Easter brought about a resurrection…of sorts. Can you really bring something back to life if it was never alive to begin with? Or is everything alive if it’s part of your living memory?
---------------------
They’ve been important enough that they moved with me four times. They were dead weight in all of those moves, things I thought I might do something with but never really in any serious, intentional way. Still, it was a part of my past that I had put away but never really forgotten. Sentimentality demanded I put in the effort. So they went to Brookfield. They went to Texas. They went into a storage locker for a year in Carol Stream. Finally they went to my basement.
On Easter Sunday they emerged once again.
---------------------
It all started in either the summer of ’92 or ’93. I want to say it was the summer before seventh grade, which would make it the earlier, but it might have been the summer after. My junior high offered summer clubs. It wasn’t summer school so much as summer camp in a school. I signed up for the radio controlled car club.
One of the requirements was to bring your own radio controlled car. My dad and I went down to the local Radio Shack and purchased a buggy. I thought it was the fastest car in the world and it was going to kick everyone’s butt. I had no idea what I was getting in to.
My little Radio Shack car broke on pretty much the first day. It was no big loss, really, since my little Radio Shack car was absolutely nothing compared to the cars the rest of the kids were running. It wasn’t something that could be repaired, either. My dad and I didn’t go back to the Radio Shack. We were directed to a local hardware store that had a hobby section.[1]
That was where I bought my first real R/C car: a Kyosho Raider.
The Raider was what was known as an ARR kit, which stood for “almost ready to run.” It was a starter car that came with a closed, can-style stock motor and a mechanical speed control. I needed to supply my own radio. I also needed to paint the body.
For those who don’t know, R/C car bodies are made of clear lexan. That’s so you can paint the inside. I did not know that, so I painted the outside. With a paint brush. The results were somewhat less than stellar.
The mechanical speed control melted shortly into the summer’s events. Back to the hobby shop I went with my dad. I bought my first electronic speed control (ESC): a Novak 410-M5. It was bright orange with a big, black heat sink. It also didn’t have a reverse option. I thought that was weird. The next time I bought an ESC I got a Novak 610-RV, precisely because it had reverse.
My Kyosho Raider was big, heavy, and slow. It was also not really part of the zeitgeist, as most of the other kids had Losi or Associated cars. Losi v. Associated was the Chevy v. Ford of R/C.
They came together at various points over that summer for spirited games of “kill the Raider.” Weirdly, although I firmly remember being a bullied kid and I remember the chants of, “Kill the Raider!” quite well I don’t remember that as being anything other than good fun. It was also a useful impetus to become a good driver. Sometimes slow and steady does win the race. Other times it simply means you can turn the tables on the other guys.
I also know that I didn’t hold those games of kill the Raider against the other guys. I raced with them for the better part of the next decade, after all. I can still remember their names, their faces, and in some cases their cars.
---------------------
I didn’t race the Raider for long. It just wasn’t a good car and there were no modifications that could change that. I’d added the 410-M5. I also added a Trinity Slot Machine 27 turn stock motor.[2] I shifted fairly quickly to 1/10th scale onroad pan cars. The big dog in that particular class was the Associated RC10L. I had a (used) TRC Pro10.[3]
Really, though, in 1/10th scale pan car there was no real advantage in one car over another. This is a Pro10:
This is a RC10L:
The cars were as basic as could be. It might look like the big metal bar on the front of the Pro 10 would add a lot of weight, but it was some sort of super light magnesium or something and the benefits of a much sturdier and easier to adjust steering system far outweighed the minor weight difference.
I put that car through a lot of races. The first body I had with the car was basically a lexan wedge. We raced on carpet that was stored on 12 foot wide rolls and duct taped together at the seams. One race the tape came up at the seam. The leading edge of the body caught the underside of the gap and the car disappeared under the carpet.
The car had its quirks. The motor mount, for one, gave me fits. The rear pod (as the motor mount box in the back was called) was just two metal supports with graphite over the top. The motor had to be able to move, as changing gear sizes required being able to move the motor to compensate. The motor mounts themselves were just a pair of grooves cut in the uprights that were wide enough to fit a motor mount screw. It was trivially easy to jostle the motor out of place. It happened in a race once when I had a pretty wide lead. The race was a main, which meant it was the big one at the end for all the bragging rights. I kept the car in the race even though it was emitting a ghastly whine and running incrementally slower with every lap.
I won the race by a hair or three, then retrieved my car. The pinion (the smaller metal gear attached to the motor shaft) had cut a perfect groove right down the middle of the spur gear (the larger plastic gear attached directly to the rear axle. There were no teeth left to speak of on the gear, either, which would explain why it was moving pretty slowly at the end.
