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I got a couple of the rip off ones to test them out. If your expecting the real thing, they you’ll be dissappointed, but then again, I was rather dissapointed with my first real Z.
You really have to go all out on the upgrades to
build up a car worthy of racing. The clones can be upgraded just like the real Z’s, and you might consider using one as a base for building up a second car etc, replacing parts one by one.
The best option is save your money (about $300)
and then order a complete ready built upgraded top shelf model from Hong Kong. For $300 you will
be getting the very best of everything.
I have some phone numbers of shops there if you want them.very cool !!! I haven’t seen the honda’s yet and I got mine from Nikko in Malaysia at the factory outlet shop. They have lots of other stuff, but prices in Malaysia on average are double what they cost here. The iRiders were the only thing that was good value.
What frequency do the honda’s work on ?
It’s their only real downfall. You can’t run two
of the same colour bikes together.Update …
I was just fooling around with a micro car I picked up today at Big W. A holden ute with a pistol grip 27mhz txer. I turned it on and was going to test drive it on the floor. Throttle on
and the ducati 749 kicked off on the other side of the room. The controler circuit is the same.no, they handle the same.
I showed a guy at a shop today who has a glow plug rc motorcycle. He got it up second go and had no problem driving it. He reckons it handles just the same but on a tiny scale.
I discovered a problem this afternoon when a friend came around. Each model bike is on the same frequency. The 749’s are on 27Mhz and the 999 are on 40.685Mhz. DOH !!!
It won’t be an issue later, but for now I can see it being a problem with only 2 freqs used.Can anybody suggest a program to convert .avi to mpg so I can post the video of them somewhere for you guys to see ?
Yes, It was suggested today that I try run them on something like an indoor basketball court.
I’m keen to try it, just have to find a somewhere near to do it.
To answer your questions…Yes, the throttle is proportional. You have a smaller turning circle at lower speeds.
No, I haven’t opened them up. I have been having too much find driving them and trying to race them with friends. I’d love to see a more powerful motor in them.
Yes, they turn at low speed, and it is even possible to stop them without falling completely over. It came to rest on a footpeg. Of course I haven’t been able to do it again.
The Txer is a gun grip wheel style, but the wheel is on the back rather than the side.
The tyre traction is good, they have rubber tyres with tread on them just like real bikes. If the motor had more torque in the low end, they’d pop some cool little minga’s.
Yes, I reckon they’re worth it. So do my friends who of course all want one now. I’m a cheap skate,
the thought of paying $40 for a BCG horrifies me.
(reckon they’re worth about $8).
Personally I reckon they’re worth about $60 and if shops sold them at that price every kid would have one for xmas this year. The ones I got cost me $80 and I bought them from company’s factory shop. You can buy them on the web for about that price, the postage will bring you up to about $100. They’re made in Malaysia, not China, so the quality is pretty good.Ok… pictures of the bikes are up.
check my members gallery.
I’ve done a lot more playing with them today.
They are much easier to learn to use if you have a large space to practise. 2 minutes and anybody
should be able to drive one of these little bikes and keep it upright. There really is not need for the training wheels provided.
I’ve tried mine on several surfaces now and concrete is best. But they are very intollerant of dirt on the track. The smallest pebbles will
give your robot rider death wobbles.
Large fast turns are easy, but slow narrow turns take a little bit of time to master.
Overall you can expect the performance of these bikes to match that of stock standard mini-Z.
Their charge time is good, you’ll tire of doing laps before the batteries do.
I give them an 8-1/2 out of 10, and hope that more powerful motors are availble for them soon.I’m not sure what is available in tyre temprates like mini-Z, but maybe this is the answer.
Stock Z’s come with 50deg tyres… rock hard, they only stick to concrete. At the bottom end is
10deg, so soft that they practically stick to oilly carpet.Gee’s that’s crooked !!!
In hong kong they cost $50 HK, they’re even cheaper again across the border in China.
Yes, lucky for us, China has the yuan pegged to the USD and then it’s seriously undervalued.yep $100 aus.
Nikko iRider motorcycle. Ducati 749 or Ducati 999.
I have a 749 so far and I’m chasing up a 999, they’re quite difficult to find. There is only one other that I know of on shop shelves around here.
ahh.. finally just found on on the web with a picture !!!http://www.otherlandtoys.co.uk/product695/product_info.html
ah, and one even cheaper … the 999…
http://myahead.com/go/look/product.show_product?v_id=4338no need for me to bring another one back when you guys can order them on the net… coool !
that actually run on two wheels, and they take a bit of time to learn to drive. I was playing with it last night. They do come with training wheels that you can put on in one of two settings.
