RC_Jeff

iTrader: (3)

I am looking to get back into racing after a rather large hiatus.

Where I am now: I've got none of my old gear save for a few random tools and spark plugs.

What I'm looking to buy: Any and everything required to race. The two most popular classes in my area are 1/8th buggy and 1/8th truggy.

How much I'm looking to spend: Whatever I can sneak by the SO. So have fun with this part.

What I'm asking for: What's a great setup for racing? What would you put together for a buggy and/or truggy to race right now? Remember I'll be needing everything so don't be afraid to suggest odd things. (Second kit for spare parts, etc)

monsterbrad

iTrader: (1)

You have a ton of reading to do..
making the call between truggy and buggy is your personal decision.
they are apples to oranges
Speaking from too many years of experience go with the buggy.
They are a bit better in my opinion.
Truggies are heavy and are hard on lipos! and have various other traits that make them what they are...
The buggy will take more of a beating and a good set up will run awesome on 4s.
Remember I am trying to nut shell this for you.
Watch ebay and try to find somebody that is getting out of 1/8 buggy and wants to unload an entire set up.
Picking a buggy ???
I would go to your track and see what the guys are running and make a choice after that.
And remember something about 1/8 scale they are all VERY competitive platforms in today's market.
Kyosho
Mugen
Team Associated
Team Durango(pretty much gone)
Xray
and a few strays that are good as well..
Read all the forums on the buggies you are looking at.
My personal opinion on this is as follows...
I like Kyosho and Mugen if you are going to spend big bucks on new..
The new Team Associated buggy is pretty nice read about it.
One more key factor is parts supply where you are.
1/8 are very durable but they all break after a while.

StrangeRanger

iTrader: (2)

Like monster said, a good place to start is your local track (if you have one) and see what others are running and what they like or don't about their rig.
Personally I like truggies better, but a lot of that has to do with the fact that buggies don't run well on the track I go to. They get too squirrely under certain conditions that don't bother truggies.
Either platform will take a beating and it's hard to find a bad ride these days. Just have fun, buy one of each
j

RC_Jeff

iTrader: (3)

Thanks for the replies guys!

To give a little more background I used to race 1/8th nitro buggy but that was 6-7 years ago and in a totally different part of the country on different surfaces. I'll definitely ask around the track to figure out tires and compounds and all that.

I guess what I'm curious about is what are the top choices for buggy/trigger rollers, motors/escs, batteries, radios, servos. I'm completely new to the electric racing world and it's clearly come a long way from the NiMh Nicad days.

SpongeX

iTrader: (1)

It's hard to go wrong with the new kits that are out now days. If I were choosing for myself I'd take a good look at the E817. HB makes super tough cars and they function well on all surfaces. The Mp9e tki4 isn't as strong but it's very agile and has been consistent for me this year. I've likes all the other cars I've driven and think I could work with any of them if I spent some time tuning them for my track. Only kit I would completely stay away from is the team associated kits. The 1/8 scale stuff just isn't on par. All the ones at my track are constant trouble and their drivers spend twice the time working on them that everyone else does.

Jason B

iTrader: (13)

I agree with SpongeX - you really can't go wrong with a kit from any of the major manufacturers. I absolutely love my RC8B3.1e. If you want a pillowball suspension car, any of them will suffice (Mugen, AE, Xray). I had a Tekno EB48.4 briefly that I wish I had kept, too. Great car.

It appears money is no object for you, but I think part of the fun of the hobby is chasing value, and SMC is the pinnacle of value. For motors and batteries, you simply cannot beat SMC's value. You say truggies are one of the most popular classes, so I'm assuming you're running on larger tracks. Given that, I'd suggest a battery around 6500mah (I run ebuggy on a medium track with 5200mah's and can put in 35+ laps no problem, though). As for motors, it's a tough call between 1900kv and 2100kv on a large track. 2100kv can be tough to control, but if you have a huge straight it might be nice. I love my SMC 1900kv.

I'm extremely picky when it comes to my ESCs. SMC offers a 1/8 speedo but I haven't tried it. I'm very partial to Hobbywing because they've proven to be extremely durable and reliable, and I like the integrated capacitor bank (which SMC does not have). Some kits (EB48.4) have somewhat restricted space for the speedo; I've seen people get the SMC in there, but it might be a touch dicier than Hobbywing and Tekin. Most other kits (Mugen, AE, Xray, Kyosho) have a lot more wiggle room for the ESC.

Servo... not much to be said here. I like my Savox 2273: at 6V it has .12 seconds for a 60 degree sweep and 319 oz/inches of torque. It can be run at 7.4V, which gives you 0.095 / 389. Regardless of the voltage, the numbers are plenty sufficient for ebuggy and etruggy. It's a great value at just under $100.

