ASK Cub Reporter- 11.02.2011- More Questions, More Questionable Answers
What do you guys do with the models you review? do you sell them, keep them, givve them away? If you give them away then sign me up! I would always be interested in a new rc! Really love the site and keep on bashin’ !
Gray M.
Cubby- Hey thanks for the props Gray.
We don’t “sell” used test vehicles as much as we “trade” them. For example, you trade me a new bottle of Dom 98′, I trade you a beat down stadium truck. You trade me a Rotolog, I trade you a taco’ed out nitro monster truck. Sounds fair to me. 🙂
But seriously…. some former test machines we keep to review new product with (like batteries, motors, etc), all the others we Give Away To Our Readers. We aren’t like some members of the press that sell old test gear (sic), we choose to take the high road and give the stuff away. Sometimes we just hand test gear to people at the track, sometimes we have contests. Which reminds me, we have a LOT of contests coming down the pike, keep your eye on our front page to find out how to win! I hear our next contest involves giving away a new charger, expect full info in a few days.
Hey, I was just noticing your ihobby posts and wanted to tell you that I would buy that uber-cool bigsquid bowling shirt that you are wearing in the pic. Not the actual shirt, that’s gross. I would never wear another man’s shirt unless it was an emergency, but a shirt of the same design.
Kind Regards,
Tom N.
Cubby- Hola Tom, good hearing from you as always. You are probably talking about our 2010 shirts that we wore again on Sat-Sun this year at iHobby. We’ve gotten a lot of positive comments about them over the last year, and thanks for your props. Unfortunately those aren’t for sale, but… we do have brand new uber t-shirts that have been selling faster than Red Bull at an ADD convention, just click on the “BSRC Shop” link above.
Can u tell me what manufacturers have SC motors and motor combos.
Matt N.
Cubby- All of them. You’re welcome.
But seriously…. all the major manufactures have “short course” specific systems available. What makes these systems more suitable for short course than just a normal 10th scale buggy or stadium truck system? The biggest difference is typically the motor. Short course trucks are heavier, have more rotating mass, and have big bodies that push around a lot more air, so larger motors are quite beneficial.
As far as what’s good… we have recently reviewed three 2wd SC specific systems, two from Novak and one from Viper. All were 8.5 systems, all were sensored, all put out smooth controllable power and ran quite well, so I can first hand recommend those to you. If you are looking for “crazy” power I’d recommend looking into the Castle 1410 or 1415 systems, or one of the Kershaw systems. The Castle systems are “relatively” tame on 2S, but yield crazy power on higher cell counts. We’ve also tested the Kershaws and they are another system that will destroy drive-line parts on higher cell counts (if you are willing to give up drive-abilty for shear power).
I was left baffled after reading your electrix torment review. You see i once owned an electrix ruckus and it was a piece of s*&t. I could twist the chassis with my hands flexing it several inches and on top of that i could not mount a small enough pinion to keep the motor from overheating. The electrix trucks are crap and i will never own another one. You have lost all credibility in my eyes for recommending them.
Jim A.
Cubby- Hey what’s up Jim? Thanks for the email…
Ok, a typical “racer type” would grab the chassis on an Electrix/ECX and declare it totally unusable. A basher type would pick up the same chassis and exclaim it was perfect!
In bashing a chassis with a fair amount of “give” is less likely to break… than one that is perfectly stiff. In bashing we are more concerned about taking our trucks home in one piece after a good hard days thrashing than beating Cavalieri across a finish line, so flexible parts can actually be a good thing.
About the motor in your Ruckus, we burnt one up in ours as well. So here’s the scoop- if you don’t break in an Electrix motor it’s gonna run hot, put out poor power, and have a very short life span. But… if you break one in they aren’t bad, they can put out roughly the same power and have the same life span as the brushed motors that come stock in a Slash. Yes it takes some time and “know how” to break in a motor, not exactly the best thing for a noob, so hopefully the ECX people will make a running change to motors that live longer without the extra hassle.
About our credibility- our only goal around here is to report exactly what happens, for better or worse. If we test a dirt cheap truck and it works just fine, that might go against conventional wisdom, but we aren’t going to make things up that didn’t happen. If we test a high end uber racer and it sucks, we report that as well. In the case of the Electrix/ECX product we’ve reported every single broken part/problem we’ve ever had with one, which haven’t been many, and they are nearly daily drivers for us. We’ve got hundreds of packs through the Ruckus, Boost and Torment, and we’ve yet to taco one out or have “major” issues. Yes, we’ve burnt up a motor and our Boost came with a dead transmitter, but their overall platforms have worked well for us during daily bashing. Yes they are dirt cheap, but they perform and hold up better than their price points would indicate, if that wasn’t the case we’d have zero problem reporting that as well, it doesn’t make a difference to me, I get paid the same either way.
That’s it for yet another ultra-informative edition of ASK Cubby. Submit your questions, at the very least we’ll have fun reading them, and at the very best your name will be spackled all over our front page. Shoot your ramblings to Cubby at BigSquidRC dot com!
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