Haha. i'm glad i found this. Its funny how many people have had and want this car today. I bought, on Ebay, a brand new in the box Green (49mhz) Fast TraxxCar identical to what I had when I was littleabout 5 years ago for $60. I had one when I was a kid and did all kinds of stupid stuff with it, including driving it through puddles over the top where all you could see was the antenna/flag above the water telling you which direction it was facing. Great stuff. The most water proof off the shelf RCcar I ever had.
So, 5 years ago, I opened it... charged the battery and ran it all around the apartment we were in, and then having had my nostalgic fix...parked it. Fast forward 5 years later and i'm getting into more hobby RCstuff (Helis and planes, all electric) and I thought to myself, hmm... I hated those 9.6v Turbo batteries and the charge times required. I always had the standard 4-hour 'quick' charger that came with the batteries (i've got 3, 2 good.... one bad). So I had a thought the other day when I saw it on the shelf. Why deal with the 9.6v old batteries that weigh a ton. I was on Rcgroups (dont hate me) and started asking questions about the LiPo batteries and after some learning/discussion I was determined to use one of my tiny little 800mah Lipos that I had for my E-Flight Blade CX2. I took my dead 9.6v battery and cut the wires about halfway between the battery and the plug that goes into the car and soldered on the proper end of a Deans connector. I put that tiny little 2S 7.4v 800mah battery in the battery tray (could fit 2-3 more in there its so small in comparison) and ran it yesterday for about 6 minconstantly around the basement in low gear trying to use up the battery as quick as I could stopping short of running the Lipo cells too low... I plugged the battery into my balance charger and I still have 3.7v per cell. Needless to say, I'm going to do some measurements when I get home from work (yep, working hard today!)and see what size 2S battery I can fit. maybe a 1300mah or so. Length is the concern. I bet I could run the Fast Traxx for 30+ min, provided the motors dont get too hot. So anyway, long story short, 2S 7.4v Lipo batteries work fine
I love having this thing running again and.. being new, the treads are still black and dont fall off. Thats what made me give up my old one when I was little... the treads were shot... they were turned grey, nubs on the treads were wore off and they kept falling off every time i did something remotely stupid like... turn. I ended up pulling all 4 wheels off and putting monster truck wheels on it... that unfortunately stripped the low gear but damn was it fast in high gear with those much larger wheels. No idea where it went over the last 15 years.
I still have the Richochet also, we only ran it about 6 times... and then my brother got it wet (got it for x-mas and it was NOTmeant for snow). He was sad and moved on but I was diligent and opened it up, dried it all out and sure enough, it was like new again. Mine now
I haven't ran it since, cuz I had the fast traxx....
Brian / ChevyNovaLN