A friend told me he saw somewhere where someone hooked their steering servo directly to the battery and it worked WAY BETTER. Just curious if anyone's seen this and if so how is it done? Thanks.

You can run the servo's power leads in parallel with the receiver, that way more current can be drawn from the battery. You still need to have the signal wire connected to the receiver for the servo to work.

OK that's how it works ad it does work. Thanks a bunch.

Does it make a big (or noticeable) difference?

You will burn out your servos doing that if you are running an electric. If running nitro you are fine.... It can make a difference if your servos are pulling heavy current and your ESC;s BEC cant handle it....

Yeah it's for nitro..Thanks.

I would be cautious about doing that (bear in mind I've never done it).....but I would think that you risk burning up your servo. I'd be curious if it makes THATbig of a difference to make it worth while.

Yes in nitro it "can" make a difference... If we are talking a heavy monster truck with 2 biv digital servos, you will likley see a BIG difference. Normally, you have small gauge wire running from the battery to the reciver, from there it goes into the servos.... often the wire from the battery to the reciver is the same size as the servo wires.... so you have 2-3 digital servos, being powered off one set of wires that were made to power 2 analog servos (steering and throttle) Not only is the wire gauge smaller than it should be, but all the extra length is lowering voltage... running the power wires right to the reciver battery takes out some of that length, and removes the small gauge wire bottleneck... meaning you have more voltage and amps available for your servos..... of course if you are running this off alkalines, or 4 consumer nimh, you wont gain as much as you could. You really need either a 5 cell nimh reviver pack, or better yet a lipo pack with a voltage regulator for best performance.... You could also run a 2 cell A123 pack without a regulator.

As long as your battery voltage doesn't exceed what the servo can handle, nothing will burn out.

For sure! Most servos are rated for 6 volts, and I did hook one of my servos up to a receiver pack to test it after I had run it though some water. [&:]