So what made you get into "hobby grade" rc's?

[Doc J33P]

For me it started back in the late 80's when I learned about tyco and wanted one very badly. As I was about ten I had no money and my parents knew I wanted one. In the spring of '89 or '90, my Father took me to "Spring Spree' which is a spring celebration we have here in Colorado Springs. That year the local rc guys put on a demo at a baseball diamond and it all changed for me when I saw a JRX-2 for the first time. I literally became obsessed.

Over the next few months my Dad took me to hobby shops to learn about them and the costs. At that point my Dad said that he would not allow me to own a Tyco and that if I wanted to run rc's I had to buy the best. I still live by those ideals when I buy things as an adult. It drives the wife nuts but she understands why quality costs money.

As my family couldn't afford hobby grade back then I had to mow lawns and shovel driveways for over a year. Then one day my Dad looked at what little I had saved, maybe $100, and said that I had earned enough for him to help. I received my first JRX-T that Christmas along with a Tekin 411p esc, a cheap pro-tech charger, used batteries, a Magnum Junior with and S148, and a $5 stock motor.

I stayed in my room all day until it was built and charged. I took it out on the street and ran it around for a few minutes when my brother wanted to drive it. I was told to let him and then he proceeded to drive my brand new T into a curb and snap both front a-arms. I cried for hours I think, lol.

To this day though, I am glad that my Dad made me wait for hobby grade as that is why I am here and I think all of you are too.


So lets hear what made you get into "hobby grade".
Jon

[bscotti]

For me, I was oh so tired of the crap toy grade r/c's. Every single one was a disappointment (my parents never understood why). My first trip to the hobby shop was a disappointing one when I saw the prices! Yikes! I mowed many a lawn that summer to afford my RC10, Futaba radio, Parma SCE battery and thermal battery charger. I've never been the same since!

[vwjuice]

For me it was when my uncle got a brand clodbuster when they first came out in '87. He put inmod motors and painted the body to match his show truck. I fell in love watching that clod do wheelies in reverse. That was the coolest freakin thing I ever saw.

[karnivool]

always had rc in some form from a young boy then one day my brother who was always an adventurer took the family on a drive, we stumpled upon a 10th scale race meet. i just couldnt believe the size and speed of these cars and was instantly hooked, i think i remember tamiya f150 srb's and the kyosho scopions well thats the image i have in my old head. later on the local hobby shop lured me in and i purchased my first tamiya handbook, i took it to school everyday and my friends and i used to drool over the cars saying which ones we were going to get. we wernt a rich family but one day my brother bought me home a nib hotshot, my eyes lit up and i was so thankful to him, i couldnt even build it i looked at the instructions and went woah 4wd 2 gearboxes etc and had a professional guy build it, when it came back it was a cherry red coloured hotshot which looked just fantastic, i drove it around our big back yard with glee, mum walked out back door and i didnt see her the buggy ran right into her foot and peeled the skin back she jumped up and down shouting at me..oops sorry mum are you ok. after then i was pretty much hooked. starting racing/building kits myself and won my first race even. over the years been in out out of the hobby until ive found this unreal forum no doubt here to stay now with all you fans..

[tecnica2001]

For me It was my Uncle, and I'm forever thankful to him

I think it was the Christmas of 87 or 88, and I wanted a German Sheppard, at the time, in Puerto Rico, they were going for about $500, a little too rich for my uncle to get. So he sold me on getting an R/C car, I wanted a Sears Lamborghini Countach, he convinced me to look into off road r/c cars, so I wanted the Sears Lobo II. One day he brought home 4 R/C car action Magazines for me to look at, and told me, choose one of those and that'll be your gift for Christmas....

Off course me being a little kid, went for the Monster Trucks, 1st choice--Big Brute, out of stock, 2nd choice--Bear, out of stock, 3rd choice--Tamiya Blackfoot, and that's the one I got, with a Protech Charger, a Tamiya Battery pack, and Futaba Radio.

It took my father 3 days to build, and less than a week for him to break the body post while attempting a jump....

Been Hooked ever since, never once in 22 yrs. been without an R/C car...

Good times...

