Acht! Another find at the Truck-Stop

frizzen · #1 06-17-2003, 02:49 AM

It's nice when you go out of your way to buy cheap gas, and find a suprise...

New Oval-bubble clone. Made in China by "MT", patented and FCC registered.

First off, they have 2 bullets: flattened Hummer, and a Jeep Cheroke type thing. They had off-road looking tires, like the MotorWorks, and the Semi clone have. Nice if you're into station-wagons in cammo, but still ugly.

Now, for the cool part; they have tanks. 2 styles in 3 colors. Not 100% sure, but I think it's a Tiger and two Shermans. Molded and sprayed: Snow, Desert, and Forest camoflage.

My (snow camo Sherman-ish) tanks frequency is labled 49B, so I can only assume they have 2 useing bands of 49 mhz spaced just far enough apart not to interfere. *assumption, not fact.* Then my dad got a 27 mhz, German Tiger in the forest camo scheme.

The Good: Detailed body. Remote set up so it actually drives like a tank. Decent speed for a tank, but plenty of torque for what it is. Low gearing. About $10.00. Tracks are really grippy rubber. Scale is good. Turret pivots about 120 degrees. Driven wheels are on the back, idle and road wheels along for ride.

The Bad: Really light weight. CG too high so it likes to flip. Non-propo. Syspension doesn't articulate. Turret not on servo. Gun barrel fixed position. Great for gentle desktop courses, but not a land-speed record setter. Can't quite make it over a Bit Char-G without falling back onto the rear. In other words, it's a 1/80 scale toy tank.

The Ugly: Those stationwagons I mentioned earlier in the post.

I haven't yanked the body off it yet, but checking out the slight chassis/body gap it looks as if it *may* run a dual cell pack stock.

If you're in the USA, and within a few miles of a "Flying-J Travel Plaza" check them out. As soon as I get the peak chager for my 1/10 scale truck, I'm going back for another tank!!

2G2SILVERSTRAT · #2 06-17-2003, 10:38 PM

i live 3 minutesfrom there right off kentucky avenue....interesting and not fat at all.....thanks for the info.

frizzen · #3 06-17-2003, 11:48 PM

I didn't realize there was somebody else here from Indy. I'm like 10 minutes north of that one. (Yeah, westside!!

)

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I was playing with it more today, and I've come to the conclusion that the rubber tracks are too big, and the drive wheels don't have enough bite to catch the tracks properly. It will start out with it pulling toward the weaker tread, and it becomes much more noticeable as the battery goes flat.

Batterys don't seem to have a good MAh rating. But the Torque is unbelevable!!! I was climbing like a 60-70 degree slope, high cg and track slippage are the only limiting factors.

2G2SILVERSTRAT · #4 06-17-2003, 11:56 PM

isold my tank .......it was good quality for me

frizzen · #5 06-18-2003, 02:28 AM

These things are great!!! I wish i'd found these before Bits/Zips/MS!

-- Electronics:
The charger/tx using three 1.25v AA (copper-tops, used) batteries, puts out 3.75v at charging pad. So, on a fresh set, that would be 4.5v.

The tank (measured at charging contacts) I managed to get charged up to 2.80v using the weak batteries, even so it's not bad!

Run-time is a little short, but it's not like you're really going to need that much time to conquer all kinds of stuff at this scale.

The body is held on by 3 screws, and you have to remove the middle road-wheel axle to get 2 of them. I'm guessing the transaxles use a worm/spur setup.

Power/Weight ratio seems dead on, or better than actual, for a real tank.