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markbt73

Contemplating something different... but what?

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I may have a little bit of money to spend soon, and naturally, I'm already thinking of how to spend it. It won't be much, but it's an opportunity to maybe grab a kit that would ordinarily be out of grasp. I still want a Bruiser eventually, but this budget won't stretch that far. However, there are some other intriguing ideas I have kicking around, so bear with me while I talk them out. Opinions are, as always, welcome, though there's a good chance they'll be ignored and I'll just get what I want anyway.

The contenders I'm currently thinking about are:

XV-01 Lancia Delta: Somehow, as much as I love rally cars, I don't own an RC one. And that seems like a glaring oversight. I've liked the idea of the XV-01 chassis ever since it came out; I like that the drivetrain bits are in the right places for the Lancia body. And I do love me some Martini livery. Probably would get an Audi body as well, so I can change it up a little.

VQS: The Avante series cars are a mystery to me; I've never had one. But I sure do like the looks of them. I miiiiiight be able to swing an Avante Black Special instead, but the VQS is more realistic. But... would I drive it? Or would it just sit there looking cool with my other 4WD buggies? And is that a bad thing?

Try drifting: I've considered it before, and tried putting cheap drift tires on various 4WD buggies. But we just had our side yard paved, and all that clean black tarmac is calling my name. And I love the look of the MST FXX chassis; front motor and rear wheel drive? How cool is that? The only trouble is that the only place that has them in stock is RCMart, and I'd feel better ordering something that's already in a warehouse somewhere in the US, with everything that's going on. Or maybe there's another drift kit I should consider...?

A semi truck: I could probably afford one of the simpler semi kits, like the single-axle Scania or something, but no trailer, at least not now. But I'd still have a 3 speed gearbox to play with. But I'm afraid it would get boring, without a trailer or any of the accessories. Or would it be a stepping stone to a whole new dimension to the hobby? Not sure if that would be good or bad.

And of course, all of this is dependent on what's in stock, because you can't count on anything in this crazy year...

I don't know; I've been doing this for 34 years now, and I've built and run so many kits that it's getting harder and harder to find new challenges. That's kinda why I'm leaning towards a good serious drift car, or an introductory big rig. Just to have new skills to learn.

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Hmmmmm?

My #1 pick for you is behind door Number 4, a Big Rig!

Crawler/Trail trucks are the funnest to build.

Tank next, one problem, The Tamiya's are hard to find right now.

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50 minutes ago, ACCEL said:

Hmmmmm?

My #1 pick for you is behind door Number 4, a Big Rig!

Crawler/Trail trucks are the funnest to build.

Tank next, one problem, The Tamiya's are hard to find right now.

The only trouble I see with that logic is that I already have a bunch of crawler/scaler stuff lying around doing nothing, because I sort of lost my inspiration for it. And if the big rigs kind of "build" the same, maybe I should get something else this time around, and save that idea for later.

And I have zero interest in the tanks, sorry.

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XV-01 Lancia Delta: For no reasons other than that's near the top of my list too.  

I was not interested in drifting at all. 

But... Seeing this, I might buy this cheap toy and try it in my living room first?  For about $70, it could be the gateway drug I've been looking for.  At least it's something different.  Not at all serious, though.  

https://usa.banggood.com/WPL-D12-1-or-10-2_4G-2WD-Military-Truck-Crawler-Off-Road-RC-Car-Vehicle-Models-Toy-p-1720320.html?rmmds=search&ID=512288&cur_warehouse=CN

 

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18 minutes ago, Juggular said:

I was not interested in drifting at all

I wasn't either until i built the MST FMX 2.0.

now looking into the new releases of Yokomo YD-2SXIII, and a couple others

 

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I don't think you can go wrong with an XV-01. I'm in love with mine, and I haven't even finished or driven it yet! :lol:

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I've contemplated some of the choices you have there along with tanks. For me, it came down to speed and driving dynamics. I've tried crawlers and scalers and even a Kyosho Blizzard. While I can see their appeal for some, I still prefer the driving dynamics of a buggy or monster truck with even just silvercan power behind it. Once I came to that conclusion, it whittled down a lot of potential purchases. I want a Globe Liner or Grand Hauler but after building it, I can't see the fun factor since I don't really enjoy normal on-road or scalers. The Blizzard was cool but not cool enough to keep, so tanks are our too.

