"Direct Drive to Diff" MT2 18SS

[MetalMan]

Today I maidened the truck. Initial thoughts were, "wow, this truck takes off fast". The minimum throttle position results in a pretty high speed, but that's not surprising considering the cheap airplane ESC and the direct-drive setup.

As others have found, outrunner startup is odd. If I GRAB full throttle, there will most likely be harsh cogging (and some interesting musical tones). If I grab some throttle, the truck might move a foot smoothly, and then encounter some cogging, only to take off. It doesn't happen all the time, especially more recently since I'm learning how the throttle wants to be worked, but when I do get past this "post first-foot-cogging" point the truck accelerates like no other... Too fast, in fact. Traction becomes a HUGE issue with acceleration like that.

After work I pushed the truck pretty hard on asphault with the tires shown (worn down HPI Dirt Bonz). The motor and ESC had no problems taking the abuse. Only problem I noticed, is that the ESC has a bit of a lag to it when getting the motor RPM up to the point it should be at relative to the trigger position. That is really only an issue when I'm trying to do drifting (be it on asphault or a waxed floor).

Unfortunately the truck doesn't seem to like this much power. Previously with a Feigao 9L and 4s2p A123 it had problems with the diffs clicking (with the hardened diffs), yet inside the diff housings there was nothing but a little grease. That's when I went to aluminum diff housings. During the pavement run, the rear diff actually went out, and since a new ring/pinion costs $32, I'm hoping it's just the internal diff gears.