Welcome to Revive RC!

Hi, welcome to the blog!

I'm a dude approaching 40 getting back into my childhood RC hobby. I'll be fixing up old cars, maybe building some new ones and possibly even doing a bit of racing, and trying to get some of my mates into it too.

My main aim is to have fun while I fiddle with old RC cars and see how well I can get them running. Hopefully some of what I do and document as I'm doing them can be helpful to you or someone else too!

Here's a little about my history of RC cars and the toys that preceded them.

As a child of the late 80's and through the 90's I had a number of RC toys from the likes of Tomy, Nikko, Tyco and so on. It was a golden era for cheap exciting toys you could bash around the house or in the garden. Stuff like the Tomy Char-G, Tyco Triple Wheel, Tyco Rebound and a great Nikko speedboat among quite a few other bits and bobs. We had some other cars too, there was a small tracked car, and I think a Tyco buggy of some kind, along with some Lego Technics motorized cars.

After the toys my dad got a Mardave Cobra for us to build together. I think was an attempt to get us off the video games quite so much, and he was also desperate for us to get into building stuff with him, but we never really liked Meccano he tried us on before.

The Cobra was a lot of fun. We bashed that car around our garden all the time. The real flaw was that the old 90’s NiCad battery packs were pretty low capacity and lacked the punch of even NiMH packs. Much later I did buy a couple of decent NiMH packs for the Cobra, but by that stage the Cobra was already in a bad way reliability wise. 

Eventually it broke and it was deemed beyond repair so it was binned(!) between a couple of house moves. An action I now regret, as now I want to get a new buggy!

Around the same time my brother wanted a car too, so he got a Mardave Mini. That was a fast car! But it wasn’t as fun bashing around the paved bit of our garden or the dirt paths near our house. We didn’t really understand that it was a racing car designed for use on a properly prepared surface, like carpet. That car also got smashed to bits and was eventually thrown out too. Which is a shame too, but that was also heavily damaged. 

Sometime around 1999/2000 I picked up a Tamiya Mini kit on the M03 platform. I wanted a new Mini, but with a bit more in the way of suspension for bombing around our uneven paved drive and the unmade dirt road down the side of our house. Unfortunately in running it for the first time, as an excitable teenager, something seized in the gearbox for some reason. I put it down to the lack of lubrication in the plastic bushings, but it could have been any number of things even down to just bad luck and bad driving. When that bushing seized it caused the axle to heat to such a level that it melted the part of the chassis that it sits in and all of the gears ended up way off axis meaning the gears didn’t mesh so it stopped. I hadn’t even painted the shell…

There ended my engagement with RC cars, until 2023, when I decided to get the Tamiya mini out of my parents basement and get it running, which is where we begin with my next article.