Originally Posted by
howard1
I would like to know if there is a brushless motor which is approved to replace the Johnson 540 Silvercan brushed motor for racing.
Depends who you ask to approve it.
Clubs have their own ideas, whereas international bodies have their own completely different ideas again, so it's a mishmash of sorts because all of the reasons listed by previous posters. If you just want to know what BL motor you can run at your club, they would be then the place to ask. if you want to know what you can run in a certain competition, you need to study their regulations.
As explained before it is very difficult to compare the two. We switched to 21.5 and it was just unfair to the silvercans (or even the black cans which we also allowed in the class). Limiting gearing options might help even things out but still, as explained above, the torque of BL is going to be an advantage.
That being the situation, it looks like there are two schools of thought. One that argues that silvercan should be kept (or that it will never go away because of the cost advantage) and another which argues there are already cheap options with BL systems like the EZrun, etc. These are however not that cheap to buy upfront, but in the long run might come cheaper if you factor in the cost of replacing silvercans over say a year. There is of course a crossover point. If your racing timetable is not that busy, you may find you only go through a couple of silvercans a season, so BL is still the expensive option. If you have a really busy racing timetable, you might find the BL cheaper than having to buy five silvercans or more a year.
There are also the outliers, i.e. people who would do anything to be faster, money no object, and go out and buy specially prepared silvercans but I think this is a hobby gone mad and it only fuels the argument that we should get rid of silvercans because it implicitly means these people are cheating. Practically, it is difficult to argue it is cheating, but still, most people think it is going overboard and not in tune with the spirit of the silvercan class.
There are also various types of silvercan (Mabucchi, Johnson, etc) and there are people who claim some are better than others, but that again is missing the point of spec racing. It may be however the reason why in the end people will just decide toi give it up altogether.