I mean it! Hobbies are fun!

So my last post was about my RC Boat, this post is about my RC Drift Car. I got into this pretty much the same time as the boats. I have a neighbor, Jeremy, that had one, and after playing with it for a bit I decided I had to get one too. One Graig's List later and I had a fairly decent drift car for super cheap. It's a slightly older electric touring car called the Losi XXX-S and it's got a belt driven four wheel drive system which is wonderful for drifting.

Jeremy helped me out a great deal with set up, which was a lot more extensive than I thought it would be, and now it runs extremely well. So far we've locked the rear differential, tightened up the front, gave it a little bit of overdrive to the rear wheels, changed out the shock springs, and changed out the regular plugs on the batteries to a plug with lower resistance to help keep heat down. There's still a whole lot I want to do to it, but the changes we did were the only cheap ones, the rest are triple digit cost and I'm not ready to spend that kind of dough.

Jeremy is also one of the creators of a Sacramento based drifting club and I joined up with them. Every week or so we meet up for practices and such. Last weekend however, there was a fairly large meet with a tournament and everything! I was able to find out just how well set up my car was. See?


Woot 2nd place. Got a trophy an' everythin'!

This group of guys are really awesome. If you remember I tried to get into buggy racing, but the people in that hobby were very competitive and unhelpful. They all felt that their set ups were trade secrets and they didn't want to give their competitors any advantage at all. This drift club is the complete opposite of the buggy club. Everyone is there to help everyone else. Here's a perfect example; I was doing a tandem run (which is when two people are competing against each other at the same time) with one guy, and on our second run his car broke down. Rather than just let him have to forfeit, I helped him out. The belt drive on his car had frayed a servo wire and I took the time and soldered it together for him, then put on a zip tie to make sure that those wires wouldn't rub against the belt again. After that was done, we finished our run and luckily I still won that match up. That wasn't the only example of that day either! These guys are wonderfully laid back just out to have a fun time.

Here are some more pictures of my Car and my Trophy. There's also a short clip of my car drifting around a part of the track.

Hobbies are fun!

So my friend Mike has a friend and co-worker named Jim who bought three remote controlled boats from an estate sale for $75. All of them had been neglected for some time and none of them ran. Since Mike knew that I had that RC Buggy, he figured I knew more about this stuff than he did. I was given the offer that if I could get them up and running, or at least could show them what they needed to get them up and running, I could keep one. Well, I got the first boat a couple of weeks ago, and after a dozen or so hours of research and elbow grease, I got it working! Boy, am I glad I live on a small lake (it's more like a large pond).

Check out these pictures! It was super fun.

As you can see, it's kind of an old boat. Nonetheless, it's still a very good boat.


It's an older style K&B outboard 7.5 cc two stroke nitro motor. I found out that they don't make any more. I did find a website that still makes newer models of this motor, and therefore can get some parts for it, but they're all sorts of expensive. Here's to hoping that I don't break it.


This is me just cruising kind of slowly. I never had a real chance to open her up on the water because it kept stalling out on me. I have to learn the proper settings for the carb a little better... then I'll be able to see how fast this sucker really is.


Even without full throttle, you can see that it can cook.


This is me giving it a little too much power as I put it in the water. I almost flipped it!



All of these pictures came from some video that Rebecca took with mom's old Sony Handicam, but as of yet, I don't know how to copy the video on the tapes to my computer. As soon as I figure that out though, I'll be sure to post it.