dicko

i think you'll find they weigh a similar amount. if you weigh the ESC, Motor & two 7 cell battery packs (the heaviest part) it would weigh a similar amount or more than 1 engine, a servo & a filled fuel tank. as for dust.. have you heard of 1/10th EP offroad? they have 3 classes, 2wd, 4wd & stadium truck they race on the same tracks quite often. i think dust is not an issue. never was in any of my EP off road buggies. i don't agree with your comments. at one of our local tracks, the 1/10 4wd EP is much faster than the 1/8th buggies around the track. because they are lighter they can hit the top speed a lot quicker. and jumping is definitely not an issue, my 1/18th RC18B can jump a hell of a lot further than my mugen can. 8000kv on a 3S lipo (11.1V) will do that, that translates to 88000rpm unloaded.

aangelet

rrusso, my 8ight T weighs in right at 10lbs in race form. Is that too light? In any case, your statement regarding a nitro engine having more torque than an electric motor, really shows that you are truly ignorant of what brushless systems are capable of. If you want to talk sheer rpms, the motor that I run in my 8ight T is a Neu 1512/1.5Y and is capable of 60,000 rpms. On the track, I only need to run it on enough voltage to get it turning at about 25,000 rpms, and geared 17/48, it was the fastest truck on the track the last time I ran it with a group of guys out there.

I'm not going to bicker back and forth. When I first posted in this thread, I did so with the intention of sharing information, because I'd really like to promote interest in large scale electrics. It is now obvious to me that there are at least some here that are ignorant of what we are discussing and are too closed minded to accept that there might be something better than what they have. I've been into this hobby for about ten years now. I've been through most of the better buggies and truggies and have run them on OS, Novarossi, Ninja, and RB engines. I certainly didn't convert to brushless to take a step backwards. I have a buggy that I use to do some parking lot racing. I'm running an 8L motor in it with an MGM Compro 160-16 controller on a Kokam 4S 4800mAh lipo pack geared 18/44. The biggest problem that I'm having with it is that it will blow the tires right off of the wheels if I don't watch it on the take off. This buggy weighs around 8.5lbs and will walk a Jato 3.3 in a straight line run.

j_blaze

I'm just saying if it is THAT much better, there would be a class for it already, no matter how new it is, it looks really cool. Just from looking at that video I have some questions. How long does a brushless system last? batteries, esc? With proper mainteneace of course. I'm too new to know if the setup you have there will only last a few months as opposed to years with nitro. One day I'll convert my buggy just to see how it compares at this scale. Comparing 1/8 nitro with 1/18 electric isn't right.

happywing

I've been racing for 2 years now. I sold all my nitro stuff about 2-months ago. With the change, I went from a B-main driver to an A-main driver. My electric Mugen MBX5 has never lost to a nitro and my E-Revo is undefeated in A-mains when running against the nitros. I do not get lapped in my victories. The buggy weighs 8Lbs and the MT weighs 10Lbs. They are very controllable. As for torque, I can make triples and fly over tabletops much easier than it was with my nitros. My electrics have WAY more torque than my nitros did and my nitros had top-notch engines. So far, I have had no problems with dirt...They like dirt. We have a growing group of guys around here that have 1/8 buggy conversions. At some races we have enough to make our own class. When I'm allowed, I like to race against the nitros, but the nitro guys are starting to complain about my "advantage."
It's very obvious that you have not tried a good brushless setup. Try it and it will change your mind. Hopefully then, you will stop the posts that are making you sound so foolish.


MBX5 with Neu 1512d/f and Mamba Max

E-Revo with HVMaxx 6.5

rrusso

some 1 has to stick up for the nitrosthat does not weigh 10 lbs

happywing

I understand the attraction of nitro. I miss it sometimes, but for me, the negatives outweighed the positives. It's fine for you to stick up for nitro. The problem is that you're making a lot of negative statements about electric without any knowledge. Last time I weighed the Revo, it was 10Lbs, 2oz with batteries. Why would I lie? 10Lbs is actually a very good weight for an electric Revo. In general, electrics are heavier than nitros. Do some research.

supertib

Well i am not entering this argument... I am a nitro guy 110% wether electric is faster or not.... But regardless i gotta give props to your electrics and the work that went into them.. I have a CEN Matrix Pro buggy i'd consider converting to brushless for parking lot racing....

