How many spares do you really go through?

[markbt73 3165]

The topic of spare/replacement parts availability seems to be coming up a lot, and I admit that it's a bit of a mystery to me as to why. Are people really needing to replace parts on their vehicles that often? And if so, what is the more common failure: is it wear, or breakage?

Honestly, I can't remember the last time I broke a part that wasn't already compromised. I broke a Boomerang bumper a while back, but it had a crack in it when I got the car, so I don't count that. And I had an RC4WD Trailfinder that had a habit of eating driveshafts, but that's because they were a poor design. But generally, I don't break stuff. I'll wear it out; both my WR02 chassis are getting a bit sloppy in the suspension department, and I have a CC01 that's just about worn down to a stump, but even that's still intact. And that's after ten years of use, and daily use for quite a few years.

Even when I was racing competitively, I rarely broke anything. I still have my Associated RC10L from my carpet oval days; it's still 90% original parts. And that's after using it as a 10-cell drag/speed run car after its racing days were done. It had several 50-60 MPH blow-overs, and nothing broke. And I ran in an M-chassis spec class for a while; I bought 2 M02 kits, and never even tore into the second one. Tires wear out, sure. Bodies get used up. Bearings go crunchy after a while. But the chassis and drivetrain parts should hold up fine under normal use.

Now, I realize that "normal" use for me might be different from others; I rarely go hotter than silver-can power, so I don't know what these crazy brushless setups do to gearboxes. But I don't "baby" my cars (except the rarities). I drive hard-ish, and I don't worry too much about breaking things. But with very few exceptions, all my cars hold up quite well.

I don't want to start any arguments, I'm just honestly curious: how often do other people break or wear out parts? And what are you doing that uses them up?

[TurnipJF 4993]

2 hours ago, markbt73 said:

I rarely go hotter than silver-can power

There, I believe, lies the key. On the models in my fleet that still have silver cans, I too have yet to break anything. However on the models with upgraded motors, breakages are not unheard of, especially when racing on tracks with hard barriers and/or novice drivers. 

Different cars have different vulnerabilities, and in some cases I replace broken plastic parts with carbon or alloy ones in order to move the likely breakage point to another part that is cheaper or easier to replace, while in other cases I fit a stock plastic replacement if it is already cheap and easy to replace. For example suspension arms are typically easier to swap out than hubs or chassis mounting points, so I don't mind leaving them as the sacrificial part, but if I break a hub, it typically gets replaced with an alloy or carbon reinforced one. The same logic applies to shock towers and bulkheads for example. When I broke the front shock tower on my DF-02 in a collision, I fitted a stock plastic replacement as I would rather replace this again than have to replace the entire front bulkhead.

Sometimes one doesn't need to change the material, just the design of the part. For example, I had several TT-01 front uprights broken in racing collisions, until I switched to the thicker ones as supplied with the TT-01E. Same with the standard TT-01 bulkheads with integral shock towers, of which I broke two on my rally car before switching to the TT-01E ones with tougher separate shock towers.

[87lc2 769]

On my Clods I actually replace parts quite often, mostly axle tubes and knuckles.  Always keep plenty of those parts trees around.

The RCs I use most often are my crawlers, most running brushed motors in the 27-35t range.  I run them often and through mud, water, etc.; lots of miles on these every season.  I rarely have to replace any parts with the exception of a new bearing set every now and then due to the water/mud.  Other than that everything else holds up great.  

[Superluminal 1545]

I bent a front damper piston on my Egress re re. It took over a year for the pistons to appear in stock and that was after emailing the uk distributor directly. Bearing in mind this was the late 2018 rerelease spare parts supply for the Egress is appaling - im assuming because there isnt parts commonality with any other cars (or very little)

[Mad Ax 3011]

I actually break very few parts on my cars, and I don't really drive carefully or use low-power motors.  OK, none of my cars have ridiculous 4S power (except my E-maxx) or nine billion KV brushless systems or Conrad motors, but very few cars still run silvercans.  And everything gets driven on track as often as I can (which isn't really that often as most tracks near me don't do open days and most of my cars aren't eligible for racing).  I generally only race my vintage buggies once per year but it's at a crazy event with big heats and hard racing, and I've broken very few parts.