I don't have a smooth enough off road area for rally, but if I did, I'd jump on the XV01. Its build (I'm guilty of drooling over the manuals too) looks different from the typical Tamiya fair I'm used to. The VQS would also be an interesting build and they are decent runners. They aren't as exotic as the Avante BS, being more plastic, but I'd guess they are slightly better performers. I wouldn't feel guilty slinging dirt with a VQS, but the Avante BS would look nicer on a shelf.

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Within Months.... I'm coming into some Money.

If that were My List (and believe it or not, that's close to mine), I'm with ACCEL - Big Rig!! They're funnerer. 😂 I'm getting a Hauler, and will be recreating Cletus Snow's Rig from Smokey and the Bandit. 😊  It would also be my first. It would be sweet to have someone else building one with me. 😉  {I realize that's not a reason to make a major financial decision, it would just be nice} 

Have you looked into Hercules??  A cheaper Tamiya Big Hauler knockoff. Yes, I have no experience with 1/14 Trucks, but I've heard a lot of good feedback from several others about the quality of Hercules. No American prototypes though... However, the Tractors are nearly $100 LESS!! 😊 

Just my 4¢....

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@markbt73 what kind of places do you run your cars - that probably has the biggest impact on what you should pick :)

Hard to go wrong with XV-01 really

If you want a real challenge... have you ever raced / built a competition car? They are a completely different beast to the more basher/hobby focused cars IMO.

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Thanks all. I've been thinking more about it, and I think the big trucks are out, at least for now. I want to do one eventually, but I want to do it right, a genuine Tamiya kit, with all the trimmings, and that just isn't in the cards right now.

I am leaning towards something on-road, because of the recent changes in the terrain I have to play with. Our side yard used to be a bumpy mess of gravel and weeds, the perfect place to run off-road buggies, but we just had it paved (after getting our vintage trailer stuck in the mud over there one too many times) and now it's billiard-table-smooth brand-new asphalt. There's an area behind the trailer that's about 10 x 20 feet, with an apron of hard-packed gravel about 8 feet wide beyond that. So not enough room for anything fast, but a challenging spot for some lower-speed fun with a rally or drift car.

The drifting idea appeals to me for two reasons: first, I used to race on-road cars on a carpet track, where you don't want the car to slide around. It would be an interesting driving challenge to lear how to slide it around on purpose. And second, because the speeds are lower, you can do all that detail stuff; it seems like they're the on-road equivalent of scale 4x4 trucks, of which I have several and do enjoy.

Still mulling it over, and I have time, as I don't have the money yet. It is fun to window-shop, though.

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XV-01: I finally built my XV-01T earlier this year and I absolutely love it.  Mine has a Super Stock of some description (I can see the endbell from here but not the motor sticker) and it's the best car I have for driving around my garden.  Rally cars don't have enough clearance for the grass sections and buggies are too big for the tight areas.  Given this has been the year of playing at home, it has been the most-run garden car.

It was also a truly fabulous build - it's like no other Tamiya I've made.  In fact, like no other anything I've made.  It's got as much adjustability built-in as my Xray race car, which is strange for a Tamiya kit that doesn't really fit into any existing racing niche (except possibly rallying, which is largely dead here in the UK).  If you wanted to run it hard there are probably some upgrades you should hunt out to start with but overall it feels like a very sturdy and well-made car.  Space for electrics is cramped (I had to abandon my planned brushless installation because it wouldn't even slightly fit) and you'll almost certainly need to be happy soldering on longer motor wires but other than that, it's hard to fault.

