Granite First Arrma (Granite 3s BLX) - Couple questions

[sonicslp]

I unboxed it yesterday, went over everything and took it out today for about 30 minutes. First, I'm impressed. This might be the best $300 bargain on the market right now, imho. I come from crawling (mostly TRX4-stuff), so this is fairly new to me, so I have a couple questions, excuse the newby:

1- Are the bearings sealed? How well does this thing do in sand/water? I know it's considered a "basher", but I just don't know how confident I should feel in fine dirt/sand/water scenarios. After all, it was only $300. If not, is there a bearing pack that you could recommend? I'd just like to bite that potential problem in the butt right away.

2- Steering is quite slow. After a bit of youtube'ing, I see the servo+transmitter combo don't have a great reputation. I do have an extra 20kg servo and plenty of receivers that I could swap in there to connect up to my own transmitter. I assume this would be the recommended route? Are there any gotchas I should know about when swapping out these items? I assume the stock servo has a saver, so that may be an issue depending on the type of servo I have.

3- ESC/Battery issue. FYI, I put in two different 3s/60c/5200mAh batteries (both balanced and performing well in TRX4) and within five minutes of fairly fast blasts over wet grass (in the park) it would go into limp mode. After sitting for a few minutes and reset, it would work again. Do you think this is an over-heating issue? Battery was not warm at all, motor was only a little warm, wires were fine. Not sure what temp the esc was at, though.

4- Is it recommended to do a 4s build on these? I'm already impressed with what it does on 3s, but it would be fun to do a 4s build.

Again, sorry for the newb questions, thanks in advance!

 

[jondilly1974]

I unboxed it yesterday, went over everything and took it out today for about 30 minutes. First, I'm impressed. This might be the best $300 bargain on the market right now, imho. I come from crawling (mostly TRX4-stuff), so this is fairly new to me, so I have a couple questions, excuse the newby:

1- Are the bearings sealed? How well does this thing do in sand/water? I know it's considered a "basher", but I just don't know how confident I should feel in fine dirt/sand/water scenarios. After all, it was only $300. If not, is there a bearing pack that you could recommend? I'd just like to bite that potential problem in the butt right away.

2- Steering is quite slow. After a bit of youtube'ing, I see the servo+transmitter combo don't have a great reputation. I do have an extra 20kg servo and plenty of receivers that I could swap in there to connect up to my own transmitter. I assume this would be the recommended route? Are there any gotchas I should know about when swapping out these items? I assume the stock servo has a saver, so that may be an issue depending on the type of servo I have.

3- ESC/Battery issue. FYI, I put in two different 3s/60c/5200mAh batteries (both balanced and performing well in TRX4) and within five minutes of fairly fast blasts over wet grass (in the park) it would go into limp mode. After sitting for a few minutes and reset, it would work again. Do you think this is an over-heating issue? Battery was not warm at all, motor was only a little warm, wires were fine. Not sure what temp the esc was at, though.

4- Is it recommended to do a 4s build on these? I'm already impressed with what it does on 3s, but it would be fun to do a 4s build.

Again, sorry for the newb questions, thanks in advance!

1) Not sealed. Get a rubber sealed kit.
2) Servo sucks. Get at least the ADS-15M or an Amazon 20kg+
3) Sounds like your Lipos are overrated for this use. The 60C rating is what I suspect is wrong. Try to find someone you can borrow another Lipo from
4) I run mine on 4S. You will want the 4S slipper assembly to avoid shredding the plastic spur gear. You will also want a motor fan. Obviously you will need a 4S ESC & motor too. I would caution this tho as you will pop u-joints often. The 4S outer joints are thicker and have held up better for me, but you need the arms, hubs, c-blocks, shocks, and turnbuckles to make the swap. It’s a deep rabbit hole.

 

[Surchaufeur]

No bearings sucks stock change all of them if possible expect the sliper clutch bearing change the front bearing of your motor for a sealed one too or even better a ceramic bearing size of that bearing is 5x13x4 i think. If you want a better steering speed you can find on aamazon the dsservo 25kg coreless servo been running that for 4 months now went trought snow and still working but be sure to set your endpoints or dusl rate correctly
And making it 4s in my opinion not worth it the motor can would be heavier and might bend your motor mount like mine does on a nose impact on my 4s kraton its plenty fast for its size on 3s you can gear it up if you want to hit like 55mph or something
And for the baterry the C rating doesn't really matter much if its not too low maybe slap a fan on the motor idk. Thats something new that the granite goes into overheating are your baterries voltage doing ok when it goes on limp mode?
If something happens with electronics keep calm and call horizonhobby to claim warranty and they will send you a remplacement was 5 mins in the phone 2 days ago about my esc was not waterproof anymore because it started to do funky things when i was going troug snow like a complete kid and a new esc is in is way. I used the bad one today and was running fine but no more water with this one

 

[sonicslp]

1) Not sealed. Get a rubber sealed kit.
2) Servo sucks. Get at least the ADS-15M or an Amazon 20kg+
3) Sounds like your Lipos are overrated for this use. The 60C rating is what I suspect is wrong. Try to find someone you can borrow another Lipo from
4) I run mine on 4S. You will want the 4S slipper assembly to avoid shredding the plastic spur gear. You will also want a motor fan. Obviously you will need a 4S ESC & motor too. I would caution this tho as you will pop u-joints often. The 4S outer joints are thicker and have held up better for me, but you need the arms, hubs, c-blocks, shocks, and turnbuckles to make the swap. It’s a deep rabbit hole.

