Gold needs gold!

 

When you get the gold edition with gold rims you need to have matching gold anodized flange locknuts! :)

Lunch box upgrade

As I’ve mentioned earlier the Lunch Box comes with friction dampers, which means not really dampened at all. Despite it being quite fun to drive I decided to upgrade to the C.V.A. Short Shock Unit Set II.

Each pack (#50520) contains 2 shocks, some non-descript oil that’s pretty thin (certainly has less weight than the medium oils I have) and a choice of stiff or soft springs.

Here’s a shot of how the old friction dampers just push the rod up through the chassis. The Lunch Box comes with metal mounts for the short shock kit.

Since I got the pimpin’ Gold Edition my old shock housings were chrome, the new ones aren’t. But I can live with that :)

 

New dampers and springs installed.. Now when I do the “drop test” it “sticks” instead of bouncing back up at me. I’m taking it for a spin today so we’ll see how it handles.

All hopped up

Hop-ups are upgrade options that can increase the performance and durability of your radio control car. So, what can you hop up? Just about anything.

As you can see in the picture below, I'm all hopped up!

The Lunch Box

The Tamiya Lunch Box is one of the most fun RC cars I've ever driven, it's got friction dampers and huge tires so it bounces up and down pretty much anything. If you punch the throttle from stand-still it will pull wheelies, if you do it from reverse it will flip over! :) I'm extremely happy that Tamiya decided to re-release it, this time with an electronic speed controller. Back in the day all my cars had mechanical ones and a lot of you will remember chasing after rogue RC cars that had theirs stuck in full throttle. No more! The bathtub chassis is very durable and the hugging nature of the body makes it pretty much dust free inside (unlike, say my Humvee, more on that car later). The gearbox is the exact same as it was back in the day and the same one found in The Hornet. Out of the box this car runs pretty good, but like many of the cheaper Tamiya kits it comes with plastic and metal bearings, which is cool for about ten minutes. VXB sells decent ball bearings for a good price and if you don't know how many ball bearings you need of each size they have a Tamiya section where you'll find what you need. I'll repeat what many others say, adding ball bearings is the best and cheapest thing you can do to improve your cars performance. I ran plastic bearings in my Lunch Box, Mini and Humvee for a short while, since then I've bought ball bearings before I build and I just throw the plastic ones right in the trash where they belong! The Lunch Box comes with the standard "silver can" 540 motor, which is pretty decent and I used it for a long time. As I got some more cars and upgraded those motors I ended up putting the "black can" Sport Tuned motor that comes with the F201 (Ferrari F1) in it. Which seems like a really good for it. Putting too powerful a motor in the Lunch Box will either flip it or constantly lift the front wheels off the ground making it very hard to drive. For videos of the mighty Lunch Box in action, just search youtube, I'll make some of my own soon.

RC Cars need controllers

When I was a kid I always had a 2-stick transmitter because I could never afford a pistol grip transmitter, so based on some quick research the radio controller I got was the Futaba 2PL 75Mhz. Again I based my decision on brand memory, Futaba was around back in the day and the Tamiya kits come with Futaba steering servo adapters.

The 2PL was about $70 which is a pretty good deal considering the kit comes with a nice pistol grip transmitter, a R153F micro reciever (typically runs for $50), two standard S3003 servos (typically cost $15 each) and crystals ($15). The radio has 10 model settings with a quick and easy interface.

The FM band has a lot more channels available to it while the 27Mhz AM band that all the RTR (Ready to Race) Tamiya cars come with only have 6. My Tamtech gear mini-frog came with the Expec SP, which is the most basic one you can possibly get away with. It has an on/off button and a couple of knobs for steering and throttle trim.

As I got more cars I bought more recievers, I don't want to move the reciever from car to car when I'm out driving them. Since the 2PL came with the R153F that's what I kept buying. It seems a bit silly to buy a 3-channel reciever to go with a 2-channel transmitter. But for some insane reason the futaba 2-channel 75mhz reciever costs the same as the 3-channel! So my thinking is, if I hook up something fun on the third channel in the future (gearbox, hydraulics, lights, etc.), I can.

The next system I got was the Futaba 75Mhz 3PL system, the reasoning behind this was that now I'd finally have a 3-channel transmitter to go with my 3-channel recievers (despite me still not having anything connected to a third channel in any car). I made sure I got a different crystal set than I had so non-rc-car-enabled friends could come over and share in on the fun :)

The 3PL FM transmitter has a lot more convoluted interface than it needs to, switching car models requires a LOT of button presses. In hindsight I should've just bought another 2PL or I shouldn't have bought another analog radio system at all.

My Scion xB car has a LED light system in it and when connected I got massive servo chatter caused by radio interference on any of my recievers/transmitters. So I drove down to ultimate to get their take on it; is it the light controllers (more on those in a different post) or is it the reciever? To my surprise, the problem didn't happen in their store at all. So it was fair to assume that it was radio related. Their recommendation, go digital... so I did!

My latest radio system is the Spektrum DX3s 2.4Ghz it was ~$250 so way more than the standard analog systems. But any hint of interference was gone, which is worth a whole lot to me, especially considering how much money I put into the Scion xB (more on that build later).

The DX3s has a really nice LCD screen with a push-roller interface, it is very light weight as it only needs 4 AA batteries (as opposed to the 8 in my other transmitters). The transmitter antenna is very compact so nobody will ever lose an eye like you can with the "fishing pole" antennas on the AM/FM systems. The reciever antenna is also very short, so your cars end up looking a lot swankier, either by having no visible antenna tube or a very short one.

The DX3s kit came with 2 recievers (SR3300T and SR300) and no servos, which was pretty perfect for me as I had all the servos I needed. I knew that I'd want my Mini and my Ferrari F1 car on digital so I picked up a SR3000 reciever for $70. Which is only $20 more than the R153F's.

More on the awesome DX3s later... I've hooked up the telemetry from the F1 car :)

Intro

When I was a kid I got my first RC car, the Tamiya Hornet. I had so much fun with it that I also got a Tamiya Lunchbox... But somewhere along the way I lost interest... That is, until now.

Ever since I got the re-released Lunchbox I've been spending a lot of time and money on Electric Tamiya RC cars. Why electric you ask? For me the answer is simply;that's what I grew up with, so that's what I'm into.