In high school I needed to do a demonstration speech for speech class. I decided to do my speech on how to assemble an R/C car. I took the Pro-10, since it was a relatively simple car. The speech went pretty well, except for the bit where I cut a few corners and didn’t fully assemble the car because it actually takes for-frickin’-ever to mount a couple dozen screws while talking about it. I wasn’t using the car at the time so I never got around to fully reassembling it. The pieces are still somewhere in my parents’ basement.
---------------------
Sometime around the beginning of high school one of my friends decided to upgrade from his first generation RC10T to an RC10T2. His RC10T had the aluminum tub chassis and a lot of the cool upgrades, including Associated’s famous Stealth transmission. I jumped at the chance to buy it. I’d wanted a truck and I was tired of racing on road.
That was the golden age of stadium trucks, at least for us. There were a bunch of us keeping the Associated/Losi rivalry alive but also racing each other for bragging rights. Several of the guys had a competition going to see who could buy the coolest stuff and go the fastest.
I got the better end of that deal. I didn’t spend a lot of money on upgrades, so I just made sure I knew how to drive. I can still fondly remember weaving around my buddies while they went full-speed into walls because they didn’t understand the concept of braking into a turn.
---------------------
I wasn’t out of on road that long, though. There was a big change in tech in the mid- to late ‘90s. The old pan cars disappeared and were replaced with four wheel drive touring cars. I don’t remember Associated or Losi jumping on that market. I do know that I was a fairly early adopter, adding a HPI RS4 Sport to my collection sometime shortly after it was released in 1997. The other big name in the touring car market, at least as far as I knew, was Schumacher, who had put out the SST 2000.
Then came happy, amazing news. HPI was releasing the RS4-MT, a stadium truck version of the RS4.
I bought one almost immediately. Or, at least, I bought one as soon as I could afford to. It was the coolest thing in the world as far as I was concerned.
---------------------
I raced my last race in the spring of 2000. My cars were both HPI, which was solely an after-market parts, tire, and motor manufacturer when I bought my Kyosho Raider. The ESC in my RS4-MT was the Novak 410-M5 I’d put in that Kyosho Raider nearly a decade before. The ESC in my RS4 was the 610-RV I’d bought a year or two later.
In the thirteen years since that race I pulled them out exactly one time.
Then, on Easter Sunday of 2013, a resurrection.
(L-R: RC10T, RS4, RS4-MT)
---------------------
[1]That hardware store’s hobby section had R/C car stuff, model trains, and RPG stuff for reasons that are completely beyond my comprehension. I also used to get Ral Partha BattleTech minifigs there. My BattleTech thing and my R/C car thing are oddly intertwined like that. The week before I pulled my R/C cars out I pulled my BattleTech stuff out, set up a scenario, and played a game (against myself, because I’m weird like that).
In order to do that I had to come up with a way to create a temporary workspace. I also decided to finally get around to finishing a Shadow Cat and Cauldron-Born minifig that I got a few years ago.
This, somehow, got me thinking about R/C cars. Weirdly, the last time I put serious thought to one I also put serious thought to the other. There was a power outage in the summer of 2007 that lasted for the better part of a week. In order to pass the time I pulled out my BattleTech minifigs and my old Testors paint and painted (or, in a few cases, re-painted, including an Axeman that I’d completely and totally butchered but which is now one of my favorites) a bunch.
I was still seeing Amy at the time and I showed her what I was working on. She, um, she didn’t get why I thought it was cool. At around that time I also pulled my R/C stuff out to see if it worked. I took my RS4-MT over to her place one night to show her what I was talking about. She was nonplussed, to say the least.
There’s probably a lesson to be learned here, but fuck if I know what it is.
[2]”Turns” are a strange and wondrous thing that I never fully understood. These were electric motors, so they consisted of a round can with magnets on the edge and a pole that went down the middle. Wire was wrapped around the pole and the amount of wire determined the turns. The higher the number of turns the slower the motor because, um, science, bitches. I guess. There was then a cut off somewhere in the neighborhood of 22-24 turns that switched from “stock” to “modified.” Modified motors were generally faster. They also had an additional signifier of “double,” “triple,” and, I suppose, “single.” What that means is…um…I don’t know. I mostly raced stock because stock motors were a lot cheaper than modified. I was also usually running in some sort of formalized class where we all used similar equipment and kept track of points throughout the year.
I developed loyalties in motors, much like I developed loyalties in speed controls. My ESCs were both Novak. My motors were either Trinity or Reedy unless I was required to run something else. The two best motors I had at the end were a Reedy Speedworks 17 turn modified and a Trinity Onyx 14 turn double from their SpeedGems series, which was the absolute shit.
