Fountain of youth

Many, many moons ago I was a teenager. Actually it is 30 +/-2 years ago. Back then I had an RC car. My first car. A Kit. From Tamiya.

Back then there were no "ESC". We had resistors that burned energy, or just used full power all the time. Batteries were weak and rechargeable were not wide spread yet.

I am not sure what happened to the car I had. I was more into airplanes later, then came cars (1:1). Life goes on. We change.

But now I feel young again because I own the exact same car as I had 30 +/-2 years ago:


Tamiya re-released this vehicle this year. It was their first off-road RC car back then. A school friend of mine had the "Cheetah". Actually I wanted the Cheetah too, but when I had saved the money there was no stock, so I bought the XR311 instead. I have many good memories of this car. And I learned valuable mechanical skills from it. Such as "don't go from full forward to full reverse multiple times as it strips threads of grub screw in aluminium gears". Reckless youth...

Tamiya has improved quite a bit on this re-release. The car has torsion bars as springs, which originally were made from plastic and did not survive when you stored the car tensioned-up for an extended period of time. The new release has metal torsion bars, and they give you a set of spares in the kit.

Also the gears are now on splined shafts instead of held by grub screws. And the out-drives are made from one piece instead of 3.

Compared to modern cars the XR311 is not a good trailing vehicle. Actually it is not particularly good in anything. It has rear wheel drive, not a lot of ground clearance, no shocks, a Silver Can, a gearbox where you can select 3 speeds (but you have to open screws and exchange a gear). But I love it. Dearly.

I am looking forward to this build. But first the Dingo will have to be fully finished before I even open one plastic bag.
I will take it very slow, so that I can inhale all the memories that will be set free when I put the pieces together.

Feels good to be young again

Keeping the Dreams Alive!!!

Ya man
When 20 years later I hope can built a cc01 again

Hope 20years later I can build my 1st cc01....

One downside about tamiya is their plastic. You can't keep it for long. It will start to crack. But their RC is the most scale cause tamiya is more of a scale model company.