Lastly, I love my Futaba 4PV radio. It does more than I need it to, and it feels great to use.

Oh, and read this. Every last word of it.

monsterbrad

iTrader: (1)

I read about the new AE buggy and was about to pull the trigger.
But I ended up with a pretty sweet deal on a Kyosho TK off ebay.
Years ago I ran a 777 buggy and it was good but picky about surface and traction.
Tires are everything and now that most tracks have gone to turf and are getting away from clay that seems to be less of an issue.
Any way you go now will work and to be honest there is no BEST out there..
They all have there specific traits.

billdelong

iTrader: (33)

I would see what brand has local pro drivers in your area to help you out with setup, then go with the brand that offers you the best local setup support, that to me is the single most important factor. In my area the top 2 brands offering local pro driver support are XRay and Tekno, though there are quite a few fast guys running Mugen too if I had to pick the 3rd most popular in my area.

I started with an Associated RC8E around 2012 when I first got into 1/8 racing and it nickle and dimed me on necessary upgrades and would break a little more frequently than I thought was reasonable. As my skills improved I eventually upgraded to an XRay 2015'XB8E and it was a breathe of fresh air which quickly moved me from a middle of the pack sportsman level driver to the top of the pack in sportsman. I dabbled a little with the expert class but felt the car was holding me back as I saw some other expert drivers run considerably faster than me with Tekno on the 1/8 track, but I was faster than them on the 1/10 track (running different brands/classes) regardless I knew where I matched up in skill. That's when I upgraded to a Tekno EB48.3 and then I was in the mix with the majority of the expert drivers. No doubt in my mind that Tekno offers the best tuning box for my driving style, their geometry is completely different from any other brand and is worth reading up on... oh and my Tekno is significantly more durable than my old Associated and XRay combined

I also got into the truggy class about a year ago and I started with the Associated RC8T3e because that seemed to be the most popular platform at the time... I should've learned from my previous lesson about Associated's durability issues and would break arms about as often as Mugen (another brand that is known to be somewhat fragile). Shortly after I got the truggy is about the time I got the Tekno EB48.3 and that's when I knew I should've went with the ET48.3... the biggest selling point that the locals had me on the Associated was that it offers more aggressive steering than Tekno and let's just say that was an understatement... it took a lot of tuning for me to settle down that setup and while I did get it very competitive and even won a club race once with the RC8T3e, I decided that Tekno was calling out to me so I picked up the ET48.3 and my only regret is not buying Tekno in the first place... Joe Bornhorst's setup is perfect for my driving style, the truck is very stable and super easy to drive, I still had to dial out some steering for my driving style so the guys who said Associated had more steering that Tekno were just plain wrong.

One more thing, the "Progressive Springs" from XRay are pretty sweet, huge improvement for traction over traditional springs, but I've found that the "Low Frequency Springs" from Tekno are even better. I'm finding that with the LF springs that I can get a little more life out of worn tires that just won't get enough bite with traditional springs

Wish I could give more insight for other brands but since I haven't owned them it really just wouldn't be right to talk about them, however I will share this one little nugget.... there is a local pro driver who recently jumped from Losi to Tekno (both excellent brands) but pro drivers don't typically make big shifts like that unless they truly believe the change is for the better.

monsterbrad

iTrader: (1)

well put!

Cain

iTrader: (294)

I can answer some of the questions on electronics. For vehicle specific roller choice, etc. in general I would say give the websites for the brands that interest you a look as well as the thread specific to them and find out what are the pro's and con's of the vehicles. Everyone will have preferences, try to find the common things about the vehicles that fit what you like. If you had a brand you liked when running nitro and they are still around, they may have what you want too.

For electronics I'll group them into sections:

Motors

In general I haven't really seen a "bad" motor from ones that are oriented towards 1/8 E-Buggy usage from known manufacturers. The buggy motors are strong enough to push Truggies around when geared properly, some even run buggy motors in truggies so that should tell you what they are cable of. Tekin has always been a good default motor brand. SMC has been good to me as well and they are pretty cheap too. One brand that i have not tried but would like to based on what I have seen with there 4x4 SCT motors is Maclan.

In short, if you run 1/8 buggy, any of the known brands will be fine. The big thing is proper KV for the voltage you are running.

Assuming you are running a 4S 14.8V lipo, you will want a motor that is around 1800kv - 2100kv for buggies. 1900Kv-ish motors are a sweet spot. You can basically gear these to get the speed you want so don't go looking for some high Kv thinking you need it as the motors are overpowered anyway.

For truggy, the main thing I would look for is a truggy length motor (these are a bit longer than buggy motors) for more torque and better cooling properties. Tekin again comes to mind here, there 2000Kv motor is great.

