svt923
I wanna be Dave
Story time kids!
Long ago, in a time called yesterday, a box arrived at my house.
Contents were contained within which revealed themselves upon opening.
These contents were chewable fish oil tablets for dogs from the Kingdom of Amazon.
The End.
A glorious tale indeed; fit for a king even!
Oh and this thing showed up too.
Ahh, the Gen 8 or the Eighth Generation Scale Vehicle from the House of the Cat That is Red for the more formal among us. This was ordered after some friends who are bad influences showed off their new Gen 8s and said they weren't total crap. I can definitely work with something that has such stellar reviews.
You can see that I'm part of #teamblue but mostly because this was the only one I found in stock that wasn't selling for over $300. I suspect with the low availability of the Gen 8 now and the Chinese New Year factory shutdowns approaching, these things are going to have spotty availability for the next few months. RC Crawler Country had one in stock and now they don't because its at my house. That damn Scarcity Principle of Economics got me again.
One of the hot takes on the Gen 8 is "who would buy this when the TRX4 Sport is only $40 more?". Much discussion has been had on this topic and the answer boils down to a simple point. If you are Johnny Scalenoob walking into a hobby shop, the Gen 8 simply looks a lot cooler than the TRX4 Sport.
Before you start throwing words like "reliability", "durability", and "parts support" at me, take a moment to remember how shallow and into appearances people actually are then try to refute me. Think hard as you drive your leased Wrangler to get your stupid Starbucks coffee before going back to your double mortgaged 5,000 sq/ft home that costs 80% of your monthly income. Throw the 2 trucks next to each other on a hobby shop counter and 8 out of 10 people will choose the Gen 8 on looks alone.
I'm kinda glossing over stuff as I just throw pics up but a lot of the outside has been covered by others. The rear light buckets have separate lenses which are a nice touch and look great. The back lacks a lot of the 3D detail of the front.
However, you do get the most adorable wittle kitty hitch cover.
If you agree with that statement, then it is just further proof that there are too many cat weirdo in RC.
Since we are still covering the outside of the truck, another look at the facepalm inducing fender flares.
Those will definitely be getting trimmed up, nothing witty to add.
The next fender-adjacent topic: tires.
The Redcat IROKs look good but the wheels don't work for me. Something about the combination of the chrome wheels, uncoated beadlock rings, and huge black center caps just looks off.
A full size spare is included in the box but being an ungrateful jerk, immediately undid all of the factory's hard work to check out the wheels.
One thing that pleasantly surprised me was the beadlock rings felt very solid. The downfall of most cheap beadlocks is the rings are made of "metal" with all the structure of room temperature butter or SCX10 shock towers. I tend to blow out plastic hexes so these wheels probably won't see much run time.
As you probably know, the tires are filled with memory foam inserts which was a hot performance trend 10 years ago. As everyone else has moved away from memory foam, Redcat embraces the past.
"Why are memory foams bad?" you may wonder. Well, a simple squish test will reveal the answer.
The insert after being squished:
1 minute later:
5 minutes later:
2 hours later:
The next day:
You can tell from my drawn out hack of a joke that the foams are very slow to return to shape. Not anywhere close to ideal when trying to conform to the terrain. If you are a fan of old school, minimum performance tire mods, I suggest filling them with BBs.
(Editor's Note: Do not fill your tires with BBs, water, or anything else you think will flow to the bottom as the tire turns. This was a terrible idea from long ago and I do not want to be responsible for any idiot that picks this up and starts spreading it across social media.)
One thing I noticed when doing some research was Redcat isn't very forthcoming with the specs on tire size. One site said they are 4.5 inches tall by 1.7ish inches wide so I lined them up with some popular options for comparison purposes.
Left to right you have: PB 1.9 Rock Beasts, Redcat Iroks, PL Swamper XLs, PL Hyrax, and PB Rock Beast XLs.
The stock tires aren't that much smaller than the average large 1.9 tires and don't come close to filling up the huge wheel wells so there is room to bolt up what suits your fancy. Just not 5.5 inch 2.2s, don't do that.
Overall, the tires seem adequate. The compound is decently soft and sticky but not immediately impressive, reminds me of the Vaterra Swampers from the Ascender. I'm sure these will get better with lots of break in time but who knows if I will have that patients.
Time to pop off it's velcro mounts and:
The velcro holds better than the adhesive on the velcro. This seems to be a common occurrence with the Gen 8s as it happened to both of my buddies' trucks as well.
The Gen 8 in it's full body off glory.
If you haven't seen, the receiver box has a neat little feature where everything plugs in from the outside. It is not waterproof however never trust the waterproofing abilities of a box anyway.
The motor and transmission are crammed in there.
Here is the front chassis rail/servo mount. Kinda strange the chassis doesn't go all the way to the bumper mount.
I didn't realize when I first saw this design that the servo mount/chassis rail extension is also part of the front shock tower. You know how people complain about breaking a c-hub on Axial's 1 piece axle housings requires replacing the whole housing? Well Redcat has brought us "break a panhard mount, replace the shock tower, servo mount, and part of the frame rail". At least the whole setup feels very stout.