And then there's the driving dynamics.  OK, for all-out racing you might want a bit more rear grip, but for bashing it is just fantastic.  Mine, with the stock BFGoodrich tyres, runs just fine on short grass and has enough traction to roll over in the corners, requiring some level of finesse, but once onto the pavement section the tail comes straight around and does some awesome four-wheel slides right through the sweepers and into the straight.  I've never had a 4wd car which is so easy to drift through a corner and still maintain pinpoint accuracy and speed.  OK, so it won't drift like a proper drift chassis (although I'd wager you could make it do that, if you wanted to) but it's the way it will let me drift it hard and fast and still give me enough control to point it into a 1m-wide straight section with some nasty car-killer fenceposts on the outside which is totally mind-blowing.  It really is an amazing chassis for showboating.

For your other choices, my opinion:

VQS: I don't have one.  An opinion, or a VQS, or any of that range.  They weren't really a thing when I was younger and they have always been priced outside of my scope, so even with the new release I don't really have any interest at all.  And if I had just a passing interest, I'd worry that parts would disappear as soon as I build it and leave me afraid to take it racing.

Try drifting: Is there a drift club near you, and do you expect it to be open at all in 2021?  IMO, drifting alone quickly gets dull.  If that's what you want, stick some plastic tyres on a TT02.  Proper drifting like the drift clubs do is a whole different animal.  In fact it's one of those weird little niches where the regular RC brigade doesn't seem to go.  They have their own range of preferred suppliers and manufacturers, their own language and terminology, and obviously their own setup techniques, because what you're trying to do is the opposite of what you're trying to do with a touring car.  The attention to detail and realism, in track layout and scenery as well as cars, is on a par with the big rig crowd, and you get lots of kudos if you can trim and paint your car to look absolutely scale.  You'll never stop adding bits to the interior or cutting away parts of the body to add things underneath, like oil coolers and braided hoses.

The only downside is it's a very expensive niche.  I guess it doesn't have to be - you can drift with an FXX or a YD2S, but once you arrive on scene and see acres of aluminium and carbon fibre from companies that don't sell anything for under $100, you see how quick it adds up and how much the top drivers spend on their cars.

I hoped I'd really enjoy drifting but I've never put the time and effort into either the detailing, the hop-ups or the practice, mostly because the clubs are all too far away.  There is now a new club with a permanent indoor track around 30 minutes away, but I've been avoiding any indoor meets this year, so I haven't been.  Maybe next year, if things settle down.

Big Rig: life at a different pace.  My gut feeling is that, without a trailer, it will be boring.  As a technical exercise it's OK, but once it's built there's not much to do.  If you had a) a local club and 2) the budget for some trailers, I'd say go for it, but without, it's just something to look at.  A bit like drifting (although more established) it can be a minefield getting around the suppliers and manufacturers.  Hercules Hobby, Carson and Lesu all make very pretty and functional parts but again, you can spend many times the cost of the rig outfitting it with realistic parts and have almost enough bits left over to build a new rig.

If you love detail and want to spend a lot of time making your own parts then it can be a great way to spend your time.  Also, if you want to get into RC mechanics, it can be great fun.  Hydraulics is the big thing right now, but you can build electric stuff too.  For example, if you made your own crane or tow truck, you wouldn't need a trailer.  Then you could have fun at big rig meets by towing other rigs or lifting things on and off other people's flatbeds.  Right now I'm slowly building a tipper trailer on the back of my Grand Hauler, so that when we can finally go trucking again, my friend will be able to load it up with dirt with his excavator, I'll drive around to the hopper and dump it off, and he can load it up again.  Working out what the other club members have got so you can form a kind of cooperative crew makes the events a lot more fun than endlessly driving around in circles and failing to reverse park properly.

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Thanks for all that, it's actually really helpful. It's looking like the XV-01 is the way to go.

I genuinely prefer to keep my RC hobby to myself, so anything that requires a group of people to enjoy is probably not a great idea. It's one of the things I like most about the scale 4x4 trucks: I can make cool stuff, post photos to show off the cool stuff I made, but then have fun by myself in my own back yard driving them.

