Notorious First day with an RC

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If this is your first R/C I don't recommend doing extensive disassembly unless you're very mechanically inclined. I used to know a hobby shop owner who commented on the number of customers bringing in new RTR cars for repairs after they're rendered less RTR by a novice attempting to do a bunch of preemptive maintenance they read about 'on the internet'. The other basic stuff people have mentioned here like checking screws for tightness, checking the gear mesh and setting steering end points is worth doing and hard to mess up.
Why not do wrenching right out the box???:unsure: Because it will be too hard? If so then the hobby is not for you.
You will absolutely be doing it anyway at some point. Why pay a LHS to do everything? And I find they never teach you anything. It does not benefit their business model.
You have to learn anyway. Why not out the box. Children/very unskilled labor assembles these. Why be afraid to wrench on them yourself. ? Why be in a hurry to drive it like a kid at Christmas who rips open the box and can't be patient enough to read the instructions. Wanting that instant gratification. That is how things needlessly break. Many of the AF Newb issue type threads here are proof of this.:rolleyes:
7 Arrma 6s rigs later and every single one of them were horribly built. Some completely undriveable out the box.
Just consistent atrocious QC. A pattern of this.
And I prefer unassembled kits anyway for just this reason.
Many here have never had anything but RTR rigs. Never built one from parts out of a box. That's how I learned. Forcing me to learn to wrench a whole kit in this way.

>>>How do you become mechanically inclined (if you are not) without doing the wrenching yourself??:LOL:
Nothing is extensive with these Hobby grade rigs. Just dive in. You won't learn by just driving.
But I guess driving right away until something gets bricked is the norm these days.
Breakage and maintenance seems to be an after thought.

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Why be in a hurry to drive it like a kid at Christmas who rips open the box and can't be patient enough to read the instructions. Wanting that instant gratification. That is how things needlessly break.

where is this discription / scenario coming from? oh right; your imagination.

dude; that's your "vision" or perspective of RC car toys.

MAJORITY buy rtr, rip open box and run it...there are options for kit if you want...arrma is rtr rip open box...market developed to that because that is what majority want. what's more imo RTR is not quite "RC Hobby"....imo is like a modeler buying a half assed completed model.

of course best way to get balls deep into hobby is buy kit. they person did not buy kit...they bought rtr.

imo you and arrma are not a good match....which is odd because you're so active on this forum and have so many arrmas. love / hate?

imo that advice offered, across the board, including yours is spot on...op will follow the advice that suites them.
 
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All RTR's are generally subpar. Nothing new. No reason to not treat it like a kit, out the box. We all RC differently with a different level of mechanical aptitude, no doubt.
They became RTR's in the last 20+ years to saturate the market, selling to many who would never be able to wrench out the gate. (building a kit) A learning curve for this kind of buyer. Smart marketing. Not hating RTR's. Just they are mass produced very poorly to a low price point. I think many will agree. RTR's encourage interest and support for the hobby. It was waning 20+ years ago. Hence RTR's to save the day. TRX being the leader in this regard.
The OP has some knowledge in hand now. What this forum is all about.
:cool:
 
All RTR's are generally subpar. Nothing new. No reason to not treat it like a kit, out the box. We all RC differently with a different level of mechanical aptitude, no doubt.
They became RTR's in the last 20+ years to saturate the market, selling to many who would never be able to wrench out the gate. (building a kit) A learning curve for this kind of buyer. Smart marketing. Not hating RTR's. Just they are mass produced very poorly to a low price point. I think many will agree. RTR's encourage interest and support for the hobby. It was waning 20+ years ago. Hence RTR's to save the day. TRX being the leader in this regard.
The OP has some knowledge in hand now. What this forum is all about.
:cool:

Very well said imo

"No reason to not treat it like a kit, out the box." That part I agree with 100% and why I (and likely many) as a VERY experienced surface rc hobbiest went with this mass produced RTR rc; because I just bash.

