Heng Long Tanks "Factory web site"
 

Fellows-
This is my first post. Is there a Heng Long Factory Web site? All I can find are "venders" of many sorts that "sell" Heng long tanks. I am getting conflection information. Just WHO IS the "AUTHORIZED HENG LONG DEALER"? I have many questions and seem to be getting "jacked around". I "think" I would like to purchase but am hesatant due to people not really seeming to "suport" the product after the sale.


Please help?

MotionRC is the "Official" US distributor for Heng Long tanks.

The official Heng Long website is practically useless for getting information about their tanks. ????_??????_????_????????

Some times I wonder if https://www.henglonghobby.com is just a scam webpage, well depend on where you are, if you like me in the land of down under you practically screwed there is only one store that have HengLong stock and non of them Pro version.

I think some of the problem is due to the fact that Heng Long is a massive Toy Manufacturer and we hobbyists are too small to have any impact on their annual sales,
Why would they expend time and money catering for our special needs when all they will get is non stop complaints and demands for almost no financial return?
They sell a lot more dolls than Tanks and they do not go out of their way to treat the customers of that particular product any differently from other items in their catalogue.
Because we think we are special there is no particular reason why the manufacturer would think so.

Fortunately they are not monopolist anymore and competition can listen and improve sometimes ;)

According to the US supplier for Heng Long they are very much invested in RC tanks.
Here's a great thread for some insight..
https://www.hobbysquawk.com/forum/rc...ong#post256837

Any competition would need DEEP pockets. I don't think people realize just how expensive it is to build molds and manufacture something. The initial investment it huge and molds eventually wear out and must be re-made. It costs millions to retool a car plant to make a different model vehicle and while some think their car is manufactured there, it isn't. It's only "assembled" there. The parts are manufactured off site by multiple vendors. I'm sure with these tanks the retooling is much less expensive, but that's because the huge initial tooling is pretty much the same for all of these tanks. There is a HUGE investment in the initial tooling. I'm sure the machines HL use don't make one hull at a time. I'm sure it has a bunch of molds in different stages of finish as new ones are being molded the molded parts are cooling to be demolded. Making one hull at a time would be a way to hemorrhage money by the hour as machines sit idle. To be honest we don't even know how much of the tooling or parts are made in house at HL. HL may farm out parts to other companies to produce just like companies like GM do. Hell, IBM didn't even make their own laptops. Lenovo made them for them for years and they just slapped an IBM logo on them until one day IBM decided to stop selling laptops. At that point Lenovo started putting their own name on them and purchased the "Thinkpad" license. HP does the same thing and Dell probably does too. HL has been very successful making tanks, but don't hold your breath for other companies to get into this game.

An illustration of how much Heng Long give a hoot for hobbyists is that since the first 1/16 Tiger 1 was released from its mould to the very latest Heng Long Tiger1 was released from its mould the duplicated aerial stowage tube has never been removed and since the first mould was placed in service there must have been hundreds of replacement moulds that could have been modified but why would they when people still buy them and the only people who notice the error are a few thousand hobbyists so telling me that there is a Heng Long executive with a watching brief over the "Tank Division" makes me want to call him/her out for taking money under false pretences because until you mentioned him/her he/she had done a very good job of playing the invisible man.

Every model company including Tamiya has made mistakes in kits and never fixed them. There isn't a single 1/16 kit that is perfect on the market that isn't lacking either on detail or has some mistake on it. We either accept it's faults and buy it or don't accept it's faults and not buy it.

Trust me when I say that my interest in this hobby would be much less than it is were it not for Heng Longs failings,
I belong to another Tank Forum and its start up is lost in the mists of time (RCTW) but it and I would suggest this hobby is based on Heng Longs original Tiger 1 which because of its failing induced the fiddlers and rivet counters amongst us to get together to help other like minded fools to fix the problems,
Tamiyas Tanks at that time were top quality and expensive and no one wanted to cut and drill one but a cheapo Chinese toy was a different proposition so here we are.