Now, I will say this about power sizing your motor, some vehicles due to gearing limitations can benefit from going a bit lower in Kv than the range I mentioned. the ET48.3 for one I found I liked the 1700Kv motor from Tekin on 4S due to the available gearing range (how small a pinion you can run) to get temps where I needed them to be for a shorter track. The motor on 4S could push the vehicle fine, and still be geared properly for a variety of tracks.

Speaking of Motors, pinions will probably be something you will need. Personally I have used a large variety of pinion types. outside of a few that were not hardened in the early days of 1/8 Electric racing and went to hell quick, I am liking the cheap traxxas XO-1 pinions as they are very wide. This gives a nice engagement range to the spur gear so if for some reason I get some sort of chassis flex, I know the pinion is still engaged at certain points. They even worked on the Durangos which at one point needed for short motor shafts the long shank $$$$ pinions.

As for determining what you need for gears, a trick i found works well if find someone running at your track and just ask them what vehicle they are running, motor, lipo voltage, and gearing. You can using any of the common speed calculators back track to a theoretical top speed they are geared for. Using that info, you can then come up with what gearing you need for your gear for your vehicle to get the same theorectical top speed. I would then buy pinions around that range to give you some adjustability.

Another option if the above is not an option, go with pinions that will give you a theorectical top speed between 35mph to 40mph. that usually is not a bad range to start with.


Battery

Stick with 4S hardcase lipos, that will make you legal anywhere the class is ran these days.

Buggy: 5000mah - 6500mah 4S 14.8V
Truggy: 6500mah+ 4S 14.8V

These would be my recommendations. Go with a C rating 50C or higher. You don't need to spend big $$$ here on batteries. SMC has good offerings.

For the buggy you can find lower mah batteries that will make runtime (10 minutes in general) but you may find you want a bit more runtime for any practice laps. The weight of the battery can factor in as well as to get the best balance so for a vehicle you want, ask about that.

It is possible to run a truggy with a lighter battery, but I like a bit of heft and it works great for runtime, especially if you find you get thrown in with say nitro truggies. I have run upwards of 7600mah 4S packs.

ESC

- Hobbywing XR8 (SCT Pro version works for Buggies, the full one for truggies may be best)
- Tekin RX8
- SMC 1/8 ESC

There are more, I have seen or used the ones above in some manner in addition to others. The nice thing about the hobbywings in addition to performance is price. The XR8 SCT pro is a great option for 1/8 E Buggies. It has a nice small footprint and can handle the load well.

I personally would look for ESCs that have the ability to do a 7.4V BEC for more power to the servo.

You will want to read up on the different brands for reliability, etc.

Servo

Buggy - 250oz torque, .15 transit minimum
Truggy- 325oz torque, .15 transit minimum

Those are the specs I try to stick with when looking at servos for these vehicles. in general I go higher.

One servo brand that actually works quite well with say a Tekno vehicle due to the position of the receiver box (all the way on the other end of the vehicle) versus the servo are the Hitec servos. They have a very long lead so you don't need an extension. the Hitec HS7955TG servo has great power and can actually be ran on 7.4V according to hitec themselves without issue (called them, you can too, and the confirmed and have been running it that way).

I have also been impressed with Futabas S9372sv servo. It is stupid fast and a torque monster, however, it is a bit fat, so in some vehicles you may need to work it into the mount (Tekno for example).

Radio

I think the main thing here is that you get a radio that has features like EXP and EPA. Those have been some of the settings I have used the most.

You can also look for other various bells and whistles and pay for them too, but, against the competition here I have been happy with my cheap Futaba 3PV as it has all the features I want for a cheap price. I also like how the receivers from Futaba can be bought that don't have antennas and are reasonably cheap too.

I'd suggest going to the local track and seeing how the various radios out now feel to you and make a choice. I would also look and see how receivers are bound to the radio and if its specific to the model on the radio. Futabas you just bind the receiver to the radio, I like that so I can just drop in a different receiver if I need to without trying to bind it to a specific model.

Chargers

Adding this in as I think this is overlooked and you need the right info when doing 4S lipos.

You will see a variety of cheap options out there that will say they can do lipos from 2S to 6S or more cell counts.

The big thing to watch for is the wattage they are able to do. You may ask why? This all factors into how fast you can charge a battery based on the available amps the charger will have for the battery.

So for example, its common to get cheap 50W chargers. These will work out okay for a battery that is a 2S 7.4V lipo, common in 1/10 racing. Using this formula you can figure out the amps you have available to charge the battery:

Watts / Voltage = Available Charge Amps

so in our example:

50W / 7.4V ~ 6.75 Amps

This in general will cover most batteries 1C rate of charging.