THAT's what I like about arrma, it suites my use if however irking my suspension slop ocd lol (which doesn't matter much with offroad, let alone bashing).

the pre build part is a downside imo, having to disassemble is an extra step lol. but is worth the effort for an Arrma imo. it is durability that has me in the arrma "ecosphere"; and of course price point is pretty much lowest (best value for low'ish price).

with respect to lapping RC's competitively...this and traxxas would be the LAST rc I would buy lol. in that comparative...these are not really the same RC vehicle, let alone hobby...

and those RC's are in the market, but man....$$$. I'd love me a mugen 1/8 and couple of xrays...and omg the awesomatrix....yes please!!! that's what...12-20 6s RTR arrmas? lol I've assembled a Tamiya 416 I think...omg fitment, tolerances ect..that thing was tight however sensitive. a proper RC model imo.

I hope Arrma does a quality kit version. I appreciate it is costly to ensure is a good build experience and that would likely mean kit is more expensive than roller. But imo Arrma should take a stab at marketing a product to pull in some budding fans of mechanical things that go zoom.

jez...thinking it through that would be very pricey, would need to include proper tools as well. but you and i know arrma would ship it with 0.10$ allen keys and a build manual 2-4 revisions old and a pre-painted body so your RC can look just like every other of same model lol
 
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Why not do wrenching right out the box???

You answered your own question:

Because it will be too hard

If you have no experience wrenching on something of this scale, tearing it down, opening and filling three diffs and putting it all back together properly can be overwhelming and destructive. You lack perspective on this because you have years of experience as a serious enthusiast and can't easily put yourself in the shoes of someone with zero, who bought an R/C because they want something to drive around and entertain themselves without spending days becoming a proficient mechanic before they ever charge the batteries.

If so then the hobby is not for you.

Ah, gatekeeping toy cars, amusing.

You will absolutely be doing it anyway at some point

Of course, but you can ease into it. You can start by taking apart some minor plastic assembly to get a feel for how much torque you need to use when threading screws into plastics with different levels of glass filler before you go ripping apart your diffs and either stripping out or under-tightening some of the most structurally critical screws in the car. You can take one diff apart when you feel comfortable with it and learn to keep track of the parts and assembly order effectively. And so forth.

Why pay a LHS to do everything?

I don't suggest that long term, but it can be an option when you're new and still uncomfortable doing certain repairs and maintenance that you haven't worked yourself up to yet.

And I find they never teach you anything. It does not benefit their business model.

Based on how many data points? Because my experience is the opposite. Maybe a big box type shop like Hobbytown won't teach you anything, but smaller local shops will often do so if you ask them. It benefits their business model to have a good reputation around town because their business primarily comes through word of mouth.

Why be in a hurry to drive it like a kid at Christmas who rips open the box and can't be patient enough to read the instructions.

Where in the instructions does it say you have to tear the car down to the diffs before you run it? Right, it doesn't, only the internet wisdom says that. I definitely suggest reading the instructions first as with any unfamiliar product you buy.

Wanting that instant gratification. That is how things needlessly break. Many of the AF Newb issue type threads here are proof of this.

How many threads feature newbs dealing with serious, catastrophic problems that would have been made less likely by extensive preemptive disassembly? I browse this forum quite a bit and see about as many as LiPo fire threads, and there's a broad consensus that these are fairly rare events. Forums like this are not a good representation of the modal experience of the general R/C owner population, because this is one of the places people show up if they're in the cohort that has significant out-of-the-box quality issues, and that skews the distribution of members here to be non-representative. If you judge the frequency of LiPo fires by the frequency of posts here, you'd be inclined to think that they're a greater than 1/100 event when they're probably an order of magnitude more rare when considering the entire population of R/C owners. The same is probably true of blown diffs, fried electronics etc.. Your views on things like diffs, stock steering servos being doomed to fail after a few runs, ESCs not being waterproof etc. are likely similar distortions that stem from not having good intuition for thinking about probabilities.

7 Arrma 6s rigs later and every single one of them were horribly built. Some completely undriveable out the box. Just consistent atrocious QC. A pattern of this.

Do you know what any researcher worth his salt would say about a study with a sample of 7? Virtually impossible to detect an effect even if statistical power is high. There are likely at least hundreds of thousands of these cars out there in the world, you have owned and read about a tiny fraction of them and extrapolate to grand narratives based on this very limited experience. It's not sensible.