[mrlexan]

For my brother and I, it was solely my grandfather. He was into RC planes since he was a young man.... well actually I should model planes first, rubber band and general models. He got into control line, then RC as the technology progressed. I've actually got some ancient pics of some of his builds. Anyway, growing up being exposed to all that stuff and paging through his stacks of RCM magazines compounded with being raised an IMSA racing fan, ended up with me drueling over the Tamiya ads in RCM. Didn't get my hobby grade, Tamiya Brat until X-mas of 1983. That was all she wrote and now look at me.

[Bongo Fury]

I can’t really explain, especially since the RC aisle at Toys-R-Us was the spark that relit an unfulfilled childhood lust. Somehow I knew to check out a hobby shop, even though I was completely unaware of hobby RC and hadn’t been in a shop for years. Would have been so much easier, and cheaper, to just buy a Nikko/Tyco or whatever, after all they had some really sweet looking stuff.

Same with model selection, as I started looking into it most everybody I talked to had and enthusiastically recommended either a Grasshopper or Frog. The small shop didn’t even have a RC10 in stock, even though the guy spoke highly of them.

But they did have this new thing just in from California, no picture on the box even…..by this time I was tired of window shopping, guess I’ll just have to buy it and find out what it looks like.....

Could have been a huge mistake, what if Losi hadn’t made it, I’d have a white elephant, with a rookie hack sorely in need of spare parts. Fortunately it all worked out all too well. Everything else I bought that day was relatively speaking junk and quickly replaced, but that little unknown car is one of my most cherished toys.

[Halgar]

To be honest, I never knew about them. I'd see the cheese that all the run of the mill stores carry and knew they were garbage and really want one, but knew they wouldn't hold up. Then, back in 96 or 97 my sister bought me a Clod for my birthday. Actually, she told me she needed me to drive her somewhere, which ended up being the LHS, and told me to pick out what I wanted. I think I dropped nearly $800 in that trip to get everything needed to make the truck move. Next truck came from Tower and I got twice as much stuff for about $600.

[Y'ernat Al]

An article in Trckin' Magazine, from like 1981. I just checked and it's actually still published! http://www.truckinweb.com/index.html

Anyway, I was like 10 or 11 and it must have been laying aroung the house amongst all my BMX Action mags. They had an article towards the back where they tested, as a lark probably, a Tamiya F150 SRB. Like they do with the 1:1's they tricked it out a bit with parts from RCH (blue aluminum outers, double shock mounts with coilovers, a stiffer alloy chassis, etc). Anyway I was already into bmx enough to be entirely addicted to wrenching as well as anything annodized gold, red or blue for that matter.

I practically slept with that article and ended up with a Super Champ for my birthday that year. I was breaking parts and spending alowance money for the 4-5 years.

[faceman2k]

I was 11 years old back in 86' and my older brother (by 14yrs) came to visit my parents and he brought his brand new Tamiya Hornet and I was there playing with my Turbo Hopper. I took one look at the car and was instantly hooked! I had to have one. My turbo hopper went from being cool to anything but instantaneously. Needless to say that Christmas I got my hornet and have been at it ever since.

[ROH73]

I had owned various toy grade RC cars, but they were never fast or durable enough for me. Then two of my friends, brothers, got matching Frogs in early 1986. I couldn't believe how fast and cool those cars were. So, my parents bought a Hornet with a Magnum Jr. for my 13th birthday in June 1986. I've loved the hobby ever since and still run that Hornet on a fairly regular basis, although it's been a truck for about 20 years now . I also bought one of the Frogs about 20 years ago...it's still awaiting a restoration.

Some trivia for Scr@p: my friends' Frogs came from Trains 'N' Lanes and my Hornet came from Valley Hobbies and Crafts.

[Charlie don't surf]

My Dad & I raced GP slot cars ar a little place in Faimount NY, called Minature Grand Prix, I was under 5yrs old at the time--the place was owned by an elderly couple named Art & Winnie (can't remember the last name). One day Art was out back with a (I think) Tamiya Porshe 959
rally car painted flourescent orange--first RC car I had ever seen, and it looked HUGE compaired to the 1/32 slots we were running. Then my Pop's and I started racing MX for many years until he caught his ankle on a steel post in a fast righthand corner, splitting his tibia upwards, and ending our racing for a while. Then after he healed & the Doc said racing for him
wouldn't work out so well, we put the bikes up for sale & had nothing to do--Enter RCCA mag!
I decided that I had to have a Tamiya Blackfoot!!, but alas--------I still don't have one, instead he went down to the newly build Walt's Hobby--and bought me and RC10T (late 1991)
I raced it (poorly) from there until I got the hang of it--and haven't stopped since!