Even when I was racing weekly, actual breakages were rare.  Generally it was down to bad luck.  One time I went to a one-day championship with my TA05, in the first heat I clipped the end of the main straight and ripped the entire rear right suspension off.  Nobody had any TA05 spares, but I had some cash in my pocket so I bought a used car from another racer and swapped over all my electrics.  In the next race I clipped the same part of the track and ripped off the exact same suspension parts.  The track had been assembled incorrectly and part of the barrier was exposed enough to clip tyres if they got too close...

The car that has broken more parts than any other is my re-re Blitzer Beetle.  It has sheared off a drive hub (rear left), it has shredded the spokes off a wheel (rear left), it has lost numerous wheel nuts (rear left) and earlier this year an upright broke (rear left).  It wasn't even driving it - it had flipped over, so I picked it up and tossed it onto the ground.  I didn't throw it from that high, but the rear clipped a fallen metal fence panel and that must have been just hard enough to break the upright.  Due to the pandemic it took months to find a spare.

Most of my cars are built new from box but my few vintage cars break more often.  It makes sense, as the plastic is older, has been exposed to more UV light and might have had some very hard use before I got hold of it.  My Top Force Evo had a strip and rebuild three years ago but still feels very sloppy and has cracks in some plastics.  That said, I replaced the front gearbox housing a couple of years ago and after one race it had the same cracks in the same place.

To be honest, most of my stoppages aren't actually due to impact or part failure - they're down to parts coming loose.  My WR02 will lose a step screw in a front upper arm in every endurance race (but it's still entirely driveable even with one wheel flopping around, so I just carry on).  I've had several cars consigned to the shelf for considerable time because a screw came loose and caused a vital part to go missing.  I lost my most stressful ever final because my Top Force lost a steering kingpin with a minute to go and sent it head-on into a barrier.  I try to check all the likely culprits after every race but I sometimes miss one, or get caught out by something that never came loose before.

My crawlers are probably the most worn cars I own - they don't go fast but they do have very torquey motors and big sticky rubber.  Amazingly I've not broken many driveline components (the rear spool failed in my Maverick Scout axle this year) but things start to feel sloppy after a few runs.  The cars get submerged in filthy water and driven through lots of muck, so any exposed joint gets coated in a perfect grinding paste.  I like to rinse and oil any moving parts after a run but that oil only attracts more dust next time out.  My SCX-10 is many years old now and still hasn't actually let me down, but even so it feels very sloppy and was replaced with a CFX-W this year because I thought I'd be doing a lot more crawling over the winter months and didn't want to have my current fleet let me down.

[Saito2 2811]

Anything over my stock Clod runner takes uses up hubs and knuckles like 87lc2 said, but that's monster truckin'. I had a used Blackfoot that I replaced every piece of plastic on at one point because it literally broke something every run, but that might have been UV exposure prior to my ownership. Like Mad Ax said, the front gearbox housings develop cracks in my DF01 cars. The axle gears get sloppy in my TXTs. I've had a CC01 and a Hot Shot knuckle literally fall apart on their maiden runs for no apparent reason. Knuckles a vulnerable in crashes in general. Other than that, my Hot Shot type cars have been robust, but I still keep some extra arms about. Other than body mounts, Lunch Boxes are bulletproof for me as is my daughter's Stampede. Hardware goes missing from time to time in the more rubbery plastics. My hottest motor aside from my Clods is one Sport Tuned. Most are Torque Tuned or silvercans. Crashing is rare. I run cars for decades, so where parts supply is 10 years down the road is one my mind when I pick up spares here and their. My Kyosho, Traxxas and Associated cars have never suffered parts failure.

