Last year I happened to stumble up on some videos of electric RC cars. I watched couple of those and started reminiscing about the time I had spent back in ~2004 when me and a friend ordered couple of Traxxas Revo’s with the TRX 3.3 engine. It was a blast, but the bad thing about living on this lovely island we call Iceland is that the temperature here is pretty low, and the engine settings really often need some modifications so we spent the better half of all sessions doing tuning before we could start bashing.
But watching those videos of those electric cars was pretty interesting as you could just charge up and start to bash right away! I started researching and ended up ordering a Traxxas Maxx v2. I had a blast bashing it couple of times, but a little later I got the chance to get my hands on a Traxxas TRX4 crawlers (Bronco 2021 body). Now….this is where things started to get interesting. I took it along with me when the family went on a hike and man….I realized I had so much more fun crawling then I did bashing.
So – since then I have built a Vanquish Phoenix VS4-10, and I just finished a Axial SCX10 Pro build (well, I still need to do some work on it, but it is in a driveable condition). Building those kits has been the best hobby I can think of. I’ve searched for a hobby to spend my free time on for a long long time and I think I have finally found it.
There are two issues though. Number 1 – this hobby is a money dump!…..however I am pretty sure that this is a lot cheaper than if I had gone into hobbies like fly fishing or hunting. Number 2 – living on a island in the middle of nowhere with a population of ~400.000 means that access to crawler parts that are not made by Traxxas is very much non-existent. So I need to order pretty much everything except original parts for my TRX4 from abroad. But even if I can find cheap stuff then shipping along with the duty fees always adds a premium to every part so I have to think carefully before making any orders.
But never the less I am lucky enough that there are stores in Germany and Asia that do ship things pretty cheap (and some even ship things pretty fast, thank god for cheap Fedex shipping!) so if I make sure to put together a sizeable order it won’t be anything crazy. I am going to create a page here sharing the stores I primarily use along with a list of my parts just for fun if it helps anyone that is in a similar situation.