Edit: so it turns out that every hobby can be expensive if you do it long enough.
Also I love how you talk about your hobby as some addicts.
Edit: so it turns out that every hobby can be expensive if you do it long enough.
Also I love how you talk about your hobby as some addicts.
Out of curiosity, have the battery lives improved from older RC vehicles? I’ve looked at some current models and it still seems like they run only a short time, but I’ve not followed RC stuff closely enough to know if they’ve really gotten much better and I’m lacking the context.
Depends on what you want to get and how you use them. I have racing drones with batteries that only last 4 minutes, and a few planes that last 30-60 minutes. Lipos haven’t improved radically in the last decade, but they are a lot better than nickel batteries from a few decades ago though.
I race electric on-road and we have a couple endurance races we run every year. We’re able to get upwards of 45+ minutes of run time without losing performance from some of our high capacity (8000mah+) batteries.
But we also run high turn (21.5t or 25.5t), and sometimes fixed timing, motors, so draw isn’t that significant.
My Losi Baja Rey running a 3600kv (beefy, high draw) motor gets 15-20 minutes of run time from my 5000mah battery depending on how hard I run it.
Run time really comes down to how high draw the motor is, lipo battery technology is significantly improved over the old nicad and nimh chemistries of the past.
Thanks for the reply and insight! I suspect some of the models I was looking at may have had some lower capacity batteries to try to balance out the costs, and I was overlooking that.