My good friend Joe has an old E-Maxx – not wanting to miss out on any bashing and crashing fun, I had him dig it out. It’s an oldie but a goodie. A 1st Generation E-Maxx with dual motors, dual batteries and a 2-speed transmission. It’s the one with the chassis that looks like this:

It’s also a bit of a relic. NiMH batteries, brushed motors, and AM radio aren’t exactly state-of-the-art. But I don’t want to upgrade everything, I just wanted to get it back on the road – so where do we start?

Flite Fest Ohio 2018 is on the books – we went, we flew, we crashed. Here’s a little brain-dump of lessons learned from our second year.

More Stick Time

My first year I spent a lot of time building a project that ultimately didn’t fly. For me it was a disappointment. So this year I did a build ahead of time and planned to do much more flying. It turned out to be much more crashing because I didn’t have all of the bugs worked out of my plane. But it did fly, and it helped me achieve my goal of more stick time at the event. But the stick time paled in comparison to the time I spend in the bean field looking for my plane after a crash. You haven’t fully experienced Flite Fest until you’ve gone looking for a downed plane in the bean field.
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Marshalling

To ceremoniously guide, conduct or usher.

In R/C club racing, similar to 1:1 scale club racing, the drivers must also help as a corner marshal after they race. This means helping out cars that get stuck, crash, or flip so they can continue their race. It’s a dance as you help crashed cars while other cars are still racing on the track. I’ve picked up a couple of tricks here and that help me – and maybe they can help you be more adept at marshalling. And since every driver is also a track marshal – there’s a section for drivers too. You should read both. 

Introduced as the Traxxas Slash in 2008, 10 years later many racers are asking, “Is it dead yet?” Check out this recent episode of Radio Impound Podcast. The chatter about Team Associated’s new releases start at the 19:30 mark and you’ll hear them ask about the Associated SC6.1, “Isn’t it that class obsolete yet?”

Short Course Truck

Also known as SCT, Short Course Truck is going to be a mainstay class. I’m talking about the staying power of something like 1/10 scale buggy, which has been around for multiple decades. SCT has already stood one decade, and it will continue the trend. Let me explain… In a sea of increasing costs to get into the hobby, anyone can get into off-road racing for around $200. When others are spending $1000 to get into racing, I was looking at getting into on-road for half of the cost. But how does getting into off-road at 1/4 of the cost sound?

I ordered an iA6 receiver for a flying wing I picked up at the local R/C swap meet. It took 30 days to get here from China. How have I not learned not to order stuff during the Chinese New Year? Once I got it, there were a few tricks and troubles I went through, so here’s the rundown.

I specifically purchased the Turnigy iA6 (same as FS-iA6) instead of the iA6B for a few reasons. It has leads coming off of the top instead of the end, so it’s effectively shorter when servo connectors a plugged in. Perfect for the Techone Mini-Popwing which has a small receiver cut-out. It also has a rudimentary telemetry system built in, and the first version (non-B) can be hacked very easily to provide battery voltage telemetry to the transmitter.

The telemetry hack is well covered in the RCGroups link above, so I won’t go into it, but will outline a couple other issues I encountered.