ASK Cub Reporter- 01.10.2013 – Your Weekly Questions, My Questionable Answers

Post on the BigSquidRC FB Page-
Lance B. 10:06am Jan 7

With all the people out there running our electronics to the max I have to wonder if anybody has ever done some side by side reviews on fans and heatsinks for brushless motors?

I think much value can be learned from a shootout on this subject. I know the fan is a low cost part of the whole deal but it can do much to protect an investment.

Cubby– Hi Lance, and thanks for leaving a question on our FB page. Shoot Brian your Pony Express addy so he can mail ya out some stickers.

There are some people out there that pop in a high cell count Lipo and slap on a huge pinion and use it for performance. They use the ridiculous power for one high speed pass, or one huge jump, then pull in and cool everything off.

Then there are idiots who use wayyy too much voltage with wayyyy too high of gearing with wayyyy too high kv of motor, and they keep on running till they see fire spewing from under the body of their truck. The moment they get home they jump on
the message boards and raise hell about what a piece of crap their “Happy Flower” brushless motor was.

And finally… you’ve got the racing guys sticking to the letter of the law, gearing and timing the holy crap out of ridiculously low kv motors just to squeeze another 5 watts out of it. The motto of the day is “gear it till it over-heats, then drop 2 teeth”. Most of these guys have been racing for 20 years and should put their big boy pants on and finally race mod, instead of continuing to kill stock motor after stock motor.

To finally get around to answering your question, I have never seen a brushless motor fan/heatsink shootout before. But lets say one fan/heatsink set-up was far superior to anything else on the market. My contention is- certain people would still burn up their gear, even with the best fan/heatsink that money can buy. Maybe they are just that stupid, or maybe they don’t mind spending $100 a week on rc motors, who knows.

What I do know for sure is this- you can run high cell counts, low kv motors, gear it properly, and still have so much insane power that you can’t control it all, while not running into heat issues. At the end of the day, if you are running a fan or heatsink, you are only putting a band-aid over a bigger problem. Either you are geared too tall, you are running too high of a kv motor for your cell count, or you should lose that love of timing that you have.

Hey, I’ve just moved & now have a decent BMX track across the road!, looking for something that would be up to the most skying with the least amount of wrenching. Prefer brushless or brushless ready

Keep up the good work!
Thanks!
Alan K.

Cubby– Congrats Alan, you are now going to be totally dialed with a perfectly prepped BMX track to use as your own rc bash-compound. Well, ok, lets get real here, you are going to need to approach the BMX guys and ask permission. If you are act cool, don’t tear anything up, and maybe let a few of the guys take one of your bash-mobiles for a couple laps they shouldn’t have any problem letting you drive on their track. Even an 8th scale buggy can’t do much harm to their handy work, and they usually go over their tracks pretty well before they race, so in theory, the BMX’ers should not have a problem with a neighbor running his rc toy once in a while.

So… what would I recommend for you? Something that comes brushless, jumps well, has a lot of suspension travel, and you rarely have to wrench on? For you I’m going to recommend the new 8th scale Thunder Tiger ST4 G3 truggy. The big truggy tires make it easy to drive on bumpy surfaces, they give it some extra ground clearance, and they also have a lot of rotating mass to aid in mid-air throttle corrections. The ST4 has loads of suspension travel which comes in handy when landing from extreme heights to the flat or when casing doubles. It also comes with a 2000kv brushless system which is fairly quick on 4S, and approaching gnarly on 6. Because it’s a truggy, it features a fairly low center of gravity, this helps it turn at high speeds without wanting to flip as much as a monster truck. Lastly, just like most new era Thunder Tigers, it can take a pretty good beating without breaking. We’ve been bashing one for a couple months now, look for our review in the next couple of weeks.

That’s it for this week. Send in your questions, comments, rants, and whatever else is on your mind to Cubby at BigSquidRC dot com. If your letter makes the big show you’ll get free stickers, if I proclaim yours as “letter of the month” you get an
uber BSRC t-shirt.

YOUR Cub Reporter