1986 'Penn Models' Touchtronics VF8 (V-FET) ESC

[dinglem]

I have touched upon this ESC in my MMS thread just now as this is what came installed in the red MMS chassis car.

It is certainly from the British heatshrink era, but when I saw it I had zero clue what it was. The extremely neat soldering on the reverse was a notable feature, as was the copper board itself, and the only other detail of note was the VF8 identifier.

I asked around a few people who are generally in the know and drew a bit of a blank, but then this reply came in when I posted up a couple of pictures on Fb:-


'Martin, this looks to be a Touchtronics VF8 (V-FET), these were developed and raced in the mid-eighties by many leading off road drivers at that time, Sid Girdwood was the engineer behind them there was also a VF4, 6 and 10 version. Sid was an awesome electronics engineer and forward thinker he also developed many items for Schumacher racing back in the day like the nms charger ccd charger and Traco speed controller, I believe they were the first race speedo with fets, Demon, Nosram and others soon followed. I think this model would have been around 86 as I used one at the 86 regional finals in Worcester to finish third behind rc legends JB and Kevin Moore.'


Has anybody else seen/heard of/got one of these?

[dinglem]

Well.... after some deep digging by another friend who has a vintage mag stash (oh MATRON!) it turns out that the VF8 was actually marketed as a Penn Models ESC (my local RC shop bitd). Really chuffed!

Penn Models advert from Dec '86 Radio Race Car along with a Brimod promo too.

[dinglem]

This has now been sent off for testing and a tidy up by ESC guru Ian Mullaney over in the UK - it is working fine and has been treated to fresh heatshrink. The original wiring looks good so all it has had is a new Tamiya connector added and it is now ready to go back into the Penn Models-based MMS RC10 it came to me in.

[winner_evo]

Looks a nice esc & early in FET use. Was quite a price at the time at £85. If I remember correctly, the Demon King esc was around the £45 mark.

[dinglem]

I must admit even though I was racing at that time, and Penn was my main model shop, I had never even heard of this 'VF' range until stumbling across this example. the whole car i bought was sourced from Penn Models along with all of the mods and hop-ups, so this will be going straight back into that car. I will post up a photo of it once the electrics are back in.