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With the size of the area you have to run on and the mention of hard packed gravel - rally definitely sounds like the way to go! Maybe something M-chassis size? Smaller cars are a lot more fun if you don't have a lot of room to play with (or maybe Mf01X?) 

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I'm not sure what you already have in your collection, but at the risk of getting  telling off ,or the boot 😳, have you considered a different brand?

Kyosho Ultima, Turbo Optima , CAT XLS or even a modern buggy like the Cougar Laydown or the freshly out Schumacher Storm? (Which I'm mightly tempted by....)

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1 hour ago, BuggyGuy said:

With the size of the area you have to run on and the mention of hard packed gravel - rally definitely sounds like the way to go! Maybe something M-chassis size? Smaller cars are a lot more fun if you don't have a lot of room to play with (or maybe Mf01X?) 

Funny you should mention that... I actually have an MF-01X. Not sure quite what to make of it yet. But then, I haven't spent much time with it...

I'm generally very fond of the M-size cars; I used to race one in a spec class back in the M01/M02 days. I like them much better than touring cars, actually, or maybe I just like the typical subject matter better. I suppose another alternative would be to lean in to the M-chassis world again, pick up an M05 and an M06, and a couple of bodies I like, and have three different drivetrains all in the same size/form factor to play with.

(goes off to check prices and availability of M-chassis stuff)

 

31 minutes ago, Wooders28 said:

I'm not sure what you already have in your collection, but at the risk of getting  telling off ,or the boot 😳, have you considered a different brand?

Kyosho Ultima, Turbo Optima , CAT XLS or even a modern buggy like the Cougar Laydown or the freshly out Schumacher Storm? (Which I'm mightly tempted by....)

I adore Kyosho cars, and if there were an Optima Mid re-release, this wouldn't even be a discussion. I have several Kyosho buggies, both vintage and re-release. I considered an Ultima re-re, but I have a nice original, and it's enough for me.

The Schumachers don't interest me; here in the USA they're practically nonexistent, so we never really formed an attachment to them, and I've never really liked the "serious" off-road buggies. And I've done RC10s to death, and also Losi JRX2s.

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2 minutes ago, markbt73 said:

I adore Kyosho cars, and if there were an Optima Mid re-release, this wouldn't even be a discussion.

Surely on the horizon....🤞 (although  did a bit of a resto mod on mine, and it's running a 5.5t and keeping with newer stuff) 

4 minutes ago, markbt73 said:

The Schumachers don't interest me; here in the USA they're practically nonexistent, so we never really formed an attachment to them, and I've never really liked the "serious" off-road buggies. And I've done RC10s to death, and also Losi JRX2s.

One of the draws to Schuamcher is they're a home brand, competitive and parts are super easy to find, it was the likes of the Losi JRX2s that I thought of as exotic (and I've still not see one, in the flesh ,so to speak...) 

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If you’ve really a race track finish in terms of new asphalt then you’re right making the most of it whilst it lasts with on road fun 

10 x 20 isn’t a massive space but more than enough to practice fast cornering between short sprints and reducing lap times - which, in terms of driver talent, makes up by far the most time saved on pretty much any decent track 

If I had that space - and a modicum of cash - I’d go for any decent TRF TA chassis with the option to adjust and drift ?

And a TA03R-S TRF possibly pegging out as the best value / options ? 

Followed closely by various TRF TA05 siblings ?

Also a spot of history - noting the TA03s / David Jun fed the TRF404x, 414 etc and ultimately Worlds wins 😬

PS Completely agree with @Carmine A - if I ever dabble with trucks it’s a Snowman all the way !

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5 hours ago, markbt73 said:

Thanks all. I've been thinking more about it, and I think the big trucks are out, at least for now. I want to do one eventually, but I want to do it right, a genuine Tamiya kit, with all the trimmings, and that just isn't in the cards right now.

