Wow, still with the angry people. Gotta love those short autumn days and the zillion different ways they mess up people's heads. That's why we have so many holidays clustered into this part of the year, so people don't just start murdering each other.
It wouldn't be the first time something I wrote was read by someone else who then responded "Are you saying
[insert worst possible interpretation of what I said]?!?!?" Someone once told me that I translate into text worse than anyone else they ever met, but I think that's because people can't help inferring emotional content in writing, and with me there is none. My father is a lawyer and I learned to write the way he does. I mean exactly what I say and nothing else.
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The Trailmaster Sport is definitely a cut above most disposable motors, but it's still a disposable motor. Even when I first got into the hobby and I had no experience with premium brushed motors or brushless motors, I was still underwhelmed with the performance of disposable motors. The magnets are just not good enough. I have a couple Trailmaster Sport motors for running in vehicles that I loan to kids, but for my own use, they don't have enough torque and they run too hot -- at least in my vehicles. However, I magnanimously grant other people permission to like those motors if they still want to. ;-)
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On a different note, I was outside a little while ago driving my SCX10 II, marveling at how just raising the bumper only 4mm could make the truck handle obstacles so much better, and I had a bit of a Come to Lucifer moment. I said before that I want to run my entire RC fleet using the same batteries, and that is true, but there's another motivation, which is simultaneously a goal and a constraint. But before I tell you what it is, I have to bore you with a story:
In my senior year of high school, I had the opportunity to attend a magnet school for science and technology. The classes were college-level, which was overwhelming after 11 years of public school, but the projects were super cool. I got to do biology stuff with DNA, I got to use lasers to make holograms (I was the first student in the school's history to actually succeed in making a plain-light hologram with the donated secondhand equipment the school had), I got to participate in a hacking competition, and I got to build a bridge out of popsicle sticks. That last one sounds pretty lame by comparison, but it illustrates something about my personality. While building the bridge, I insisted my team use a different design than everyone else, with the support structure under the roadway instead of above it, so we wouldn't have to design big holes into the support structure to accommodate the hydraulic press used to test the bridges at the end. The other highly-motivated guy on the team who thought I was full of crap said that he would never listen to another thing I said if we lost. I agreed. I further irritated them by bend-testing every popsicle stick in the box, throwing away any that were slightly weaker or showed a tendency to twist when bent. And I irritated them even more by weighing the 2-part epoxy to ensure a consistent mixture, and mixing a new batch of epoxy every time we took a break from gluing together popsicle sticks for even a few minutes. As the project went along, I noticed other teams starting to copy our methods. ;-)
After all that, we must've won, right? Nope. We came in second place, and there was no prize for second place. But the contracting company that hosted the competition pulled us aside to congratulate us on two things they never thought to give awards for: Our bridge was only 1% over-budget for materials and construction, and whereas everyone else's bridges crumpled when overloaded, our bridge exploded -- all of the joints were so well-matched for strength that there was no single weak spot that broke first. I was thrilled, and the other guy was reasonably content as well.
Everyone builds an RC with some kind of superlative in mind -- they want it to be the fastest, or the lightest, or completely custom-made, or whatever. My superlative is I want my RCs to be the most thoroughly adequate. That sounds boring as hell, doesn't it? But it's actually a huge challenge. It means making sure an RC is balanced in all aspects of its design. When I drive one of my RCs, I want to know that the motor, the suspension, the chassis, etc., are all being stressed equally. Partly that's because I don't want to know that the vehicle
could be handling a much rougher beating if only it didn't have that glaring weak spot that I neglected to improve, but also it's because well-balanced systems are much less likely to break in the first place.
Too much weight can destroy a motor, but too much motor can destroy a drivetrain. It's better to have
just enough motor,
just enough suspension articulation,
just enough weight on the axles,
just enough battery power, etc. That way nothing gets pushed past its breaking point. The reason the topic of this thread was funny to me is because it illustrates what happens when I
don't make sure everything is balanced.
Yes, I know my personality is not a good fit for this segment of the hobby, where overbuilding and overpowering everything is the norm. Deal with it.
![Smile :) :)](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)