[markbt73 3165]

That all sounds reasonable. The only reason I bring it up is that sometimes I reead things on here that make me think of a guy I used to work with. He drove a little Mazda pickup truck and claimed it was a "piece of junk." I had owned a similar truck and never had any trouble with it besides rust, so I was curious why he though his was junk.

"I already replaced the clutch once, and now this one is wearing out," he said. "And I've replaced the U-joints twice, and the transmission is hard to shift, and now the rear end is making noise. And the motor burns oil like crazy." I didn't understand why... until I rode with him to lunch one day. He peeled out of the parking lot, and tore off down the street, weaving in and out of traffic. He revved the engine sky-high, and speed-shifted between first and second (no clutch). And he drove like that the whole way to lunch and back.

On the way back, I made a comment that maybe some of his reliability problems were due to his driving style, and he blew it off. "My Dodge truck never had these kinds of problems," he said. "Japanese stuff just can't take it." Now I was really curious, so I asked what happened to the Dodge. "Blew the motor," he said. "Couldn't afford to replace it, so my grandpa gave me this."

I imagine he's still out there somewhere, serially-abusing pickup trucks, while the trucks cower in fear when he walks onto the dealership lot, like the toys in Toy Story whenever Sid walks by. Some people are just hard on machines; maybe I'm just not one of them.

[taffer 656]

My spares stash for my thundershot has been stagnant for years, I have ended up using them to rebuild and rescue eBay projects and build at least three ones (the last will be a fire dragon soon).

My showroom details failures and replacements over the years, after many hours running I might add.

In the past with cars, jumping and landing cause the most issues...followed by the odd freak accident (dt-03's seem to suffer with this so I got rid of them).

Staying above 20turn motors, tamiyas of all denominations seem to be quite robust in my experience so far.....

[87lc2 769]

58 minutes ago, markbt73 said:

That all sounds reasonable. The only reason I bring it up is that sometimes I reead things on here that make me think of a guy I used to work with. He drove a little Mazda pickup truck and claimed it was a "piece of junk." I had owned a similar truck and never had any trouble with it besides rust, so I was curious why he though his was junk.

"I already replaced the clutch once, and now this one is wearing out," he said. "And I've replaced the U-joints twice, and the transmission is hard to shift, and now the rear end is making noise. And the motor burns oil like crazy." I didn't understand why... until I rode with him to lunch one day. He peeled out of the parking lot, and tore off down the street, weaving in and out of traffic. He revved the engine sky-high, and speed-shifted between first and second (no clutch). And he drove like that the whole way to lunch and back.

On the way back, I made a comment that maybe some of his reliability problems were due to his driving style, and he blew it off. "My Dodge truck never had these kinds of problems," he said. "Japanese stuff just can't take it." Now I was really curious, so I asked what happened to the Dodge. "Blew the motor," he said. "Couldn't afford to replace it, so my grandpa gave me this."

I imagine he's still out there somewhere, serially-abusing pickup trucks, while the trucks cower in fear when he walks onto the dealership lot, like the toys in Toy Story whenever Sid walks by. Some people are just hard on machines; maybe I'm just not one of them.

Poor little Mazda...I think some people have mechanical sympathy and some don't.  Most that don't either don't fix their own stuff, don't understand how it works, or just have enough money that it doesn't matter.  

[Saito2 2811]

As a mechanic, I would often see this. I've seen 2.9 Ford v6 heads cracked cleanly in two. I remember 3.0 Chrysler minivans smoking like crazy due to valve guide issues. To me, that's an engineering issue. When I'd hear people badmouth a 3.8 GM V6, I'd be at a loss. It was certainly not high tech by the end of its lifespan (long) but the 3.8/3800 series was a good reliable workhorse engine in its standard form. You never can guess how a car will get treated...

[87lc2 769]

19 minutes ago, Saito2 said:

As a mechanic, I would often see this. I've seen 2.9 Ford v6 heads cracked cleanly in two. I remember 3.0 Chrysler minivans smoking like crazy due to valve guide issues. To me, that's an engineering issue. When I'd hear people badmouth a 3.8 GM V6, I'd be at a loss. It was certainly not high tech by the end of its lifespan (long) but the 3.8/3800 series was a good reliable workhorse engine in its standard form. You never can guess how a car will get treated...