And I prefer unassembled kits anyway for just this reason.

So do I, because I have been wrenching on R/C cars since I was a kid and was taught by a nice person at a hobby shop how to do it properly. This isn't the preference of a vast majority of potential enthusiasts though. These sorts of discussions always remind me of computer forums where certain people insist that you have to run linux or you'll have a terrible experience, it's really not that hard, just format and partition your drive, run the installer, boot into the new system, run a series of bash commands to enable extra repositories and configure the system, see, easy! Easy for someone with a decade of experience sure, not so easy for someone with literally zero intuitive mapping of the steps.

Many here have never had anything but RTR rigs. Never built one from parts out of a box. That's how I learned. Forcing me to learn to wrench a whole kit in this way.

I had to walk 9 miles uphill to school too and it definitely made me a better person, much harder than the kids these days who just want instant gratification.

>>>How do you become mechanically inclined (if you are not) without doing the wrenching yourself??
Nothing is extensive with these Hobby grade rigs. Just dive in. You won't learn by just driving.
But I guess driving right away until something gets bricked is the norm these days.
Breakage and maintenance seems to be an after thought.

Nobody is suggesting you don't do the wrenching yourself. You will have to eventually or the hobby is unlikely to be practical. But if you want to learn to work on a car you don't get it up on a hoist and start tearing apart the diffs, you start by learning how to check the fluid levels and tire pressure, then you learn to swap the wheels, then maybe how to do the brakes. Similar thing with R/C.
 
You answered your own question:



If you have no experience wrenching on something of this scale, tearing it down, opening and filling three diffs and putting it all back together properly can be overwhelming and destructive. You lack perspective on this because you have years of experience as a serious enthusiast and can't easily put yourself in the shoes of someone with zero, who bought an R/C because they want something to drive around and entertain themselves without spending days becoming a proficient mechanic before they ever charge the batteries.



Ah, gatekeeping toy cars, amusing.



Of course, but you can ease into it. You can start by taking apart some minor plastic assembly to get a feel for how much torque you need to use when threading screws into plastics with different levels of glass filler before you go ripping apart your diffs and either stripping out or under-tightening some of the most structurally critical screws in the car. You can take one diff apart when you feel comfortable with it and learn to keep track of the parts and assembly order effectively. And so forth.



I don't suggest that long term, but it can be an option when you're new and still uncomfortable doing certain repairs and maintenance that you haven't worked yourself up to yet.



Based on how many data points? Because my experience is the opposite. Maybe a big box type shop like Hobbytown won't teach you anything, but smaller local shops will often do so if you ask them. It benefits their business model to have a good reputation around town because their business primarily comes through word of mouth.



Where in the instructions does it say you have to tear the car down to the diffs before you run it? Right, it doesn't, only the internet wisdom says that. I definitely suggest reading the instructions first as with any unfamiliar product you buy.



How many threads feature newbs dealing with serious, catastrophic problems that would have been made less likely by extensive preemptive disassembly? I browse this forum quite a bit and see about as many as LiPo fire threads, and there's a broad consensus that these are fairly rare events. Forums like this are not a good representation of the modal experience of the general R/C owner population, because this is one of the places people show up if they're in the cohort that has significant out-of-the-box quality issues, and that skews the distribution of members here to be non-representative. If you judge the frequency of LiPo fires by the frequency of posts here, you'd be inclined to think that they're a greater than 1/100 event when they're probably an order of magnitude more rare when considering the entire population of R/C owners. The same is probably true of blown diffs, fried electronics etc.. Your views on things like diffs, stock steering servos being doomed to fail after a few runs, ESCs not being waterproof etc. are likely similar distortions that stem from not having good intuition for thinking about probabilities.



Do you know what any researcher worth his salt would say about a study with a sample of 7? Virtually impossible to detect an effect even if statistical power is high. There are likely at least hundreds of thousands of these cars out there in the world, you have owned and read about a tiny fraction of them and extrapolate to grand narratives based on this very limited experience. It's not sensible.