Speaking of the steering servo, there it is.
Can we talk about how bad this geometry is? I mean, we don't have to as long as you know it's bad. The bumpsteer is awful and that steering link connector thing introduces a ton of play in the steering. My buddy said his will drive perfectly straight forward and turn at a 30 degree angle in reverse like one of those wired toy cars that can only go forward and reverse. Much can be done to improve the truck in this area.
While the truck was upside down, here is the driveshaft setup we are working with.
I'm skeptical on these as I have popped many a plastic driveshaft yoke and they are very lightly splined. We shall see on these but shredding them on purpose may be fun. :mrgreen:
And we arrive at the infamous skid plate hump.
Overall, the majority of the hump is rather smooth but the additional protrusion on the passenger side is pretty rough. I'm also not a fan of the huge gaps for the link pockets which brings me to a big issue I have with the design.
The ability to adjust wheelbase by moving the links around in the skidplate is a cool feature but should be done away with on the front. Steering and panhard geometry are fixed for a certain link length on the front, changing the link lengths around is only going to further mess with the already sketchy steering situation. This is exactly why pretty much every other CMS equipped truck changes wheelbase through the rear links only. The path of conformity would have served Redcat better here.
The star of the Gen 8
We are all here for portals right? I'll have to tear into the axles for a full assessment but even a simple overview says they would benefit greatly from a smoothed out diff cover. Hopefully SSD is reading this because his style of cover would be perfect.
Front knuckles and c-hubs are very Traxxas-esque. We all know Traxxas didn't invent the scale portal, they just made the first widely available one that didn't suck so that is a pretty good design to use for inspiration.
Aluminum shocks.
They feel decent although a tad soft. No idea if they still have oil in them or not. That is a problem for future me.
Standard rebranded Hobbywing ESC
We have all seen it 1,000 time.
When forging your own path to individuality, always follow rule #1.
Never miss a branding opportunity.
Well now that my Gen 8 is out of the box, let's start changing things!
Don't get on me about how your Gen 8 drives amazing out of the box. You are clearly new around here if "ain't broke, don't fix it" is your mantra.
Redcat is very cool in the fact they have a bunch of add ons that can be 3D printed for free. I'm no Scout purist and I decided this style of grill looks better than the stock one. Somebody somewhere is having a stroke because I put a 77 style grill on a 78 Scout. Somebody else is having a stroke because I just threw out some dates without bothering to look anything up.
Well, I guess that about wraps up this out of the box assessment. Things will get torn into soon enough and more will come.
Long ago, in a time called yesterday, a box arrived at my house.
Contents were contained within which revealed themselves upon opening.
These contents were chewable fish oil tablets for dogs from the Kingdom of Amazon.
The End.
A glorious tale indeed; fit for a king even!
Oh and this thing showed up too.
Ahh, the Gen 8 or the Eighth Generation Scale Vehicle from the House of the Cat That is Red for the more formal among us. This was ordered after some friends who are bad influences showed off their new Gen 8s and said they weren't total crap. I can definitely work with something that has such stellar reviews.
You can see that I'm part of #teamblue but mostly because this was the only one I found in stock that wasn't selling for over $300. I suspect with the low availability of the Gen 8 now and the Chinese New Year factory shutdowns approaching, these things are going to have spotty availability for the next few months. RC Crawler Country had one in stock and now they don't because its at my house. That damn Scarcity Principle of Economics got me again.
One of the hot takes on the Gen 8 is "who would buy this when the TRX4 Sport is only $40 more?". Much discussion has been had on this topic and the answer boils down to a simple point. If you are Johnny Scalenoob walking into a hobby shop, the Gen 8 simply looks a lot cooler than the TRX4 Sport.
Before you start throwing words like "reliability", "durability", and "parts support" at me, take a moment to remember how shallow and into appearances people actually are then try to refute me. Think hard as you drive your leased Wrangler to get your stupid Starbucks coffee before going back to your double mortgaged 5,000 sq/ft home that costs 80% of your monthly income. Throw the 2 trucks next to each other on a hobby shop counter and 8 out of 10 people will choose the Gen 8 on looks alone.
I'm kinda glossing over stuff as I just throw pics up but a lot of the outside has been covered by others. The rear light buckets have separate lenses which are a nice touch and look great. The back lacks a lot of the 3D detail of the front.
However, you do get the most adorable wittle kitty hitch cover.
If you agree with that statement, then it is just further proof that there are too many cat weirdo in RC.
Since we are still covering the outside of the truck, another look at the facepalm inducing fender flares.
Those will definitely be getting trimmed up, nothing witty to add.
The next fender-adjacent topic: tires.
The Redcat IROKs look good but the wheels don't work for me. Something about the combination of the chrome wheels, uncoated beadlock rings, and huge black center caps just looks off.
A full size spare is included in the box but being an ungrateful jerk, immediately undid all of the factory's hard work to check out the wheels.