The Buick 3.8 is one of the best engines ever built, have owned quite a few and absolutely love them.  If you can break a 3.8 then you really don't know how to take care of your things.  My current daily driver is a 2004 Impala SS with the Supercharged 3.8 and it has 249,000 miles on it.  Drive it 80 miles round trip per day for work and it runs/drive beautifully.  My father bought it brand new and when he was ready to let it go I just had to take it.  Before that I drove a 99 Regal with the Supercharged 3.8 and I scrapped that car at 240k due to rust, the engine is still sitting in my garage in case I ever need it.  

[Matty36 109]

I always use to break wishbones and shock towers in my 2wd buggys, as they were very exposed and generally the weakest point to save the chassis from damage. In my 4wd losi xxx4, it would break lose the hinge pin balls, which were replaceable, until one day I realised that they were coming out because the diff case was splitting apart on impact, so after I fitted some braces across it, I never lost a single one. Shock towers on that buggy were prone to breaking, and I still have about 10 in my spares box.

My touring cars were a lot more reliable, the odd wishbone would go after an impact with track markings, although I did split a chassis and my xray driveshaft broke which apparently are indestructible and cost my £25 in 2007 to replace just one. Now it's my drift car project, so wont get to see a track for a long time if ever.

[mud4fun 1327]

It depends on the car and how it is used. Obviously if you only drive around in the middle of a big flat empty field or car park then naturally breakages will be zero.

My thundershots rarely break parts. We've only broken 4 items this year that I can remember, three front steering knuckles and I chipped a tooth on my spur. These are buggies that are racing around a tight and extremely rough garden track surrounded by heavy plant pots, railway sleepers brick walls and we have two big jumps. If you catch a railway sleeper or brick wall in an offset impact at speed then you're gonna break something. They have also this year been doing tarmac racing for the postal racing. We only have a very narrow tarmac area and many of the track designs means we are running at speed within 3 feet of a solid concrete kerb. Most of our thundershots are running higher power motors and are doing speeds 25-35mph, well above the stock silver can speed of 17mph so impacts will result in more damage. My chipped spur was actually caused when I hit a 3" deep pothole 300 feet away at 30mph (I was doing a GPS speed test at the time), no damage to chassis at all but bizarrely I lost a tooth on the spur, very odd!

My Avante class buggies are much more fragile and used to break things regularly, specifically the plastic hubs around the shoulder screws. Since switching to alloy hubs we've not had any breakages of suspension components at all in tens of hours of hard use. The only remaining weak points on the Avante/Egrees are the front gearbox shock tower mounting points and they tend to crack in rolls where the buggy lands on its shock tower first. Very rare now though after lowering the cars and adjusting camber to prevent grip rolls etc. The vanquish remains my most fragile of buggies mainly due to the rigid plastic rear shock tower/wing mount. In a roll, the Avante2001/Egress have a flexible wire mount that absorbs most of the impact and then the carbon tower and carbon deck are bullet proof and I have never sustained any damage to the chassis itself, normally just crack a wing if anything. Sadly a hard roll on tarmac at speed on a vanquish will transmit the impact down through the plastic shock tower and into the plastic rear deck, often resulting in cracked rear tower and deck.

So for each buggy there tends to be just 2 or 3 items that we 'regularly' break - bare in mind our buggies are used probably 20-30 HOURS of run time per year racing and bashing in rough tracks in close prximity to obstacles. 

We do go through alot of other spares though simply due to wear - bearings, drive cups/axles, dogbones, UJ driveshafts, wheels, tyres, gears, pinions etc. At least a set of dogbones and drivecups per year per buggy, more so on those running high power motors and 8.4v or 2S batteries.

