The Slash Report #5 – Going Faster!

Well we’ve gone over what to beef up your Slashes to make them a little stronger for racing and of course BASHING. Now its time to get straight to it. How do we make them faster? In this report I’ll go over a few cheap race legal speed tips.

The motor is the first place that you need to look for a little bit more speed. The motor is a closed end bell mass produced Chinese sizzle can. The brushes a super hard and take a long time to break in. Under normal conditions the com will be trashed long before the brushes break in. To speed up the process I use the water dunk method. The water eats away at the brushes, but leaves the com in good condition. The best method is using a charger that has a motor break-in mode. Run the motor at about 2 volts and dunk the motor in a cup of water. (Watch out for the water shooting out because of the fan in the motor!) I run mine for about an hour, because the brushes are so hard, but it’s not a must. If you don’t have a charger with a break-in mode you can use a two cell battery or just use the ESC and run the motor at about a quarter to eighth throttle. Once the motor is broken in, spray it completely out with a good motor cleaner and re-oil the bushings with a race grade bushing oil. One or two drops are all that is needed per bushing. Too much and you’ll just have a big mess. Don’t use bearing oil as it is too light and will burn up fast.

Second, your motor is now running at full power and you still have these crappy nickel plated bullet connectors. The best thing to do is just cut them off and solder them together, but some tracks require the stock connectors so all you to do there is just pull back the covers and solder the connectors together.

Third, I know this sounds stupid, but make sure that the ESC is set-up to the radio. If you changed the radio or the throw on the Traxxas TQ radio it will be off and you won’t have full power. So make sure it is right.

The last on the list is batteries. This is the one thing that isn’t cheap or free. Buy good batteries. The better made side-by-side NiMh packs and Lipo’s make a big difference in speed and torque. For racing stay away from the mass produced shotgun style stick packs. The low grade cells and spot welded paper thin bars than have a lot of resistance. Go with a good Lipo or 7-Cell side by side nimh. The 6-cell nimh can’t compete with the power of a good 2-cell lipo. Even compared to the 7-cell, the lipo is still faster because of the drop in weight and more constant power. The nimh will also drop voltage more than the lipo does under load. If you can; go lipo.

Racing the Traxxas Slash is a ball of fun as long as you just have fun. Don’t act like it’s a national finals and don’t be that guy that t-bones every car on the track because the crowd cheers every time you do. The next report will be about nothing but set-ups. I’ll give you a good starting set-up and I’ll go over tips and ideas to make the Slash drive less live a dump-truck and more like a CORR Pro2 truck. Till next time guys and girls.