Anyways someone posted a video of a wheelying 8T...well my modded STS 30 MBX5T pulls crazy wheelies.... Anyways watch this vid all the way, its half of a fast savage and the other half a 5T

http://video.google.ca/videoplay?doc...97284940363929

this is abut as fast as a Nitro truggy gets. the center diff is not locked, its running 30K with a 15th bell... this motor has major kahonies

aangelet

j blaze, I get around 30 minutes of run time with a 4S2P 8Ah battery pack and a battery is usually good for around 500 charge cycles before it starts to show signs of "wear." The motor doesn't go bad. There are no brushes to wear out and the only parts making any sort of contact on the inside are the bearings, which are replaceable. I don't know where you are finding nitro engines that last for years, but if you have one, you don't run it enough. My favorite nitro engine was the Nova P5X, and running a gallon a week, I was lucky if it lasted two months before needing at least a piston, conrod, and sleeve. Most of the time, it needed new bearing too, with a crankshaft every third rebuild or so.

happywing, I'm running a 1512 in my truggy too. I find the torque to be very controllable and it sips current. I like the MM controller. For the money it can't be beat. I run the Quark because I like to run 5S and 6S lipo sometimes, when I feel like getting crazy.

supertib, that was my 8T that I had a video of doing wheelies. I think you missed the point of the video. I realize that you can take a nitro engine and mod it and do whatever you need to do to it to make it do wheelies, and that's good, for a nitro. The point of the video was to show the performance of the setup that I had in the truck. It is a mild setup. Not even close to what would be considered to be a hot setup. I could, at will, just drop in a 5S or 6S battery pack and substantially increase the power.

A typical electric truggy weighs in at around 10.5lbs. You have to remember that the battery usually weighs in at around 1 to 1.5lbs., depending on the size of the battery pack. I know that words are cheap, and a video really doesn't do justice. All I can say is that if you ever have to opportunity to see a brushless 1/8 scale run, it will make a believer out of you.

86revo

the original question was is nitro or electric faster well i could take the motor out of a stock traxxas stampede (not vlx) put it in a revo
and get another revo and put a big block kit in it, get a force .32 modify it and race the 2 who would win the nitro of course or put a stock trx
.15 in a revo and a novak brushless in the other revo and the opposite would happen nitro or electric is like saying a car or a plane
now you could say specific electric and specific nitro but not nitro or electric it's to broad i'm not trying to insult anyone i'm just saying it's
to broad a question.

aangelet

OK, we're just going around and around on this subject. I suppose that you just can't believe it until you see it. Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule, but as a general rule, brushless electrics are faster than their nitro counter parts. I will admit that the on road nitros are pretty darned fast and building an electric to exceed their performance isn't as easy as doing a buggy or truggy, but it can be done. That's why rc land speed records are held by brushless electrics.

For many of you, it just can't be true because you can't walk into a hobby shop and buy one of what I'm talking about. I've also noticed that many of you are making references to 1/10 scale electric vehicles. Those are not what I'm talking about. Those are, for the most part, designed around and built to run brushed setups which are very limited in the amout of performance that they can deliver. I am talking about vehicles that were converted from nitro to electric.

I can guarantee you that if you took the Revo used in the example mentioned by 86revo above and put the hottest nitro engine that you could find in it, it wouldn't come close to a brushless setup running 21 volts and geared for speed.

