First off let me say that I am very pleased with both of the Redcat vehicles that I own. My Shockwave is very fun to drive and the Avalanche is just plain bad a**, with that said let's move on to what I am not happy with...

I decided to buy the Redcat electric starter system (70111e) and replace the pull starts on both of my vehicles. The first time I used it I only ran one tank of fuel and as my cars fire up very quickly I only hit the trigger a couple of times. The second time I used it the trigger got harder and harder to push. Then it just stopped working and smoke started to come out of it. Now I know better than to just hold the trigger down so that was not the cause of my problem. When using something like this you want to just bump the trigger in short burst, kind of like what you get when you yank the pull starter.

I opened it up to find out what was going on and discovered that the bottom of the plastic button had melted, resulting in the need to push the button harder. The metal contact plate under the trigger had snapped in half and what was causing the smoke was the fact that the negative wire runs right alongside the contact plates on the positive wires push button and its plastic coating had melted or peeled away. This allowed the negative and positive poles to contact causing a short. This is kind of dangerous if you ask me considering that you are holding the battery compartment in your hand. If it shorts out enough to make the battery flame up or explode it could cause some serious injury.

I would love to think that I just got a bad one out of a bunch of good products but a friend of mine bought the same kit for his Avalanche just a few days after I bought mine. When he took his out to use it for the first time it immediately failed to work. He didn't even get the truck started with it once. The motor in his was turning but the output shaft stopped moving all together. When he showed it to me I decided to open it as well and see what the problem was. These things are very simple in design and easy to open. When I pulled the two halves apart I instantly saw the problem. One of the gears in the output drive was missing about 1/3 of its teeth. In both cases these starters had what looked like very old and dry lubricant around the gears yet not much at all actually on the gears to lube them.

To Redcats credit they did send me a new starter with no trouble and they are replacing my friends as well... however... I have a hard time with the fact that we are two for two on bad starters here.

If you open one of these things you will see right away that they are just poor designs and that they are more likely to fail than not.

So my call to Redcat is this... guys, please finds a better product to sell us devoted fans than this piece of junk. There are other models out there in the same price range that are better built. I know that Redcat is constantly striving to improve their products and I feel that this is a perfect item to do so with. When I had mine start smoking and saw what was causing it to do so all I could think of was how horrible it would be to have one of these short out and have a battery explode in some kid’s hand.

Find us a better starter guys. Please.