Why I sold my Slash 4x4

My first RC car was a Stampede that I quickly turned into a Slash 4x4 LCG.  That truck served me pretty well, and at one point I had two Slash 4x4 LCG’s.  But I recently sold my Slash 4x4, and here’s basically the story on why.

The Slash 4x4 is pretty good in a few different ways.  Parts are cheap, and they’re plentiful and easily available.  That’s probably it’s strongest suit – Traxxas has the widest distribution network of any RC brand, you can basically pickup parts in every town.  The Slash 4x4 is also a versatile machine.  You can race it, bash it, turn it into a speed rig, crawler.  It’s basically a jack-of-all-trades.  But it’s also the master of none.

And that was basically the reason I sold the truck.  It’s a good learner vehicle, because parts are cheap and it’s reasonably durable.  But the plastics slop out ridiculously fast, and it’s really not that great of a race truck, even though I got it to handle pretty decently.  95% of my driving is on the track, and it’s not a very rewarding vehicle to drive.  It’s imprecise (steering slop and sensorless motor/esc) and coarse relative to race-bred machines.

There were a few other weak spots that drove me nuts.  The diffs leak basically no matter what you do and need to be rebuilt periodically.  The motor mesh was never that good, because of the floating nature of the spur gear.  Traxxas pinions are horribly bad, whatever pot metal they use sucks.  The truck uses a weird wheel offset that’s basically only shared with the HPI Blitz.

Even on the durability front, it really isn’t that tough compared to trucks like the Tekno SCT410.3.  The driveshafts and axles are pretty flimsy.  Plastic driveshafts?  Come on…

In the end, I lost interest in short course trucks, and the Slash became relegated to loaner duty.  But my son drives pretty well now, and so I no longer need a demolition derby loaner car.

It’s possible, though unlikely, I eventually end up with another short course truck.  If that happens, it will almost assuredly be a Tekno.  I’m strongly considering getting an EB48SL, which is an electric buggy easily convertible into a short course truck.  I’m not sure I want to make the jump to 1/8 scale, but that would be the most likely candidate.