Also bare in mind our buggies are being used by children, since they were 6 or 8 years old. Often we'll have 3 or 4 buggies racing at once around a track that is just 3 feet wide and edged with walls or sleepers. Accidents happen. Anybody that claims otherwise is either a god at driving or is not trying hard enough 🤣

 

[Mad Ax 3011]

14 hours ago, markbt73 said:

Some people are just hard on machines

Some people just have a knack of breaking things.  My cousin was one of those.  My first Tamiya (a King Cab) was sold by him to me for £10 back in the early 90s.  It had no body, the tyres were completely smooth and every moving joint had more play than a dry day at Wimbledon.  He had owned it for a single year.

It was the same with everything else he owned, too.  His toy cars were all scrap, his bicycles mostly had flat tyres and missing chains.  In the 90s (when massive basketball boots became the latest must-have accessory) he would get the most expensive ones he could afford, and reduce them to threadbare cloth and shredded rubber in a few months.  He might well have started the late-80s trend for holed jeans accidentally - his knees had a permanent suntan.  His parents would buy him an expensive jacket and by the end of the first week the zip would be broken.  It became a running joke in the family - his big sister once bought him an army cap while we were out at a country show, after a 10-minute monologue about how he was absolutely not to break it.

He was one of those carefree, gentle-minded kids who wandered through life with a perpetual smile on his face; there was certainly no malice in the way he treated things.  He would just pick them up and they'd break.  We all wondered why he found it so easy to break things, he probably spent his childhood wondering how we found it so easy not to break things.

My first 1:1 car, incidentally, previously belonged to his older sister, but more importantly, it did not belong to him

[Grumpy pants 1921]

I've reduced my spares right down progressively over the last 4-5 years as I have had less and less time to tinker or run the cars.

As the need for spares has reduced enormously- I try and buy only what I need as and when I need it now.

Like most of us I have Tupperware of black Tamiya spares and a tub full of screws etc of which both come in handy for Tamiya Club members, myself and the odd DIY fix at home 

I have managed myself off the wheel and tyre collecting element of the hobby- where you literally end up with more wheels and tyres than you would ever expect to use!

Every now and then I buy the odd hop up as a bit a of treat as I am not over run with cars, kits or spares- but it is a slippery slope I am trying not to go down.

[mud4fun 1327]

Next year we are planning to re-landscape our garden to allow us to double the width of our main straights, edge the track with flexible plastic pipe and make the jump landing zones safer. That should massively cut down on breakages. 

At the moment one of our jumps is positioned just before a bend, the landing zone is hardcore and you need to get at least 3 feet of airtime to clear the brick wall edged flowerbed that you're jumping over. Poor youngest Mudlet managed to break a steering knuckle when she took the jump too slow, landed short, directly on the sharp edge of the brick wall. Ouch.

It makes us laugh when we watch videos of 'off road' races such as BRCA where the track is 3m wide, smooth flat astro and with virtually zero obstacles to avoid. Even the jumps are tame by our standards. Excluding the jumps, I could get a touring car around most of those tracks, hardly what my daughter's and I would recognise as off road buggy tracks.  Combined with much stronger modern buggies I'm not surprised there are fewer breakages these days. Off road tracks I used to race on in the 80's were dirt and gravel, had pot holes and in one case had a cast iron school railing just inches to one side.

We tend to prefer watching the US events where the tracks seem to still be dirt, rough in places and with uneven bumpy jumps, even the kids find the astro races boring, although at least the cars remain clean at the end of a race, unlike ours which need hosing down. 

We watched a video that Ryan Harris posted a week ago, it was a charity race I think where the spectators were throwing obstacles down on the track as the cars raced around. Both mudlets were enthralled, it was fast, action packed race with loads of crashes and breakages. They both wanted to take part in it 

[Finnsllc 587]

I think the issues with spares are simple, U dont need them till u need them. If u need them then spares are an issue. I do wish tamiya had a good replacement program but they dont and we know that. For those of us who run our cars this is obviously an issue. For shelf queen builders it is not. All that being said, I recently had my go to top force have quite a nasty mistaken crash. I needed basically the whole right rear end. I got the parts trees from a member here so worked out for me. However if that didnt happen there was a good chance id be on the hunt to use a car i bought, built and drove. So i dont think its a question of how many extra parts do we actually need. Its a question of why cant we get them.