[3]You might be noticing a pattern here…
---------------------
They’ve been important enough that they moved with me four times. They were dead weight in all of those moves, things I thought I might do something with but never really in any serious, intentional way. Still, it was a part of my past that I had put away but never really forgotten. Sentimentality demanded I put in the effort. So they went to Brookfield. They went to Texas. They went into a storage locker for a year in Carol Stream. Finally they went to my basement.
On Easter Sunday they emerged once again.
---------------------
It all started in either the summer of ’92 or ’93. I want to say it was the summer before seventh grade, which would make it the earlier, but it might have been the summer after. My junior high offered summer clubs. It wasn’t summer school so much as summer camp in a school. I signed up for the radio controlled car club.
One of the requirements was to bring your own radio controlled car. My dad and I went down to the local Radio Shack and purchased a buggy. I thought it was the fastest car in the world and it was going to kick everyone’s butt. I had no idea what I was getting in to.
My little Radio Shack car broke on pretty much the first day. It was no big loss, really, since my little Radio Shack car was absolutely nothing compared to the cars the rest of the kids were running. It wasn’t something that could be repaired, either. My dad and I didn’t go back to the Radio Shack. We were directed to a local hardware store that had a hobby section.[1]
That was where I bought my first real R/C car: a Kyosho Raider.
The Raider was what was known as an ARR kit, which stood for “almost ready to run.” It was a starter car that came with a closed, can-style stock motor and a mechanical speed control. I needed to supply my own radio. I also needed to paint the body.
For those who don’t know, R/C car bodies are made of clear lexan. That’s so you can paint the inside. I did not know that, so I painted the outside. With a paint brush. The results were somewhat less than stellar.
The mechanical speed control melted shortly into the summer’s events. Back to the hobby shop I went with my dad. I bought my first electronic speed control (ESC): a Novak 410-M5. It was bright orange with a big, black heat sink. It also didn’t have a reverse option. I thought that was weird. The next time I bought an ESC I got a Novak 610-RV, precisely because it had reverse.
My Kyosho Raider was big, heavy, and slow. It was also not really part of the zeitgeist, as most of the other kids had Losi or Associated cars. Losi v. Associated was the Chevy v. Ford of R/C.
They came together at various points over that summer for spirited games of “kill the Raider.” Weirdly, although I firmly remember being a bullied kid and I remember the chants of, “Kill the Raider!” quite well I don’t remember that as being anything other than good fun. It was also a useful impetus to become a good driver. Sometimes slow and steady does win the race. Other times it simply means you can turn the tables on the other guys.
I also know that I didn’t hold those games of kill the Raider against the other guys. I raced with them for the better part of the next decade, after all. I can still remember their names, their faces, and in some cases their cars.
---------------------
I didn’t race the Raider for long. It just wasn’t a good car and there were no modifications that could change that. I’d added the 410-M5. I also added a Trinity Slot Machine 27 turn stock motor.[2] I shifted fairly quickly to 1/10th scale onroad pan cars. The big dog in that particular class was the Associated RC10L. I had a (used) TRC Pro10.[3]
Really, though, in 1/10th scale pan car there was no real advantage in one car over another. This is a Pro10:
This is a RC10L:
The cars were as basic as could be. It might look like the big metal bar on the front of the Pro 10 would add a lot of weight, but it was some sort of super light magnesium or something and the benefits of a much sturdier and easier to adjust steering system far outweighed the minor weight difference.
I put that car through a lot of races. The first body I had with the car was basically a lexan wedge. We raced on carpet that was stored on 12 foot wide rolls and duct taped together at the seams. One race the tape came up at the seam. The leading edge of the body caught the underside of the gap and the car disappeared under the carpet.
The car had its quirks. The motor mount, for one, gave me fits. The rear pod (as the motor mount box in the back was called) was just two metal supports with graphite over the top. The motor had to be able to move, as changing gear sizes required being able to move the motor to compensate. The motor mounts themselves were just a pair of grooves cut in the uprights that were wide enough to fit a motor mount screw. It was trivially easy to jostle the motor out of place. It happened in a race once when I had a pretty wide lead. The race was a main, which meant it was the big one at the end for all the bragging rights. I kept the car in the race even though it was emitting a ghastly whine and running incrementally slower with every lap.
I won the race by a hair or three, then retrieved my car. The pinion (the smaller metal gear attached to the motor shaft) had cut a perfect groove right down the middle of the spur gear (the larger plastic gear attached directly to the rear axle. There were no teeth left to speak of on the gear, either, which would explain why it was moving pretty slowly at the end.
In high school I needed to do a demonstration speech for speech class. I decided to do my speech on how to assemble an R/C car. I took the Pro-10, since it was a relatively simple car. The speech went pretty well, except for the bit where I cut a few corners and didn’t fully assemble the car because it actually takes for-frickin’-ever to mount a couple dozen screws while talking about it. I wasn’t using the car at the time so I never got around to fully reassembling it. The pieces are still somewhere in my parents’ basement.