So do I, because I have been wrenching on R/C cars since I was a kid and was taught by a nice person at a hobby shop how to do it properly. This isn't the preference of a vast majority of potential enthusiasts though. These sorts of discussions always remind me of computer forums where certain people insist that you have to run linux or you'll have a terrible experience, it's really not that hard, just format and partition your drive, run the installer, boot into the new system, run a series of bash commands to enable extra repositories and configure the system, see, easy! Easy for someone with a decade of experience sure, not so easy for someone with literally zero intuitive mapping of the steps.



I had to walk 9 miles uphill to school too and it definitely made me a better person, much harder than the kids these days who just want instant gratification.



Nobody is suggesting you don't do the wrenching yourself. You will have to eventually or the hobby is unlikely to be practical. But if you want to learn to work on a car you don't get it up on a hoist and start tearing apart the diffs, you start by learning how to check the fluid levels and tire pressure, then you learn to swap the wheels, then maybe how to do the brakes. Similar thing with R/C.

holy smokes!

am not too sure the source of the emotion, but dismay towards improvement in standard of living seems to be "triggering" to some mindsets / perspectives and generally amongst those 35yrs + (am old af myself). Perhaps is linked to being a perceived devaluation of niche skill set.

"instant gratification" lol most asinine hyperbolic slur that just screams baseless emotional angst. (lol I could argue is said purely for the "instant gratification" it, and other such "slurs" provide the speaker.

Also want to say, I very much enjoy reading SrC's comments / opinion / input and find their experience valuable / insightful. Of course not always, their opinionated and sometimes from strictly their own perspective....as is human nature. SrC contributes a TON to this forum and is kind and helpful.
 
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holy smokes!

Didn't intend to post a dissertation but I get carried away sometimes.

am not too sure the source of the emotion, but dismay towards improvement in standard of living seems to be "triggering" to some mindsets / perspectives and generally amongst those 35yrs + (am old af myself). Perhaps is linked to being a perceived devaluation of niche skill set.

I think you hit the head of the nail with at least a glancing blow. Devaluation of niche skill sets is definitely a factor. This isn't necessarily specific to the topic at hand, but along with a general psychological tendency of developed minds to perceive any change in the status quo in which they developed to be negative, there's a feeling of sunk cost in having lived through hardship that others no longer have to deal with that biases some people toward not wanting to maintain improvement.
 
A gear head with scale cars since I was 12.
A master tech at a Toy dealership for 8 years. Another 6 years in A/B.
>>>But.... I don't expect everyone to have the aptitude that some others have. Not at all.
If you treat these as simple toys impulsively, then they will break and frustrate you like toys do. Yes these are toys. And not hard to work on.
Dive in with wrench in hand.
Don't be afraid.
What is the worst that can happen anyway? You can only learn by doing. Right? You wont learn by just staring/crying at your broken rig. Will you???
Honestly.:LOL:
I just find that most issues early on, ARE preventable with some TLC out the box. In almost every case.
7 "out the box" Arrma 6s rigs over 6-7 years, every one of them fell short on QC. 2 of them not even drivable. I would say that is a decent representative sampling of the Arrma brand. Yet still not hating at all. Is what it is QC and all. If I can bring a newb up to speed, I will.
Have 17 rigs here in all.
Arrma is not the be all end all brand .
Neither do I pretend to be.
 
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A gear head with scale cars since I was 12.
A master tech at a Toy dealership for 8 years. Another 6 years in A/B.
>>>But.... I don't expect everyone to have the aptitude that some others have. Not at all.

I don't doubt your mechanical chops at all. We may disagree on diff oil and waterproofing but I would guess that you're one of the best R/C mechanics around. To put it simply though, I think your high skill level skews your perspective on what the average owner is capable of, like a physicist who works with sophisticated mathematical models will have difficulty fathoming that the average person has trouble with something as straightforward as calculating the volume of a sphere and is intimidated by seeing a variable raised to the third power.

In any case, I'm tired of this discussion and don't want to fuel any fights so I'm unlikely to respond again. Happy driving (and wrenching of course).
 
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