Since seeing is believing, I'm in the New Orleans area and we usually go out and run at the parking lot of the Academy Sports on West Esplanade in Kenner, on Thursday nights. I won't be hard to find. I'll be the only guy running electric 1/8 scale vehicles. If anyone here is in that area, come on out and bring what you have. I'll make a believer out of you.

aangelet

If anyone here might be interested in something that runs on an alternative power source, check out [link=http://www.rc-monster.com/forum/]RC Monster[/link]

They recently had a fatal server crash and a lot of stuff is gone, but information is building quickly. There are many knowledgeable people there and are willing to answer questions and provide information based on experience. The site, for the most part, caters to converting and building large scale brushless electrics.

j_blaze

The more I read this thread the closer I get to making a change, tuning engines if florida can be daunting specially for a noob like me, I spend a lot of time with the temp gun and screwdriver, maybe now I can actually DRIVE the buggy and truggy,if electric is so powerful, so fast (higher gear ratio) and can last longer, I'll just install a smoke system on my buggy with the electric kit. Is there a kit that you buy to change to e-power? looks like a special motor mount, then what, motor, esc, batteries and charger right?, the rest stays the same. It could even cost less than a top end racing engine I hope. Maybe I'll hold off an a new mill a bit more.

aangelet

OK guys, I jinxed myself by shooting my mouth of in here. I went out to the lot tonight to run. I was tearing everything up, then a guy shows up with a Jato with a modifed .18 TM. At the end of about a 200' run, he took me by about two feet. He was a really nice guy and let me look at his Jato. Really nice setup, although he was running super lean. He'd run the truck and then immediately shut it down.

He's going to meet me again next week. I pulled my buggy apart and started looking at where I can shed some weight. My buggy weighed in a just over 9lbs tonight. I believe that my buggy weights a good 3lbs. more than the Jato did, so if I can shed some weight, I think I can take him.

I'm going to replace the aluminum battery tray with a lexan plate and use velcro and straps to hold the battery in place. According to my scale, this should save me about 5 ounces. I'm going to get rid of the locked up center diff and go with just a solid shaft for another ounce to two, and replace what ever plates I can with carbon fiber.

I also have a set of foam tires coming. Maybe I'll be able to hook up better out of the hole instead of that little slide that I get when I take off.

If all of this doesn't work, then I'll gear up a bit or maybe go with a little more voltage to get another 5000 or so rpms. I'm also going to need to get someone out there to help me. From where I was standing, I couldn't tell if my motor had finished winding out at the end of the run. It looked to me like it was still accelerating. If this is true, I need to go down on the pinion for that little extra umph out of the hole.

This is killing me. I almost wish that he had beaten me badly. If he had, then I'd be looking at some major motor or voltage changes. Having only been beaten by a little, it's just a matter of tweaking and tweaking is a PITA. For now, I think I'll just worry about removing weight first. If I can save half a pound, that should make a difference.

Just FYI, I was running a Feigao 8L motor with about a 2800kv rating, so assuming that my pack was holding 3.5v per cell under load, I should have been getting around 39,000 rpms, if I was getting to full rpms and I was geared with an 18T pinion and 44T spur. The big buggy was movin'. It just wasn't movin' fast enough.

For you nitro fans, if you have a 1/10 scale truck, I'd add trying an .18 TM to my todo list.

aangelet

j blaze, I don't want to mislead you with all of my talk about how great brushless is. I do think that it is better than nitro. I have no doubt that the performance is better. I have a Monster GT conversion that I did and my 8 year old son can literally drive it two or three feet up a tree trunk and do a back flip off of the tree and land on all fours. The truck is just plain stupid now and performs far better than it did with the VG .30 in it.

Anyway, my point is that when you go brushless, you trade one set of problems for another set. I think that the problems that you have to deal with when going brushless are less of a PITA than nitro, but there are things that have to be dealt with none the less.

If you are interested, PM me. I'd be happy to get on the phone with you and fill you in on what would be a good start. If you want to do some studying up, do some searches and check into what people are doing with the Mamba Max speed controller in large buggies and trucks. It's a good solid inexpensive place to start. I could also tell you where to go to get some decent inexpensive starter motors. The cheapie motors go for about $70 each. My better motors go for about $280.