[scr8p]

Some trivia for Scr@p: my friends' Frogs came from Trains 'N' Lanes and my Hornet came from Valley Hobbies and Crafts.

T&L is still alive and kickin'. but Valley Hobbies has been a day care center for quite some time now. my friends dad (a fellow dirt oval racer), after they had their closing sale, ended up buying out all of the rc related items that were left. that had to be around '96.... '97 i think. dick wetzels is still in business right down the road from the old Valley shop.

how i got into "hobby grade" rc's was because of a guy that my dad worked with in the mid/late 80's. his dad owns a hobby shop about a 1/2 mile from my house. it been in business since the 1950's. so anyway, i guess my dad was talking about a tyco rc he had bought me that broke shortly after i got it, and how they are just a waste of money because you can't fix them. so, he told my dad to run over to his dad's shop and take a look at what was over there. so after work, he picked me up at the house and we went over the the hobby shop. he mainly carried tamiya stuff. he had a hornet, grasshopper, i think a fox and a falcon, a clod buster, blackfoot, monster beetle, midnight pumpkin, and a lunch box. well, my dad and i both liked the clod, but it was just too much money. so with our love of old cars, i ended getting the midnight pumpkin. i also got a challenger 250 stick radio system, a tamiya battery pack, and an astroflight 15 minute quick charger.

and i stil got it.

[justinspeed79]

For starters, I have always loved cars, since I was just a few years old, that's where it really started. I had always been into Radio/wire controlled cars as far back as I can remember, they were always my favorite toys. I always thought it was SO COOL that you could control the car without even touching it. It was magical to me at the time. In the late 80's, I was about 8, there were a lot of older kids around that had hobby cars. That's were I first learned about them. My family couldn't afford them, so I spent countless hours drooling over a few old copies of RCCA that some of the older kids who rode my buss gave me. In the early 90's, when I was about 11-12, I started working on farms that belonged to relatives, family friends, etc. After a while I had saved up about $150. About the same time, my moms new boyfriend, now my step-father, told me he had a Futaba FX-10 at his house. He said he would sell it to me for $150. It came with a Futaba Magnum Sport, a JuiceBox charger, and a couple of batteries. It was like new, he bought it as an impulse buy when he walked into the hobby shop one day, put it together, ran it a few times, and stuck it in his closet. I ran the snot out of it, loved every minute of it, and had a blast. I have been completely hooked ever since then. I have had more cars than I can remember. Unfortunately when I was younger none of my friends were into RC. They all thought they were cool and all, just not into it. Eventually I manage to talk one of my friends into it. He was a fellow motor head and quad racer, it didn't take much convincing once he saw my RC10GT tearing up the grass in his yard. He bought a complete RC10GT race setup shortly after that and we spent countless hours bashing GT's anywhere and everywhere we could think to go. I took some time off from the hobby in the early 00's. I went on a little adventure and bounced around the country for a couple of years, but got right back to it full force once I settled down again, and haven't missed a beat since. I have slowed down a little as far as cars go since I have started flying, but I still have more cars than time to work on them.

[aconsola]

I got my First hobby grade car in the late 80's. I had plenty of the cheapie department store toys prior to that. I had a neighbor in the early 80's who had some of the control line cox gas cars. He eventually got an RC shrike, the propeller driven gas car. I had been bugging my dad to get me one of the regular gas, but they were apparently hard to find. One summer we were visiting the grandparents in fort lauderdale florida when we went to a hobby shop. The shop was nearby a track that was having a big race at the time. We went over to take a look and got to watch some 1/8 scale cars race. We were amazed by the 2-speed transmission and the speed and size of the cars in general.
Shortly after returning to nyc we got our first kit. a kyosho stinger, the nitro version of the optima.