When deciding to buy a radio controlled car, you first need to decide whether you’re going to opt for an electric rc car, powered by a battery, or for a Nitro rc car, powered by fuel. As a rough guide, here are a couple of the pros and cons associated with the two options:
Electric Battery Powered RC Car
Pros:
The cars are easy to maintain with less moving parts
They tend to be cheaper to buy and to run, so are less damaging on your wallet
Cons:
They’re generally not as fast as Nitro cars, so you’ll get that feeling of ‘it could be quicker’ with an electric RC car
You need to recharge the batteries every 5-10 minutes as they have a very short life, with a long charge time
Nitro Powered RC Car
Pros:
You don’t need to charge the batteries so much as they only use them for minimal functions, and the transmitter
They’re fast, extremely fast. With a highly tuned top spec car you’ll run rings around a battery operate car
Cons:
The price… they tend to be much more expensive to buy and to upgrade
Maintenance. Running a Nitro RC car can be a lot of work as they’ll require constant tuning and upgrades, just like a real car, only smaller
With that in mind, make sure you’re aware of all the facts before you make your choice on what car you want to buy, and what you want it to do.
The Fox Valley Aero Club is one of many radio controlled aeroplane clubs in the United States. The club, quite incredibly, has been around for over 70 years and is made up of a wide range of aviation fans and enthusiasts from the Chicagoland area.
The club is a charter member of the AMA (Academy of Model Aeronautics). Also every member of the club is part of the AMA, which gives them liability insurance on their aircraft. Useful when some of the planes flown are over 6 foot in length.
Every Summer, usually around July or August, the club holds an air show named the ‘Festival Of Giants’. This show gets local and national coverage in the media.
If you’re interested in model aircraft and live locally you should pop along and check the club out.
Flying a radio controlled plane can be very difficult and requires a considerable amount of practise to get it right so that you don’t crash the thing. This video shows someone who’s mastered the art of flying an RC plane as he banks, and lands on a makeshift aircraft carrier made from a few tables.
I wonder how many attempts he actually had before doing this correctly. I expect there are a whole host of crashed planes on the floor next to the aircraft carrier.
A while ago we wrote about the incredible radio controlled car that allows you drive it and see through the ‘eyes’ of the driver, the VTS Vision racking System camera car. We’ve found some more photos of the kit that comes with it, including the really cool video glasses (which look great by the way) and the leather look brief case that contains all of the equipment.
You can buy the car, for a very expensive price it has to be said, from the geek site Red 5.
Who wouldn’t take you seriously wearing that?
Plus, imagine what you could with a radio control car that has a camera mounted on it… Interesting.
Park Flyers are small radio controlled planes that weigh less than two pounds and are capable of over 60mph. They’re small, quiet and light and represent a change in the direction of radio controlled planes.
The planes are generally powered by electric or rubber, or some other silent propulsion method.
The AMA is currently looking to get Park Flyer sites setup throughout the US, which can be either indoor or outdoor sites. When deciding on a Park Flyer site members need to determine if the site is safe to fly the plane.
According to the Academy of Model Aeronautics:
As an aid in reaching this goal, we’ve developed a special ‘How to Start a Park Flying Site’ turnkey package so members who are trying to secure a field won’t have to start from scratch when they approach landowners or officials responsible for regulation of public facilities. The package includes a DVD to show landowners and park officials what park flying is all about––and how different it is from the engine-powered, radio-control flying with which they may already be familiar. There are tips on how to approach officials and landowners, plus instructions on how to set up a field. It even includes a guide for how to quickly and efficiently organize a club, its bylaws, and field rules. And best of all, members will be able to inform landowners and officials that they’d be covered by AMA site liability coverage in the amount of $2.5 million, which should serve as a great incentive. The goal is to make it easier for official AMA recognized flying sites to be developed quickly and in great numbers.
Fourteen year-old Gareth Hunt (not the guy from the coffee ads) is looking forward to winning a big radio controlled car race in a few weeks. Gareth, from The Lane, Sauchen, has been racing radio controlled cars for four years and competes in both indoor and outdoor races.
