Tamiya RC Cars

The biggest one was the USA 1 which was a Burns chassis with twin shocks and various other differences,
It was massive and quite a tool in it's day.
They still pop up occasionally on ebay but they are expensive and a curse word to get hold of.
I have 2 x old Kyosho Burns and one parts car but partly the reason I got the new Kyosho truck is that it's very difficult now to get parts and when you do find them they seem to be a fortune, so it becomes uneconomical to run them.
I paid over 30 quid for a front driveshaft I bent badly last time.
I've paid less for full size ones!!
I love them from a nostalgia point of view though, there are not many models now that look as good as the old 80s/90s stuff and they were built heavily, although a but of a nightmare to work on.

Heres a few ive had in over the past couple of weeks. Most of them i would have liked to have kept but needs must. The escorts have custom liveries i did myself.

A couple of the old battery packs work!!! Just been blasting it around the back garden.
The controller batteries were probably 5 years old and had leaked. When I first started using it with new batteries, the stick for steering also controlled the throttle - that seems to have sorted itself out now. I need to order some new battery packs for it...

I've been enjoying getting back into this hobby,
Took the Absima out last weekend for a bash, and proceeded to snap the rear shock tower and the wing supports.
Ordered some new ones, now it's good as new again but it's made out of really naff plastic so it'll no doubt break again.
It's a clone of one of many HSP cars, and they have alloy parts but a slightly different design.
They all use the same differential, differential is held to the chassis by the arm pins and some screws, rear shock tower screws to the diff, and the suspension then bolts to that. Can't see why it wouldn't all fit.
Spoiler might take some persuasion though.

Oh, and I accidentally spent too much money on an Arrma Granite 4x4 BLX.
It's ridiculously fast.

That's fair. I think they're more expensive as it's an uncommon configuration these days.
To change the configuration of NiMh batteries you need a solder gun, something that can heat up fast and dump a load of heat quickly. That way you only heat up the tabs and not the battery itself.

Lipo's are a different beast and need respect. A proper charger, a lipo safe bag and somewhere safe to charge them.
They're already in everything you use, mobile phones, laptops etc so they aren't a new and dangerous technology, but they don't usually get the same abuse a battery in an RC Car gets, or the rate we expect them to charge back up, or how quickly they can dump their amps out to a brushless motor.

That's what makes them dangerous.

I got a decent charger, a lipo bag and just waiting on an ammo tin to arrive from ebay that I'll take the gasket out of and drill a vent hole in the side. The lipo safe bag should stop the flames and the vent will just let the smoke out.
Not too dangerous then if it all goes horribly wrong.
At the moment, I charge on a paving slab on my desk in a lipo bag.

Kids love them though (RC Cars, not Lipos) My eldest has a Rising Fighter, and it's just so much more capable than the junk you get at Argos, and the youngest loves playing with the Tamiya Lunchbox, so that's probably going his way when he's a bit older as it's a bit redundant next to the Granite.

That’s a fancy chassis on that Manta, I had one back in the day and it was a bathtub chassis and took a stick.

Yeah, I got it secondhand from a guy who was sponsored - that's why it's got all the fancy hop-up parts. The chassis is basically 2 layers of nicely cut carbon - I think it was the only way that they could create a competitive Tamiya 4wd at that point. A year or 2 after I got it the Top Force appeared that was basically the same thing out of the box - I was looking around earlier today and there are a few on eBay for silly money.

I think that's a much smaller class of cell making up that pack, I might be wrong

My current project is this AE86 on Tamiya TT02D chassis . Race bearings and sport utned motor just waiting on electrics.