If you do get into this, you'll get a kick out of watching people's jaws drop. What I really like is when people ask me, "when are you going to change the battery?"

chickenfart

Hit the nail on the head, obviously none of you electric guys have seen a truck with a .90 engine in it (thunder tiger).
Electrics are not faster its just more practical, what about almost every other speed record in the world, bugger all are electric powered planes or electric powered boats. The reciprocating engine is by far superior to an electric in the context of speed, if they werent they wouldnt be used all over the world to break records.
I think you electric guys are just trying to justify to the world that your cars aren't toys, nitro's aren't toys, fire one of them babies up and people know its the real deal and not some electric hunk o junk.

GRANT ED

You might want to do some research before making statements like this. The world record in speed for an RC boat of any kind at over 140mph is held by an electric boat.

aangelet

chickenfart, your name suits you.

Super_Dave

Lets put it this way . The ONLY thing that limits a brushless motor is heat and voltage (you can still pump as much voltage you want into it but you can't exceed what the motor/esc is made to handle). With a nitro engine you can only go as fast as the torque/power curve lets you which limits your RPMs. You can only get so many RPMs out of these nitro engines so the only way to go faster is get something with more torque to pull a higher gear ratio to get the speed. When you do that you need a bigger engine making the vehicle heavier which will ruin the handling of it on a track so its now good for nothing but drag racing. Where the fuel engine reachs its limits a brushless motor can still out perform it. A brushless motor has no RPM limit because there are no power curves so the only thing limiting your RPM is again heat and voltage. Of course you can only feed so much voltage into the motor/esc before it overheats but with the right setup it still outperforms any nitro engine you can buy for this scale. Brushless systems are still improving so if you do happen to find a nitro setup to beat an electric than chances are it wont be faster for to much longer.

I don't have an electric 1/8 buggy because I do like my nitro equally as much as my electric on-road car/off-road buggy. Still a high end electric will out perform any high end nitro engine you can buy because they don't have as many limitations. That goes for speed and run time on a charge.

Russo dust does not effect ESCs in any way, shape, or form. The only way to mess up an ESC is to short it out with something conductive (like water), to block cooling to the heat sink making it overheat, or to put more power into it then its made to handle. The brushless motors are also SEALED so no dirt will get in them causing a failure.

Don't get me wrong I love my nitro stuff and it is cheaper to get a high performance setup in nitro. Still electric overall does outperform nitro in 1/8 and 1/10 scale but you need to pay quite a bit to get there. After you buy everything once your set for quite a long time so its only a big initial cost.

RURC

AANGLET- If you want to take out the Jato maybe I can mail you my converted Jato. Nothing has ever touched that truck except for my GTRe 1/8 that goes airborne at about 105.

CHICKENFART- Yep I had a .90 TT truck. After the 3rd rebuild I converted it to brushless then sold it about 6 months later (to fund my high speed car). Never had to do a thing to it after that conversion. No tuneing or anything. Just drop and run it was great fun. The way I see it the nitros are now the toys doing the catchup. But the problem is they are at the summit of their developement and brushless is in its beginning stages. Brushless is only going to get bigger and stronger. All the crying I hear from the nitro guys is like the person drowining going down for the last time.

I still love them all. All of it is great fun.

BTW The trash talk is tung in cheek.

j_blaze

Alright, I'm gonna start doing some more reading to understand amps, volts, MaH or mAh? What would I need for a conversion on hyper 7?
Motor mount, Aluminum right or do I have to make that?
Motor, what size is good to EQUAL a descent 21 engine?
Battery, I'm guessing lipo is the way to go, what volts? 7.2, 8.4, 11.1? What mah is good 2000 or 6000, I"m guessing 6000
ESC, that can handle the correct amount of volts and amps and matches this size motor?
Charger and Balancer? Never heard of that but sounds necessary, thats pretty much all I have learned so far

Does the esc plug into the receiver or is it the receiver, on my daughters mini t its combined, what special equipment or tools are needed to maintain batteries and brushless motors?

Any comments are greatly appreciated. I think I am starting to understand, a bit.

