[sanddrag]

Originally Posted by ebmonon36

it would put my Kyosho Turbo Ultima (circa 1987ish) to shame.
Eric

You ever heard of a Panda Danny Thomson's Stadium Racer? Probably not. It has a little Thunder Tiger .10 engine adapted for the truck. It is the most POS RC car I have ever owned. Its brake is a piece of cork bonded to a brass strip that is bent over by the servo and rubs on the clutch bell. I bought it because it was only $50 brand new in the box and it was old and rare. It has a really cool body though...

Ah, I love RC cars. They are so much fun sometimes.

Just a quick story on the importance of failsafe mechanisms. I was once driving my Traxxas Nitro Stampede with my JR XR3 FM radio. The AA battery holder in the radio had a crack, but once it was put in the radio it all seemed to sandwhich together okay and it still worked fine. Well, this one particular day, I had the engine all tuned up for maximum performance. Just as I was making a full speed run dead center down my street, the craked part of the battery case in the remote breaks even further, the transmitter batteries lose contact with the terminals, the radio loses power, and the servos stay in their WOT and dead ahead positions and the truck takes off screaming dead down the middle of the street at 30+mph. It goes a full block until it comes to the intersection where it crosses the street and runs head on into a curb at full speed. But that is not all. It bounces off and makes a right and goes up the other street. At this point, I can't see it because it is no longer on my street but I can hear it's engine still screaming at WOT. After it goes up a block, it hits a curb again, somehow makes a U turn and starts heading back down the block it went up. Finally the front end is falling apart and it veers to the right back into the curb it hit the first time where it finally flips over. I thought that when flipped over, it would run out of gas and the engine would shut off, but no. From being so shaken up, the fuel is all filled with air bubbles and the engine is runing in an extremely lean condition. As I ran up to it, one tire was stuck against the curb but the other was in the air and it looked like a pizza cutter it was spining so fast. It must have been stretched out to 10" in diameter. The engine was screaming at such a high pitch and rpm I thought it was going to blow. It was the loudest sound I had ever heard in my life. When I was finally able to shut off the engine by putting my thumb over the air filter, there was the greatest silence I had ever heard in my life. Luckily, it somehow managed not to hit any houses, parked cars, mobile cars, animlas, or people.

And that my friends is why it is important to have failsafe mechanisms.