Gareth recently competed in the Much More Grand Prix in 2007 and finished as top junior.
Coming up shortly is what has been described as one of the world’s largest radio controlled car races, in Mineralwell Park, Stonehaven, and Gareth will be there to compete.
Running from June 13 - 15, the race is expected to have over one hundred entries on each day. Friday is the practise session.
Gareth says about his racing:
Now that I am older, I also enjoy the challenge of building my own cars, painting the body shells and setting up the car to race on different tracks and surfaces - this can be indoors on carpet or outdoors on tarmac.
I have won a few races locally in Inverurie and Stonehaven, I also had a good finish (third) in the UK juniors last summer.
I am looking forward to the Much More UK GP at Stonehaven because the driving standard will be really high and I will have the opportunity to race against drivers from all over the UK and from different parts of the world. Hopefully I can also learn more from these very experienced drivers to help me drive faster and to improve my car set up.
I will also be taking part in the UK juniors again this summer to be held in Bedworth, England, so it will be really busy again this summer racing both in local club rounds and national events.
I hope lots of people come along to watch the racing at Stonehaven - it’s really exciting and you will be surprised at the very high speeds the cars reach on the fastest section of the race track.
One of the things I love about racing radio controlled cars is the fact that you can thrash the cars round the track without any thought or care for the car itself. It’s just a toy, therefore you can take corners at speeds (scale speeds obviously) you wouldn’t normally consider in your own car.
I always think this is much like when you’re driving a company car or a hire car. I recently had an accident in my own car and was given a hire car to drive around for a few weeks, and besides my initial disappointment that it was a lowly Mitsubishi Colt, I soon got into the swing of the hire car ethos. As in, I was revving the nuts off it.
It seems to be the case, when you have a car that isn’t your own you always treat it, well, a little more frivolously than your would had you bought the car yourself.
I imagine it may have been a little different had I been given a personal contract hire car, and was responsible for the wear on the car myself. I wasn’t though, the car was just a courtesy car and I was able to treat it just like an RC car, as in, not very well at all.
It was good fun too, though if I’d been a little more careful with my own car in the first place I wouldn’t have needed the hire car.
Now I own a game called Mr Soccer, where you control robots on a football field with radio controlled devices, and try to kick the ball into the goal. The game comes with two robots (England and Brazil) but you can have several players on each side.
This version I’ve just found features penguins, kicking a football around the pitch. What a quality concept.
The students were awarded trophies, medals and a prize of $1,500 each for their invention, which allows the user to perform unmanned reconnaissance via a radio controlled plane. The US Air Force provided them with the prize.
The plane is made from Styrofoam and is just three feet long, housing two digital cameras. One of the camera takes photographs while the other is linked up to a set of video goggles, that allow the user to control the plane, and see through the camera, from the ground, as though they were looking out of the cockpit window.
Alex Wold, one of the inventors, stated:
What makes our plane unique is that it’s so inexpensive anyone can do surveillance from the air.
His colleague Jerry Farke said the plane went down very well at the event.
We had at least 30 judges look through the goggles. Some people even wanted us to patent it.
The future looks bright for these two RC enthusiasts.
If you’re a real lazy gardener, the sort of person who thinks gardens are for drinking in and letting your dog use as a toilet. The sort of person who has ‘a man’ come round a few times a year to perform ‘magic’ on the grass to make it shorter; then you’ll be interested in this radio controlled lawn mower.
No more back breaking work sitting their watching the weeds grow, now you can actually do something about it without standing up.
To be honest, it still looks like a lot of effort. I mean, having to start the thing to begin with looks like hard work. Maybe you could just have someone lay some concrete?
Fourteen year-old Gareth Hunt (not the guy from the coffee ads) is looking forward to winning a big radio controlled car race in a few weeks. Gareth, from The Lane, Sauchen, has been racing radio controlled cars for four years and competes in both indoor and outdoor races.