Just dropped off my gear back at the R/C track, now that the bike project is more or less done, and in 2 weeks there is a regional race happening at the track… time to focus and get back into the groove of things. I don’t expect to win that race by any means, but I do hope to at least put up a fight.
The first photo is my new plaything…
Sold a few hundred $$$ in random R/C stuff and a truck I had in a box, and used that money to fund this new chassis to race with. I have no idea what I am doing in this class, or how to set this car up… hopefully it will all fall into place tonight at the track :)
For those curious, its a CRC Racing Gen X10 LE chassis, w/ Hobbywing ESC, Orion Vortex motor, and quite a few upgrades and tweaks already done. Has an orange Alfa 8C body as well. This is a 1/10th scale pan car, vs my other 1/12th scale BMI chassis I run.
The 1/12th is considerably harder to drive than these 1/10ths, but should be a fun time at the track with both.
So far getting back into R/C has been a trip, harder than I remember to drive, but just as much fun to setup and tweak the cars. (which I like doing more than driving them) So much sub mm, and sub degree accuracy, attention to detail, exacting rebuilds, exotic materials… great fun for a geek! I guess that’s why most people in this club work in IT.
So after a weekend of prepping and tuning my little R/C car, I seem to be getting back into the rhythm of how to drive these silly things.
Two Thursdays ago the fastest lap I could turn was ~14 seconds, this last Saturday, it was a 12, and on Sunday in the race I ran consistent 11.4 - 11.6 times. The time to get on the pace with would be 10.5-8 consistently. So just a little bit more. I have some small parts coming in this week that should get my car up to spec to get there.
Didn’t break anything, and learned a bit about setups for this track over the last couple days. Success!
Some peoples addictions are iconified by pipes, bottles, needles, poker chips, etc…
Mine is on 4 small foam tires. Getting back into the game after seeing the local track in Lakewood last night, and realizing that I have every single thing I need to race already in hand. That car there is a composite of about ~$800 in purchases just hanging out in a box, with many times that in support gear.
So time to clean this thing up and put it to work.
R/C Car racing:
So last night I bought up the totes of R/C racing gear that hasn’t been looked at in over a year. Going to dig through and see what the deal is. I may even check out a race at the local track on some Thursday coming up. But i think the end goal is to sell most of it off as I don’t think I have time to really put into R/C right now.
But the fact selling the gear would get me pennies on the dollar, for thousands of dollars of hardware… may leave me to race instead.. who knows. It’s an evil addiction, and something that while I am not the best at racing when I hung it up… it is a truly interesting technical and mental challenge. (while also a serious work out on the visa).
Web Dev:
Another hobby I had before was some web development work. I built a few websites back in the mid ‘00’s that are still hosted on a server I have. But after reviewing what I am paying for the server, I am going to try to consolidate down to just some hosting package somewhere. So this is going to cause me to re-learn the PHP/MySQL/HTML coding I did in the first place to alter the code to run in hosted/shared environments. Not sure how much I am looking forward to this, but I have far too much going on with a server, and very little loading it these days.
But with the ability to save ~ $50/month it’s something I need to get on with. Time to shake the cobwebs off!