The problem comes in when you try this same charge with a 4S lipo:

50W / 14.8V ~ 3.38 Amps

You will now be hanging out by the charger for quite some time waiting for it to charge that battery. Batteries these days can also be charged higher than 1C (1C being say 5amps for a 5000mah pack, 6amps for a 6000mah pack, etc) which speeds up charge time.

In general at a minimum I go with a charger that has at least 100W per channel, and a duo charger preferrably to make charging more than one battery possible.

I also look for ones that have a built in discharge feature so it can make storage charging the batteries (putting them to a voltage that is safe to store them at without damaging them internally) a snap. Nothing worse than the old days of having charged up a battery fully, break a vehicle, and having to do something to discharge the battery when you don't have a device with that feature.




Outside of that I think the biggest things next would be practice, practice, practice!

billdelong

iTrader: (33)

I've chased budget oriented options in the past for electronics and have settled on Brushless JX Servos for my truggy and buggy, they're priced somewhat disposable and offer comparable performance with most $200 servos.

I've been having good luck with an SMC motor in my buggy and GoolRC motor in my truggy.

As far as ESC's go, I've tried more budget brands than I care to mention, and pretty much all have failed me over time, the only brand I've grown to trust is HobbyWing for ESC's when it comes to finding something for a reasonable price... I would caution that you buy from an authorized US distributor for warranty support, ESC's tend to see the most abuse IMO.

My favorite brand of battery lately is ProMatch Racing, they offer free shipping which really helps reduce overall cost.

For a really tight budget, take a look at Radiolink for a halfway decent radio which offers all the necessities for a club racer. For a discriminating racer I would consider Futaba and Sanwa toward the top of the food chain, but cost for Rx's (if you run multiple classes) can really bite into the budget. I run 10 classes and have found a happy medium by running Graupner which offers affordable Rx's in the $25 range after Tower Hobbies discount codes. Brands of radios that I've ran in the past and tend to stay away from are Spektrum, Radiopost and KO Propo

monsterbrad

iTrader: (1)

why spektrum?
they have there issues but my dx4r pro has been solid.....but I did buy it new

billdelong

iTrader: (33)

Spektrum, Radiopost and KO Propo all worked great for something like 99% of the time for me, but it always seemed to be that 1% when I did experience glitches it was always during a main and never wanted to happen during a qual

To be fair, all 3 systems I got were used, but still this kinda goes to show they didn't really stand the test of time. KO Propo probably needed the pots to be replaced but I was too lazy to send it in... what happened instead was that I needed to periodically re-calibrate both channels for each model memory about once a month... but when you have 10 presets, this became cumbersome. Radiopost had a bunch of small annoyances that added up to a deal breaker, but generally found it necessary to run on 2S LiPo to eliminate potential glitches from low voltage. I never explored 2S on Spektrum to mitigate glitching/range issues, but once in a blue moon it would glitch when the right combination of radios were present. I later got a DX2E with DSMR and that was supposed to mitigate glitching, but on a large track with a large triple obstructing partial line of sight, the car would sometimes glitch, so I ditched the brand. I still see all 3 brands of radios at the tracks in my area and often see many of those drivers win plenty of races without a single complaint, but every now and then I'll see a guy make a random complaint with one of those 3 brands of radios and not long after, I'll see the same driver show up with a different brand of radio to the track.

In contrast, as much as I love Graupner, there was another local driver who picked one up after seeing mine work well for me for over a year without a single glitch. Only weird thing he had was sometimes he couldn't get the Rx's to bind when switching model memories. Turns out that he was forced to reboot when swapping between 2 different protocols of Rx's, they offer HOTTv1 and HOTTv2... I never had this problem because I always buy the cheaper HOTTv1 style Rx's and this other guy was mix matching them... so I'd be willing to bet that there's not a single radio system out there that doesn't have at least one idiosyncrasy, but at least I can say that I've never heard of Futaba, Sanwa nor Graupner ever have any complaints of glitching during a race, and that to me is the bottom line.

monsterbrad

iTrader: (1)

well I can say when I went from my old airtronics m8 to the new Spektrum dx4r pro my lap times were 2 SECONDS faster!!! LoL

RC_Jeff

iTrader: (3)

Thanks everyone for the incredibly helpful responses! I am definitely the type of person to over research every little thing before I buy.

I did forget to mention that I've got a high end lipo charger already as I build and fly racing drones.

When I was racing nitro I ran Losi's but they don't seem to get mentioned much, at least in this thread. Mugen and Kyosho are the two brands I was originally considering but I will now widen my roller search to a few more brands mentioned here. My local track is having a large event this coming Saturday and I am thinking I'll head over and bug some of the guys running ebuggy to see what they like.