I am leaning towards something on-road, because of the recent changes in the terrain I have to play with. Our side yard used to be a bumpy mess of gravel and weeds, the perfect place to run off-road buggies, but we just had it paved (after getting our vintage trailer stuck in the mud over there one too many times) and now it's billiard-table-smooth brand-new asphalt. There's an area behind the trailer that's about 10 x 20 feet, with an apron of hard-packed gravel about 8 feet wide beyond that. So not enough room for anything fast, but a challenging spot for some lower-speed fun with a rally or drift car.

The drifting idea appeals to me for two reasons: first, I used to race on-road cars on a carpet track, where you don't want the car to slide around. It would be an interesting driving challenge to lear how to slide it around on purpose. And second, because the speeds are lower, you can do all that detail stuff; it seems like they're the on-road equivalent of scale 4x4 trucks, of which I have several and do enjoy.

Still mulling it over, and I have time, as I don't have the money yet. It is fun to window-shop, though.

An XV-01 or Mf-01X would be ideal for you combined ashphalt and gravel. The former is the best, it really is. It drives like nothing else. The latter is just a blast if not quite a s capable.

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Wow, lots of love for the XV around here. I just had another look at the manual: it does look like a good design, and a satisfying build. And is it really a Tamiya chassis without any screw pins in the suspension? Wonders never cease...

Hopefully it will still be in stock somewhere when I actually have the funds. In the meantime, it sounds like it's time to take a second look at my MF-01X. I tried to treat it like a mini-scaler, but it sounds like it should have been a rally car all along.

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Tamico still have the long damper spec version in stock and the standard delta intergrale as well for around 230 euro

UK stock appears to be in short supply generally at the moment. 

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3 hours ago, markbt73 said:

Wow, lots of love for the XV around here. I just had another look at the manual: it does look like a good design, and a satisfying build. And is it really a Tamiya chassis without any screw pins in the suspension? Wonders never cease...

Hopefully it will still be in stock somewhere when I actually have the funds. In the meantime, it sounds like it's time to take a second look at my MF-01X. I tried to treat it like a mini-scaler, but it sounds like it should have been a rally car all along.

If you're in Texas, I have a couple in stock at the Dallas Hobbytown.

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So last night, I dug out my MF-01X chassis, with the intent of setting it up as a rally car. I have everything I need to do it, including an unpainted VW Golf body that will work nicely (it's a tight squeeze over the motor in the back, but it fits if you persuade it a little). It should turn out to be a pretty cool little car when it's all done.

While I was digging out parts for it, I came across a lot of other half-finished projects, or things I bought with the intent of turning them into something, but never did. And in almost every case, I have nearly everything I need for that project, but not quite. I set them aside because I was missing one critical bit, or something frustrated me and I lost steam and put it away "for later," or something similar. I found half a dozen or so such unfinished projects, piles of potential yet to be realized, either due to my own fickle attention span, or lack of funds to do them "right."

And then I looked up at my shelf of so-called "runners" and saw that half of them actually had dust on them. Not outside dust from having fun; inside dust from sitting. And that's when the realization hit: What on Earth am I doing thinking about buying something else? Eventually it will either end up in pieces in a storage drawer, or covered in dust on a shelf. I have enough cars; what I need to do is pay better attention to them.

So instead of buying something new, I'm going to pick 2 or 3 projects that I really wanted to do, and finish them. I'll use the money I would have spent on a new kit on parts and supplies, and do these projects the right way instead of trying to half-you-know-what them. And while I'm working on those, I'm going to concentrate on 2 or 3 runners, and try to wear out some tires.

Stay tuned... this could get interesting.

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drifting can be fun, and if you have a local track with other drift people, that would make driving even more fun. it would also be very handy to get help for adjusting and setting up the drift cars. adjustments are crucial for how it drives, and varies depending the surface you driving on.

if you are considering an drift car, i would say to look at Yokomo YD-2E or YD-2S, or MST RMX 2.0. that is the most common ones. as i understand it, having the engine in front is an early design, which never was that good. with rear wheel drive, you need to have the weight in the back.

i have a Yokomo YD-2E and drive at a track about 20 minutes away, took this photo of my drifter yesterday:

M5-Drift.jpg

 

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