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Confused Bloke


Mr Fro

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Hello everyone,

Thanks for having me on here.

A few years back my father-in-law died leaving quite a collection of radio controlled cars, boats & planes.

Yesterday my wife and I went over to his garage and brought back as much stuff as we could to our place to try and sort things out. We packed two cars to the brim and currently have 14 cars, 3 tanks & 5 boats in varying states of assembly plus 50 odd biscuit tins of parts & components and loads of other bits and bobs clogging up my workshop. There's still 5 or 6 planes in his garage but they can stay there until I figure this lot out!

Anyway, I know next to nothing about rc stuff but my aim is to try and get as much as I can together and working then move them along to people who want them. I'm going to keep a few special models for my kids to play with though!

I'm probably going to be asking some exceedingly, bordering on painfully basic questions as essentially I know nothing!

I hope you don't mind too much and with some luck you might get to enjoy my misadventures and some build threads of some interesting models (I've got some old Tamiya kit in here... somewhere).

Cheers,
Fro

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Cheers guys, it's certainly a big old task!

 

I've been doing a survey of the batteries (4 boxes) and been charging up the ones with reasonable residual voltage in them. The good news is I got a little buggy up and running once I sussed out which of the 20 controllers went with it. Today's learning: don't trust the label on the top of the receiver, always pull the crystal to check the band!

 

I'm going to try and get the electric stuff working first. This is the next on the list because it looks complete:

 

20220925_210040.thumb.jpg.7c25e429206b3db4471bf7de02311ccd.jpg

 

I stuck a good battery on it but got no power coming out of the HobbyWing component (I'm assuming that's a regulator / management system). I'll have a look through the boxes and see if there's a replacement...

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The biggest challenge with a collection like this is actually identifying what you have.

 

For example....with the tanks.... the common scale is 1/16, and you could have Tamiya tanks ( costing £500 or more new ) or Heng Long tanks ( costing around £150 new) and if you are selling them on, you don;t want to sell Tamiya stuff for Chinese copy prices.

Same goes for the cars. Plus, of course, if you need spares, you need to know if you can get them, and how easily. Keeping cars for the kids to play with is nice, but you want to keep ones that you can use properly, and fix if you break things. Not find out you are driving a rare and collectable shelf-queen with parts made from pure unobtanium 🙂

 

Or end up trying to shift a Chinese HiMoto rebrand on E-Bay for double what its worth.

 

I'm guessing that some of this stuff is fairly old, as 'crystal' based radios have been largely replaced with 2.4Ghz gear that do not need or use them.

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I know what you're saying @Nitroholic. Luckily he kept many instructions, booklets & boxes that came with the models so I've got a reasonable idea of what's what.

 

The ones for the kids are just little Rhino buggies although the wife noticed that I was enjoying fiddling around yesterday and suggested I have a look at a local rc racing group... 🙂

 

When he retired in the 2000s he worked for a while in an rc shop and often got paid in parts and bought models from customers so there's plenty of bits and pieces. There's one box full of unopened motor / gearboxes and many others with unopened packets of parts. The flip side of that is that there are models with little / no identifying marks on them.

 

Any road, I'm having a bit of fun at the moment and it's nice to have a prod and a poke with the things that he enjoyed as I was really quite fond of him.

 

Ultimately, what we keep is down to my wife as it's all her dad's stuff.

 

I'll start up threads of my messing about and some people might get a kick out of my cock-ups.

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Sounds like you have a fun project ahead of you! 

 

My tactics would be to tell the wife they are all worth more as runners with radio gear, so you can put them up for sale tested and usable. Then you are guaranteed the enjoyment of tinkering, and having a few test runs ..and then just keep the good ones! 

 

Sounds like you got quite a bit of stuff to work through, and it sounds like you are going to enjoy it!

 

best of luck!oh..  and tell us if you find anything interesting 

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1 hour ago, Nitroholic said:

Sounds like you have a fun project ahead of you! 

 

My tactics would be to tell the wife they are all worth more as runners with radio gear, so you can put them up for sale tested and usable. Then you are guaranteed the enjoyment of tinkering, and having a few test runs ..and then just keep the good ones! 

 

Sounds like you got quite a bit of stuff to work through, and it sounds like you are going to enjoy it!

 

best of luck!oh..  and tell us if you find anything interesting 

She already knows they're more valuable as runners, hence why they're cluttering up my workshop!

 

I think this is one of the more interesting ones:

 

20220925_205859.thumb.jpg.7e87a2d18b912b56c4b77f5ccdd043f0.jpg

 

It's a old Tamiya - probably 80's vintage. There's what I would guess is probably enough parts to make up 1 or 2 more. I've got a manual for and many boxes labelled Blazing Blazer so it'll be interesting trying to piece that together.

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So as I don't post in the wrong bit, what are we classing as "vintage" on here?

 

I've got some Delphi Duratrax indy cars circa 2002 and other similarly aged models - are they old enough or should I stick them in electric / petrol as appropriate? 

 

Cheers,

Fro

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