1) Bummer. Ok, I've just been searching around and it looks like Fast Eddy Bearings are the way to go.
2) I'll have to see what mine is, I've had it for awhile, I'm pretty sure it's a decent 20kg. Gotta find it first, though.
3) Hmmm, I think I still have a 30c. I'll have to look. That's a bummer, almost all my 3s lipos are 60c or better.
4) Yeah, ok, sounds pretty much what I expected. I just didn't know if the base platform could take a 4s upgrade. The rabbit hole is just as big as it is in the crawling world, I'm sure. Doing a 4s build would solve my 60c battery issues, but open my wallet to all the other upgrade issues as well. Noted.

Thanks!

No bearings sucks stock change all of them if possible expect the sliper clutch bearing change the front bearing of your motor for a sealed one too or even better a ceramic bearing size of that bearing is 5x13x4 i think. If you want a better steering speed you can find on aamazon the dsservo 25kg coreless servo been running that for 4 months now went trought snow and still working but be sure to set your endpoints or dusl rate correctly
And making it 4s in my opinion not worth it the motor can would be heavier and might bend your motor mount like mine does on a nose impact on my 4s kraton its plenty fast for its size on 3s you can gear it up if you want to hit like 55mph or something
And for the baterry the C rating doesn't really matter much if its not too low maybe slap a fan on the motor idk. Thats something new that the granite goes into overheating are your baterries voltage doing ok when it goes on limp mode?
If something happens with electronics keep calm and call horizonhobby to claim warranty and they will send you a remplacement was 5 mins in the phone 2 days ago about my esc was not waterproof anymore because it started to do funky things when i was going troug snow like a complete kid and a new esc is in is way. I used the bad one today and was running fine but no more water with this one

Oh man, the front motor bearing isn't sealed? That's a bummer. Do you know if that bearing is included in the Fast Eddy sets? Like this one? I don't see a 5x13x4 bearing in these kits. https://www.fasteddybearings.com/arrma-granite-3s-blx-sealed-bearing-kit/

RE: 4s yeah we'll see if I can keep from scratching the itch to do a conversion. If I continue to have limp mode issues though, I may do it just to get a new motor/esc in there. I'll definitely do some more testing as I get time before making that decision. I'm an electronics technician by trade, so it's very hard for me to say "no" to doing builds.

Yup, I always calibrate new receivers/servos/esc/etc. when I make changes to any of it.

Thanks for the help!

 

[tdikyle]

Wet grass is a lot of strain on a RC car if it's long, what's brand is your battery, a lot of cheap batteries straight up lie about the C rating, doesn't matter if the C rating is higher as the ESC will only pull what it needs from the battery.

Are you using any battery adapters? Did your lipo come with ec5?

The standard bearings are pretty rubbish, change them as soon as you can for sealed ones.

I fitted the servo from the 6s line of cars, they can be found quite cheap on eBay.

 

[sonicslp]

Wet grass is a lot of strain on a RC car if it's long, what's brand is your battery, a lot of cheap batteries straight up lie about the C rating, doesn't matter if the C rating is higher as the ESC will only pull what it needs from the battery.

Are you using any battery adapters? Did your lipo come with ec5?

The standard bearings are pretty rubbish, change them as soon as you can for sealed ones.

I fitted the servo from the 6s line of cars, they can be found quite cheap on eBay.

I have a lot of batteries. I used two separate batteries, one from Goldbat and the other was Zeee. Again, no problems with the batteries on any of my other rigs and I keep them balanced and at storage voltage when not in use. I use xt90 on all my stuff so I had already soldered an xt90 on the Arrma (bye bye warranty). I don't like using adapters. I'm an electronics technician so soldering is second nature, I do it all day long.

I'm sure the wet grass had a lot to do with it, I imagine it's a helluva lot of strain. I was just surprised it only took all of five minutes to put it into limp mode.

And I've already swapped the servo/receiver this evening and have sealed bearings on order. The 20kg servo I had is lightyears better.

Thanks!

Oh, one other quick question, I noticed Arrma has the toe adjustment on these quite wide, is that normal or should I bring it in a bit? Seems excessive to me.

 

[Armarookie43]

Rubber sealed bearings, metal spur gear from the 4s line (if you strip your spur gear like I did), don't run it on grass that is too tall, steering? I didn't think it was that slow, but I did change out the bushings to bearings so that might have helped. Make sure to adjust your steering end points so that you don't strip your servo or cut its life short. Have fun! Battery of that capacity should be OK.