R/C Vehicles | More than Toys

Running R/C cars is yet another one of my hobbies. The hobby itself has a wide variety. Boats, planes, and automobiles are the major categories. Not sure if anyone else here shares this interest.

I mostly stick with off-road trucks. I only have a Losi LST2 that I converted from nitro to electric right now, but it is a pretty fun 1/8 scale 4WD monster truck that is capable of hitting 45 mph with my current setup. If I changed the batteries and set it to run on pavement with the proper gearing, it would go in excess of 60. I had to adjust the ESC to lower initial "punch" from gunning the throttle because it had enough torque to flip this 12lb truck on its back.

Here is a video of someone else bashing around the same kit I have. Might want to mute the music. He has a wheelie bar installed so his truck doesn't flip.


The vehicles themselves can be pretty impressive pieces of engineering. My kit has four independent, fluid-filled shocks. You can adjust the angle they sit at and how high they sit. You can also change out the springs for various levels of stiffness, change the shock fluid for different viscosity and even change this little disc that allows the fluid to flow past in different amounts. Mine also comes with a slipper clutch, front and rear differentials. It used to have a two-speed transmission with reverse, but I converted it to single-speed and forward only for better performance and reliability with electric motors.

And then there are the electronics, which have gotten fairly sophisticated over the years. Servos are common to everything and are used to control the steering and, in the case of gas engines, the throttle. There are also now sensors that will detect when the vehicle is not turning the direction it is supposed to (usually due to bumps and rough terrain) and adjusts the steering automatically to straighten it out. Also, thermal and RPM sensors and probably other things, too, that you can all see on your transmitter radio used to control the damn thing.

Electric motors have something called an ESC (electronic speed control) which sits between the motor and the battery. It takes the signals it gets from the receiver and determines how to send power to the motor. Some of these are programmable, allowing for things like changing the power curve for acceleration, braking, power cut-offs (to protect the battery), and many other things.

There is a variant of an electric motor called "brushless". I don't pretend to understand how they work, but they are very, very fast. Pairing them with LiPo type batteries result in absurd power for extended run times (like 20+ minutes) and made me never care to go back to gas again.