---------------------
Sometime around the beginning of high school one of my friends decided to upgrade from his first generation RC10T to an RC10T2. His RC10T had the aluminum tub chassis and a lot of the cool upgrades, including Associated’s famous Stealth transmission. I jumped at the chance to buy it. I’d wanted a truck and I was tired of racing on road.
That was the golden age of stadium trucks, at least for us. There were a bunch of us keeping the Associated/Losi rivalry alive but also racing each other for bragging rights. Several of the guys had a competition going to see who could buy the coolest stuff and go the fastest.
I got the better end of that deal. I didn’t spend a lot of money on upgrades, so I just made sure I knew how to drive. I can still fondly remember weaving around my buddies while they went full-speed into walls because they didn’t understand the concept of braking into a turn.
---------------------
I wasn’t out of on road that long, though. There was a big change in tech in the mid- to late ‘90s. The old pan cars disappeared and were replaced with four wheel drive touring cars. I don’t remember Associated or Losi jumping on that market. I do know that I was a fairly early adopter, adding a HPI RS4 Sport to my collection sometime shortly after it was released in 1997. The other big name in the touring car market, at least as far as I knew, was Schumacher, who had put out the SST 2000.
Then came happy, amazing news. HPI was releasing the RS4-MT, a stadium truck version of the RS4.
I bought one almost immediately. Or, at least, I bought one as soon as I could afford to. It was the coolest thing in the world as far as I was concerned.
---------------------
I raced my last race in the spring of 2000. My cars were both HPI, which was solely an after-market parts, tire, and motor manufacturer when I bought my Kyosho Raider. The ESC in my RS4-MT was the Novak 410-M5 I’d put in that Kyosho Raider nearly a decade before. The ESC in my RS4 was the 610-RV I’d bought a year or two later.
In the thirteen years since that race I pulled them out exactly one time.
Then, on Easter Sunday of 2013, a resurrection.
(L-R: RC10T, RS4, RS4-MT)
---------------------
[1]That hardware store’s hobby section had R/C car stuff, model trains, and RPG stuff for reasons that are completely beyond my comprehension. I also used to get Ral Partha BattleTech minifigs there. My BattleTech thing and my R/C car thing are oddly intertwined like that. The week before I pulled my R/C cars out I pulled my BattleTech stuff out, set up a scenario, and played a game (against myself, because I’m weird like that).
In order to do that I had to come up with a way to create a temporary workspace. I also decided to finally get around to finishing a Shadow Cat and Cauldron-Born minifig that I got a few years ago.
This, somehow, got me thinking about R/C cars. Weirdly, the last time I put serious thought to one I also put serious thought to the other. There was a power outage in the summer of 2007 that lasted for the better part of a week. In order to pass the time I pulled out my BattleTech minifigs and my old Testors paint and painted (or, in a few cases, re-painted, including an Axeman that I’d completely and totally butchered but which is now one of my favorites) a bunch.
I was still seeing Amy at the time and I showed her what I was working on. She, um, she didn’t get why I thought it was cool. At around that time I also pulled my R/C stuff out to see if it worked. I took my RS4-MT over to her place one night to show her what I was talking about. She was nonplussed, to say the least.
There’s probably a lesson to be learned here, but fuck if I know what it is.
[2]”Turns” are a strange and wondrous thing that I never fully understood. These were electric motors, so they consisted of a round can with magnets on the edge and a pole that went down the middle. Wire was wrapped around the pole and the amount of wire determined the turns. The higher the number of turns the slower the motor because, um, science, bitches. I guess. There was then a cut off somewhere in the neighborhood of 22-24 turns that switched from “stock” to “modified.” Modified motors were generally faster. They also had an additional signifier of “double,” “triple,” and, I suppose, “single.” What that means is…um…I don’t know. I mostly raced stock because stock motors were a lot cheaper than modified. I was also usually running in some sort of formalized class where we all used similar equipment and kept track of points throughout the year.
I developed loyalties in motors, much like I developed loyalties in speed controls. My ESCs were both Novak. My motors were either Trinity or Reedy unless I was required to run something else. The two best motors I had at the end were a Reedy Speedworks 17 turn modified and a Trinity Onyx 14 turn double from their SpeedGems series, which was the absolute shit.
[3]You might be noticing a pattern here…
Oh, modern BattleTech. In my day we didn't have double heat sinks or gauss rifles. (But I did get some wedding cake at GenCon '88.) :-)
Posted by: Firedrake | 04/10/2013 at 11:31 AM