[Collin 890]

I cant have enough spares for my runners, it gives me a pretty good sleep. All the shoeboxes full with little rarities, knowing to be able to print some other not available parts makes my hobby extremly joyfull. I m not abusing my runners but always pushing the limit. Yes, I broke a lot of parts already. My goal is to be able running my Dynas and TR-15T as the where never discontinued.

[Wooders28 3091]

I keep race car spares, like wishbones, shocks , hubs etc, as if I have an issue, and need the £10 part I don't have, it could mean I've spent £50+ in travel and race fees, to sit in the sidelines and watch (although ,usually find someone will sell you/ lend you a part, but don't like to take that for granted)

Spares for my tamiya's I have, as I've bought many a parts car/ chassis, as parts for vintage stuff wasn't available in re release form, so you did what you needed to do ,to keep them running (which was buy 2 or 3 of the same chassis...)  

Mixture of breakage and wear (for actually buying new spares),None of mine are cuddled, most fitted with brushless and at least 3s lipo, they perform as well as the old vids suggested, i only buy what I need.

[markbt73 3165]

Well, thanks all for the responses. It sounds like some of you really do "love your cars to death"... It's not my thing, but hey, more power to you (literally). I'll be over here, with my 540 (and sometimes even a 380), operating within design parameters and not breaking stuff. The ragged edge is just too tiring a place to be.

And I'll shut up and let folks complain about spare parts availability from now on. It doesn't apply to me. You guys do what you have to do.

[Finnsllc 587]

ive broken my 380 grasshopper like 5 times. dont think the motor really has all that much to do with it. i have a m06 on 540 thats way fast. just saying that motors and use arent an excuse for parts being unavailable 

[Killajb 357]

Hardly any consumable or spares use for me.  Of course, that's because I sparingly drive my RC's and then drive them gently when I do.  Whenever I do an occasional acceleration burst, its when there's wide-open area to do so and I try not to stress the drivetrain much with hard launches beyond testing things out.  I enjoy the process of building and displaying much more than driving perhaps..  

[markbt73 3165]

1 hour ago, Killajb said:

Hardly any consumable or spares use for me.  Of course, that's because I sparingly drive my RC's and then drive them gently when I do.  Whenever I do an occasional acceleration burst, its when there's wide-open area to do so and I try not to stress the drivetrain much with hard launches beyond testing things out.  I enjoy the process of building and displaying much more than driving perhaps..  

See, I think that's the way I'm headed too. I used to drive a lot more and a lot harder, but now I just don't want to push that hard. I still like running my cars, but I'll probably never upgrade another motor.

[berman 3239]

Back when I used to run both my vintage bullhead and clod (sold bullhead), I used to break the top half of the front servo saver all the time, I have approx 15 B parts trees all with the top servo saver part missing, I only used to break the anti-rotational brackets once in a blue moon.

My CPE Terminator clod is on it's 4th right rear wheel. I am waiting for Jconcepts Tributes to come back in stock to upgrade.

 

[Saito2 2811]

Out of curiosity, how many spares does one go through with other brands at moderate power levels and not under racing conditions? I have nowhere near the same years of experience with Kyosho and Associated as I do with Tamiya, but both their vehicles seem to be built like tanks. I've even been running my plastic fantastic Big Boss weekly of late without a single issue. I'd guess it'd be hard to break a Traxxas on silvercan power too. 

In Tamiya's defense, there were a ton of manufactures back in the day, that are no longer with us, which Tamiya had better durability than. I'm guessing Tamiya's strength and/or quality was better than Royal, Nichimo, the numerous Grasshopper clones etc. on average. The difference is Tamiya is still here and they really didn't change much (the rereleases hardly at all in some cases). Everybody else moved on with better materials. There was a time Traxxas wasn't so durable either.