wheel battle (no contact) the full race, it's awesome!!

Shake hands after  ,with the victor saying it was a good race, and the looser saying their rear tyres are worn, diff too loose etc etc , it's the law! 😂😂

I'm not really about a new build, after you've built a few, they get a bit,...samey. I much prefer getting hold of a used car , and making it my own, either by giving it a refresh with new bearings, shocks or just seals/oil ,then nailing on an odd body, or by nailing on different gearboxes from different cars, but still trying to retain,  the original look.

Which leads onto modifying. There seems to be this - don't put a brushless in, it'll blow up and kill you!, thing, which is like a red rag to a bull to me, and love the challenge of making it work, I think having a  good selection of cars helps alot, as you can mix and match, the RB5 gearbox fits on an original Ultima, the RB5 front bearing 12mm hex fits the DT03,  and a K2 multi plate slipper ,fits in an Optima Mid! 

 

I do have a 1:1 project too, but unless I can get hold of a, "Sport Billy" , bag (showing age....😳)  , so i can take it into work for a tinker, it's the RC that's getting the mods,.... for now.

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