One thing that pleasantly surprised me was the beadlock rings felt very solid. The downfall of most cheap beadlocks is the rings are made of "metal" with all the structure of room temperature butter or SCX10 shock towers. I tend to blow out plastic hexes so these wheels probably won't see much run time.
As you probably know, the tires are filled with memory foam inserts which was a hot performance trend 10 years ago. As everyone else has moved away from memory foam, Redcat embraces the past.
"Why are memory foams bad?" you may wonder. Well, a simple squish test will reveal the answer.
The insert after being squished:
1 minute later:
5 minutes later:
2 hours later:
The next day:
You can tell from my drawn out hack of a joke that the foams are very slow to return to shape. Not anywhere close to ideal when trying to conform to the terrain. If you are a fan of old school, minimum performance tire mods, I suggest filling them with BBs.
(Editor's Note: Do not fill your tires with BBs, water, or anything else you think will flow to the bottom as the tire turns. This was a terrible idea from long ago and I do not want to be responsible for any idiot that picks this up and starts spreading it across social media.)
One thing I noticed when doing some research was Redcat isn't very forthcoming with the specs on tire size. One site said they are 4.5 inches tall by 1.7ish inches wide so I lined them up with some popular options for comparison purposes.
Left to right you have: PB 1.9 Rock Beasts, Redcat Iroks, PL Swamper XLs, PL Hyrax, and PB Rock Beast XLs.
The stock tires aren't that much smaller than the average large 1.9 tires and don't come close to filling up the huge wheel wells so there is room to bolt up what suits your fancy. Just not 5.5 inch 2.2s, don't do that.
Overall, the tires seem adequate. The compound is decently soft and sticky but not immediately impressive, reminds me of the Vaterra Swampers from the Ascender. I'm sure these will get better with lots of break in time but who knows if I will have that patients.
Time to pop off it's velcro mounts and:
The velcro holds better than the adhesive on the velcro. This seems to be a common occurrence with the Gen 8s as it happened to both of my buddies' trucks as well.
The Gen 8 in it's full body off glory.
If you haven't seen, the receiver box has a neat little feature where everything plugs in from the outside. It is not waterproof however never trust the waterproofing abilities of a box anyway.
The motor and transmission are crammed in there.
Here is the front chassis rail/servo mount. Kinda strange the chassis doesn't go all the way to the bumper mount.
I didn't realize when I first saw this design that the servo mount/chassis rail extension is also part of the front shock tower. You know how people complain about breaking a c-hub on Axial's 1 piece axle housings requires replacing the whole housing? Well Redcat has brought us "break a panhard mount, replace the shock tower, servo mount, and part of the frame rail". At least the whole setup feels very stout.
Speaking of the steering servo, there it is.
Can we talk about how bad this geometry is? I mean, we don't have to as long as you know it's bad. The bumpsteer is awful and that steering link connector thing introduces a ton of play in the steering. My buddy said his will drive perfectly straight forward and turn at a 30 degree angle in reverse like one of those wired toy cars that can only go forward and reverse. Much can be done to improve the truck in this area.
While the truck was upside down, here is the driveshaft setup we are working with.
I'm skeptical on these as I have popped many a plastic driveshaft yoke and they are very lightly splined. We shall see on these but shredding them on purpose may be fun. :mrgreen:
And we arrive at the infamous skid plate hump.
Overall, the majority of the hump is rather smooth but the additional protrusion on the passenger side is pretty rough. I'm also not a fan of the huge gaps for the link pockets which brings me to a big issue I have with the design.
The ability to adjust wheelbase by moving the links around in the skidplate is a cool feature but should be done away with on the front. Steering and panhard geometry are fixed for a certain link length on the front, changing the link lengths around is only going to further mess with the already sketchy steering situation. This is exactly why pretty much every other CMS equipped truck changes wheelbase through the rear links only. The path of conformity would have served Redcat better here.
The star of the Gen 8
We are all here for portals right? I'll have to tear into the axles for a full assessment but even a simple overview says they would benefit greatly from a smoothed out diff cover. Hopefully SSD is reading this because his style of cover would be perfect.
Front knuckles and c-hubs are very Traxxas-esque. We all know Traxxas didn't invent the scale portal, they just made the first widely available one that didn't suck so that is a pretty good design to use for inspiration.
Aluminum shocks.
They feel decent although a tad soft. No idea if they still have oil in them or not. That is a problem for future me.
Standard rebranded Hobbywing ESC
We have all seen it 1,000 time.
When forging your own path to individuality, always follow rule #1.
Never miss a branding opportunity.
Well now that my Gen 8 is out of the box, let's start changing things!
Don't get on me about how your Gen 8 drives amazing out of the box. You are clearly new around here if "ain't broke, don't fix it" is your mantra.
Redcat is very cool in the fact they have a bunch of add ons that can be 3D printed for free. I'm no Scout purist and I decided this style of grill looks better than the stock one. Somebody somewhere is having a stroke because I put a 77 style grill on a 78 Scout. Somebody else is having a stroke because I just threw out some dates without bothering to look anything up.
Well, I guess that about wraps up this out of the box assessment. Things will get torn into soon enough and more will come.
