WHERE'S WALDO: My first RC car

0 Dec. 23, 2015, 5:43 p.m.

By Aaron Waldron
LiveRC.com

Christmas falls on a Friday this year, setting up a pretty sweet three-day weekend for most. No matter how you and your family celebrate the winter holidays, Christmas means a lot to many people. For me, and I’m sure for a lot of RC enthusiasts, it’s when I got my first RC car - 22 years ago, when I was just 7 years old.

RC racing, in its most pure sense, was already a big deal in my young life. On family trips to the Glamis Sand Dunes to ride ATV’s, my cousin and I raced our RC cars around our campsite. One year he got a new truck, a true hobby-grade vehicle, and it obliterated every toy I ever had. It was much faster and could actually handle the sandy terrain - plus, the batteries lasted longer and recharged quicker.

Our “races” weren’t very fair. I badly wanted a truck that could compete. Once he thought I was old enough to handle it, my dad - who had played around with Tamiya kits before I was born - sought out the same truck that my cousin had. He built and painted the kit to surprise me on Christmas morning.

The truck he purchased for me was a Team Losi Junior T, which first came out in 1991. Like most “racing monster trucks,” as the class was called then, it was based on a 2WD buggy called the Junior 2 that had been released the year prior - in fact, the two vehicles only differed in body, body mounts, tires and wheels. The Junior vehicles were based on the successful JRX-2/JRX-Pro and JRX-T racing kits, with cost-saving measures like bushings and the first mass-produced molded plastic chassis.

Ever thought about something that happened back before the days of smartphones and wish you had pictures? Yeah, me too. Of course, it’s understandable that my family wouldn’t have been able to guess that a Christmas present would eventually lead to a career. Instead, here are photos I found on RC10 Talk, Vintage Losi, RC Universe and eBay:

Photo: Tamiya Club

Photo: RC Universe

While searching for the above photos, I found this old magazine ad about the truck:

Photo: forum.losi.com

The radio system was a 75MHz AM unit called the Futaba Magnum Sport. Unlike the Magnum Junior that my cousin had, which had knobs for throttle trim and ATV - or Adjustable Travel Volume, which is another way of saying End Point Adjustment - necessary for a mechanical speed control, the Sport only had steering trim and dual rate. The receiver was massive by today’s standards.

Photo: Photobucket

The radio and receiver combo came with Futaba’s S148 servo. Rated at 41.7 oz.-in. with a .22 sec/60 deg. transit speed, it’s amazing the S148 tugged the tires to the left and right.

Photo: Al's Hobbies

The motor was my dad’s special secret. Whereas my cousin had a Trinity Green Machine, a 24-degree 27-turn stock motor, he installed had a Trinity SpeedGems Sapphire 17-turn single that was significantly faster. Suddenly, I had the upper hand in drag races across the sand.

Photo: eBay - Obviously, this example has been used before.

The batteries were Dynamite RC 6-cell NiCD stick packs rated at 1500mAh. While racers used packs with the best cells of a particular production run that had been matched for similar performance, leftover low-voltage cells went into low-cost stick packs.

Photo: Stormer Hobbies - Pretty sure mine had a red and black label and said "Dyna-Sport" or something.

I don’t remember what ESC I had (a Tekin maybe), or which timer charger we used, but I do remember the sweet paint job on that shoebox-like cartoonish pickup body - a two-color rattle can special with fluorescent yellow fading into fluorescent racing red (pink), which stayed as my signature colors for my entire racing career. My dad got the matching red wheels, too.

I drove that poor truck to death. The hobby store where my dad purchased the truck had a tiny dirt track inside, and I was delighted to practice for hours on Saturdays, but I burned way more time zipping up and down the street and making jumps out of whatever I could find. My dad replaced the truck’s transmission bushings to bearings, which always needed to be cleaned or replaced after a desert trip, and we played around switching back and forth from the Junior T truck and Junior 2 buggy bodies. Right about the time I started entering my first Novice-class races, we installed wider arms from the LXT for more stability. Six months later, we upgraded to the new XX-T truck and dove hard into racing. I don’t remember when that vehicle was eventually turned into something else or sold, but I’ll likely never forget the thrill of finding it under the tree.