ifuonlyknew

iTrader: (7)

I am not trying to be mean with the following advice. I presume that you are wanting to build a car to race as this is mostly a racing oriented forum.

There are ALOT of things you are going to need to know if you want to build a "full custom" R/C car. Typically when somebody wants to build a car completely from scratch it is because there is not a car that exist that fits their needs. The first question that you should ask yourself is "What do I want this car to be able to do that no other car currently can?" Alot of people spend ALOT of time and money on building a car from scratch only to find it handles the same or worse than any other vehicle of the same type (2wd buggy, truck, ect) that already exists. Vehicle dynamics are very complex, do you understand what it takes to make a car handle the way you want it to?

The electronics in an R/C car (transmitter, receiver, ESC, motor, and servo) are not really considered "custom" items. For these items you don't want to go cheap because you will just end up buying better stuff later. It's best to buy the best stuff you can afford right from the begining, and save yourself the headache. I would not recomend buying used electronics unless you know the person you are buying the stuff from, and you know that they take good care of their stuff. It would suck to save up a bunch of money to buy something that doesn't work. If you buy something new and screw it up at least you can have it repaired usually at little or no cost, if it is used though sometimes it can cost alot to get something repaired.

The other items you listed (shock & springs, transmission, wheels & tires, ect) are fairly complex items to manufacture. Normally when people scrarch build cars they borrow these items from other cars and mix them with their custom parts to build their vehicle. So unless you have access to a full machine shop, and an injection molding machine, you will need to borrow parts from other cars that already exist. Another thing to think about is with custom vehicles come custom made parts, if you break something you can't just go to your LHS and buy the part, or hop on the ol' internet and order it, you have to make it.

What I recommend you do is to buy a used car. Go to your local track and start talking to people, I almost guarantee you will be able to find someone that has a car for sale. Find out if the on site hobbyshop carries parts for the car, also find out what the good tires are for the track. After you buy a car familiarize yourself with it, read the instruction manual cover to cover. Then take your time to rebuild the car, replacing broken or worn out parts, and put all of the suspension adjustments back to the stock setup. The stock kit setup is usually a really good starting point.

Install your electronics, drive the car around in front of your house to make sure everything is working correctly (steering trim, steering end points, ect). After everything is in good working order get a set of the right tires for the track and glue them up on the right wheels for the car. You dont know how many times I have seen someone new show up with the right tires on the wrong wheels and wonder why their car doesn't work right. Practice as much as you can. Go slow and concentrate on not crashing. Rome was not built in a day and neither will be your ability to drive an R/C car quickly around a track. Stick with it and practice, practice, practice.

Finally, as you build your driving ability, so will you build your car tuning ability. After you have some understanding of what adjustments do what for the handling of your car then can you begin to think about building small custom parts to fix the flaws of the cars that someone else built (this is where I find myself now and I have been racing R/C cars for almost 20 years). After you can fix other peoples mistakes really well it might be time to consider building a car from scratch, diving in head first with trying to build a custom car without having any real knowledge of what your trying to accomplish is going to prove very frusrtating.

Good Luck,
Ifuonlyknew