ASK Cub Reporter, 05.10.2012- Welcome To More Of My Answer Dodging

I am getting back into rc after almost 30 years (i started then with a frog kit) which I would love to see more of now, and am simply amazed at how far r/c has come. With that being said and me being an extreme bash and speed freak, I am addicted to your review link. What are the chances of getting a section in your review on the ease or difficulty in getting replacement and or upgrade parts? ie: can a person find them anywhere or do they have to be ordered? Please email or call – and my name is jason, BTW bigsquid is the only site I have found that gives a true unbiased review- much kudos to you and your staff for that,

Jason D.

Cubby- Thanks for the props on our “true and unbiased reviews”, but…

There is nearly always a certain amount of bias, whether it be one of our reviews or anybody else’s, it is always there. For example, when I recently reviewed the Axial EXO Terra Buggy (seen here ) I was extremely biased towards it. I’m not a big Axial fan, but I have become a huge advocate for scale looks, and I simply liked the EXO and wanted to own one from the first moment I saw one. So all my testing on the EXO was done with a large amount of positive bias towards it. Another example- Adam “The Intern” recently reviewed the Axial Ridgecrest (seen here). Adam is a huge Axial and crawler fan, so he certainly had plenty of bias towards the Ridgecrest as well.

On the other side of the spectrum I’ve reviewed several products from companies I hate with a passion that borders on zeal. I might hate certain companies, but I respect our readers and I’m not going to say something is a POS if it’s not. I may talk a lot of smack in THE Cub Report, that’s what it’s for, but reviews are a different matter for me, they are about reporting as accurately as possible how a product performed.

We are absolutely aware that we are doing the reviews for every basher in every sub-division, open field and parking lot. At the end of the day the only thing that matters to us is giving you the most honest thumbs up or thumbs down that we can. We’ve had many a discussion around the office how we don’t want one reader of ours buying one bad product, it’s our job to keep you from wasting money. We know we have preconceived biases in every review, but we try out best not to let them affect our ultimate judgment of a product.

Also… we try to get as many opinions from the guys at the office and from random people at the track as we possibly can. It is pretty rare when a review is based strictly on one persons view around here. The more opinions we can get on a product, the better. While I may have been the person credited with the Axial EXO review, over a half dozen people drove/bashed/thrashed it, and I considered in all the different opinions while writing up the final review.

Fortunately we do get a chance to do some truly unbiased testing on occasion. Sometimes we are able to “blind test” certain products (like batteries and other electronics), this is where the person driving does not know what brand of product is in the car/truck while they are wheel’n, thus effectively eliminating preconceived biases. We do this as often as we can, but obviously this can’t be done for full chassis reviews, transmitters, etc.

Anyways…. to finally get to your question. What are the chances of us including a section on the ease/difficulty of getting replacement parts? We’ve had the discussion several times about including this in every review and it was even a category in our 4wd RTR Short Course Shootout (read here). Certainly it is important to be able to buy spare/replacement parts for a new ride, what good is a new truck if it’s broke and you can’t fix it? So… I’d say that including ease/difficulty of getting replacement parts into every review is great idea and something we should be including.

I just finished rereading your 2.4 ghz radio Radio Transmitter Shootout and overall I found it informative and interesting. One category I would like to see added is durability such as drops, water, heat and cold. We’ve all been caught in the rain and we have all dropped or some other way abused our radios and bashing in summer humid temps or icy winters can be rough on equipment.

Benjamin S.

Cubby– Yo what’s up Ben, thanks for taking the time to shoot us an email.

No, we didn’t have an “abuse” category in our 2.4 GHz Shootout, but… ever since our Futaba 4PL Review ( read it here ) we’ve been pretty medieval on transmitters. Every new transmitter we’ve gotten since then has gotten tossed, kicked and smashed, amazingly most have been far more durable than you’d ever expect. I especially like ramming WFO whatever transmitter Brian is using when he forgets and sits it down on the ground, it’s the simple things in life that really make me smile. 🙂

But… we have not been exposing our test radios to much water or extreme temp ranges. And true dat, we’ve all made that mad dash back to the truck to stash away our truck and transmitter before those light sprinkles turned into huge raindrops. I love torturing test gear (read- everybody does!), we certainly need to add those criteria to future radio reviews.

That’s it for this edition of ASK Cubby, submit your questions, lies, half truths, and Merrell size 14’s (any style) to Cubby at Bigsquidrc dot com. If your question makes the front page you’ll get a free set of BSRC stickers, and if I pick your question as letter of the month you’ll get one of our uber new T-shirts.

YOUR Cub Reporter