RC10Talk - The Net's Largest Vintage R/C Community

Does anyone else here listen to the Radio Impound Podcasts (RIP)? I just started listening to them and find some pretty interesting information. The interview with Cliff Lett was especially interesting to me. I am a pretty harsh critic of modern rc trends such as tracks, body designs, sugaring, etc and it was refreshing to hear that Cliff feels the exact same way that I do. When I say it online I'm just an idiot hater! When he says it everyone lets it go.

The comments on the stealth cars was what interested me the most. He stated that those cars were really the prototypes to the B3 and B4 and that they learned about equal arm lengths on those cars and where to mount the shocks on the arms. I compared my B3 and B4 parts and found that the suspension geometry between them is in fact the same right down to where the shocks mount on the arms. Neat! The B3 rear arms, B4 rear arms, and B44 rear arms are the exact same distance from hinge pin to hinge pin and the shock mounting holes are in the same locations between them as well. The front arms of the B3 and B4 are the same way. Same length pin to pin with the same shock mounting locations. The B44 front arms are close but are slightly shorter due to packaging constraints. A B3 should still be a very competitive car since the suspension geometry is essentially the same as the B4 with some minor tweaks. I am custom building a car using many of these parts but that's for another thread.

Cliff's comments about the front of the 91 world's stealth car were really cool. With the front arms reversed so they were swept forwards and the accompanying mods necessary to do it, they gained 30 additional seconds per battery pack since the front end wasn't bottoming out. Back then an extra 30 seconds added to a battery that would live for less than 5 minutes was huge. It was neat that they first ran the first car the day after the Nats event in Detroit and found it to handle wonderfully but when they went back and molded arms and all of the components that the car no longer worked when they got them to the World's. It's funny how material can make that huge of a difference even if they seem comparable.

If any of you guys haven't listened to this podcast or any of them for that matter, check them out. Some of them are pretty neat.

http://radioimpound.podbean.com/

http://www.rc10talk.com/viewtopic.php?f=88&t=31102&start=1230

page 83

Page 83! Of course!

i just started listening to this podcast, loving it.
listened to the halsey one the other night and the lett one last night.
i think R.I.P. will be my new soundtrack while in the rc workshop.

very enjoyable.

fredswain wrote:He stated that those cars were really the prototypes to the B3 and B4 and that they learned about equal arm lengths on those cars and where to mount the shocks on the arms. I compared my B3 and B4 parts and found that the suspension geometry between them is in fact the same right down to where the shocks mount on the arms. Neat! The B3 rear arms, B4 rear arms, and B44 rear arms are the exact same distance from hinge pin to hinge pin and the shock mounting holes are in the same locations between them as well. The front arms of the B3 and B4 are the same way. Same length pin to pin with the same shock mounting locations.

I find this intriguing because for a given wheelbase, there's an optimal track width where the car will handle best, and this supports it. There was a trend going to longer and longer wheelbases, and wider and wider track widths, but beyond a certain point, a car stops being 1:10 scale anymore. A lot of the modern cars look more like 1:8 than 1:10, to my eyes. I was thinking the same thing when I resto-modded one of my Optimas, I wanted as wide a track as possible, because I figured "wider is better"...but you can't just keep going wider and wider, too wide will impact handling just as negatively as too narrow. Fortunately in my case, Optimas are infamous for understeering so going wider definitely made an improvement. So it's interesting that Lett commented on this, of there being an ideal, optimal spec for track width for a given scale's wheelbase, and why all those chassis' you mentioned have the same arm lengths. (I didn't know about the shock positions, though.)

The power systems in our hobby, in general, are far too powerful for the scale. The things you see RC helicopters and cars do these days are things you'd probably never see in real-life vehicles. While it's certainly impressive to see, it's not realistic and it takes something away from the hobby, I think. The triple jumps, huge air, super speeds and almost no dirt at modern tracks just doesn't look or feel right anymore.

I guess some of us are old fuddy-duddies.

I don't believe that a good majority of modern R/Cs fall into the claimed scales any longer. The sizes to me seem to no longer adhere to any actual dimensional constraints, and implying 1/10th scale is now simply used as a marketing term.

It's something that has been bugging me for a long time now, and this was a good opportunity to bring it up. Although I don't want to distract from the initial purpose of this thread so carry on.

i agree, although i love the performance of todays 1/10 racers, they are not 1/10 scale. a grasshopper is 1/10 and looks tiny next to a modern 1/10.
but that started with the goldpan really, even the short arm is big for 1/10, it's long.