RURC

Glad to hear that you are willing to at least learn. A Hyper7 is a good base car to use. Inexpensive and readably available parts. The parts list is like this: brushless esc, brushless motor, motor mount, battery, battery holder, pinion gear, 12ga or 10ga wire, Schulze connectors 6mm. The real important thing is patience and a little bit of OCD helps for the details.
Motor mount will be aluminum. Yes you have to make them. But if you look around you can find a couple that are made once in a while on ebay. But generally you will have to make it. It is not that bad.
A descent .21 has a max hp of around 2.1 to 2.3 hp. That translates to about 1700 watts power (750 watts = 1 hp). Now here starts the learning curve. An electric motor will develop full torque (watts power) from less than 60 rpm up and 90% of torque from around 3 rpm. So your power is instant for all intensive purposes. Here to be fair you can use less electric motor and get the same effective performance of the nitro counterpart. Basically if you get a motor that will develop 1200 watts or more continuous you will have more power on demand and that power will develop sooner in the throttle sequence. Any New 15xx series motor will be more than enough as would any of the larger Plettenberg motors. The Nemisis / Feiago motors are descient and the Lehner motors are better than them. The Neu and Plettenbergs are the best there is, nothing is better or even really close to them. You can see all the mentioned motors here ( http://www.rc-monster.com/brushlessmotors.php ) except for the Plettenberg. For those go here ( http://www.icare-rc.com/plettenberg_cars.htm )
Lipo batteries are not like nixx you are used to. Their voltage ratings are nominal ratings and will retain 90% of that voltage through their full dissipation of their capisity. So a 4000mAh battery will maintain at least 3.5 volts per cell down to and through the usable mah of 4000 mAh. You do not get the roll off like nixx batteries. Lipo are 3.7 volts per cell, so 2 cell lipo is 7.4 volts, a 3 cell is 11.1 and so on. The mAh of your pack will need to be determined by the load you intend on putting on the battery. With lipo the current availability is relative(to a degree) to its capisity in mAh. So most packs out today are like this>: 5000 mAh pack 7.4 volts 20C. The 20C tells you the drain rate relitave to the mah. A 20C battery with 5000 mAh of capisity will deliver 100 amps of power continuous through its storage amount of 5000 mAh. You will need a battery that can handle 100 amps continuous drain. Max Amps is the place to go for the best bang for the buck by far. I use their 10,000 mah packs all the time. They are good for 200 amps and run for over an hour in my 1/8 buggies.
I am testing a new Cell Pro charger that dose 6 cell lipo and so far it has been the best charger I have used. For 140 bucks it dose it all and has a built in balancer and full PC compatability. But there are great chargers from Hyperion, Thunder Power, Xtreem, Duratrax ICE, and others.
The esc's are separate. There are no special tools needed. It is almost like Ron Popell on tv, you just hook it up and forget it, for the most part. Just have a good charger for the batteries and the motor will do what it needs to do. Sometimes cooling fans are needed but that will be determined later.
Hope this helps. Have fun.

j_blaze

Wow that helps a lot, now I have some idea what to look for so it all matches up. I'll try some small electric experiments on my daughters mini t which has been a definite learning experience so far. Once you understand electric its not really that tough. Here are some advantages I can think of off hand, much less long term cost, more power, no plugs, no fuel spillage, less dirt, more driving, more suspension adjustment learning, NO tuning, did I mention less dirt?, more fun, hopefully less frustration. Here are some disadvantages I can think of, higher upfront cost, no more delicious nitro fumes - actually I still have my truggy - , more tires, more diff fluid changes, more broken parts. But those last three are ok cause that means more driving! Thanks for all the info so far, I hope others see this thread and learn more from it, maybe 1/8 scale e-racing isn't that far off after all. Wait till the Ryan's or the Drake get a hold of some of these. Awesome.

SeanF

Can someone list the most popular or easiest 1/8th scale cars to convert to electric? Also, is there a good online guide or picture story of how this is done? I would assume the most important component is the motor mount. This is where I am going to need the most help.

Thanks!

RURC

I am going to start a "Electric 1/8 Buggy / Truggy : The science" thread now so others with ideas and curiosity. So look for it now I am doing it after this.

j_blaze

That would be great, RURC you're right across the bridge from me.