Down for learning, up for intermediate or off for advanced. I gave it whirl without the training wheels on first and found that I could manage a straight line with a few wobbles, but turning definately takes some practise. Keeping one on a race track will take a bit of time. I’m sure that the young punks will manage that in about 15 minutes.
The weird thing is the front wheel is free floating, it’s not fixed and there is no steering servo, it’s just allowed to wander freely and let gyroscopic forces keep it straight. The rider weight shifts to steer. This isn’t exactly the correct way to ride a bike. It’s usually done by counter-steering.
The scale is bigger than BCG, the rider’s helmet
would be twice the height of a BCG car, and the length overall is about the same. I’ve tried searching for a picture of them on the net, but even the company that makes them hasn’t got mention of them yet. doh !I have worked out how to handle multiple cars. It’s actually quite easy.
The first is that each IR beacon transmits a flag and then it’s ID. so everything else is just noise. The pic can handle multiple sensors, but
I have just programed it for 1 so far just to keep it simple. Even with multiple cars in the field of view of the sensor, it will be rare that
two cars will jam each other. The trick is to remove a car from the detection subroutine for two seconds after it has been detected. So it will ignore that car. The beacon times are also so fast that there are large gaps of miliseconds between bursts leaving enough time for about 10 cars all to go through the timer at once.
And I still have plenty of tricks up my sleve for sifting out IR noise.That’s a damn good price for something outside of HK.
I have another new toy that I picked up today…
this one is even cooler than the midget subs !!!A BCG style motorcycle.
Now I know what you’re thinking.. I’ve seen the training wheel style BCG motorcycles in HK for $5
a pop. They’re rather dull and boring.
Not this one. Think of a true motorcycle BCG size
with a robot rider weightshifting. These are SUPER cool !! Unfortunately for the plebs out there, I got the last one (again). They make two styles, both ducati’s one a 886? the other a 999,
yellow and red. You only have 4 days to wait for a picture of these ones, and I’m looking for the company that makes them. If I find the distributor, I will guess that they cost about $100-$120 to get them back to australia if somebody really wants one. I know what a bunch of nutcases you ducati people can be.give me a bit more time kiddies. I’ve written some software for it that runs on a pic chip.
They cost about $10 each and they are small enough to fit into a BCG. It in theory can identify 256 cars, but I simplified it down to 10. As you all know, I’m still on holidays.
about 7 days to go. hassle me in october and I’ll publish the source code etc here.
I’d like to make a few up and test them first.
Let ya’ll know then.they’re about 25cm long in their boxes and about 15 wide, 15 high. Weight about 500gms. They should fit nicely into a cut down post tube, or just a bubble pack. The perspex box is really strong.
anybody seen them out at parklea markets ?
Something amiss here. I’m not sure if you’ve thought through the physics of it. How much does the lead weigh and how much more power do you require to accellerate the car up to speed.
Going around corners slower may be what is keeping you upright, not the lower C of G.
You can also lower your c’g by widening the wheel base etc. Good suspension also is what keeps cars from flipping. I’ve seen a few mentions of suspension on here before, but I haven’t taken any notice of what people have been doing (yet).Lead by the way isn’t really toxic. You exposure to it rather ‘minimal’ even swallowing it isn’t going to hurt you as it will pop out the other end without too much fuss. Compunds of lead on the other hand
are toxic. Lead chloride etc. Long exposure to such things or high doses will make you a bit dumber than the rest of us.
:dead:excellent … thanks for that.
good price.
When I was in HK last week, the price on the Digi-Q’s had dropped to $300 HK which is about $60 aud. Not much of a drop, but I’d say they’re expecting the new tanks out soon. I took mine to Jaycar at Parramatta a few weeks ago to test them against the clones for compatibility. Sadly, they don’t work together, but the guys behind the counter prefered the digi-Q.
Try using your TV IR control on the tanks, they go crazy.
I have some BCG tanks extra that I may consider swaping for something else if somebody is looking for some.that’s the ones, exactly the same !
A tip on them when you buy them, check them for leaks. Mine leaked around the small LED’s. A touch of superglue fixes them.
The main seal is around the hull just in front of the motor stems. It comes off without too much trouble enven though they say not to open the sub.
(who ever reads the instructions ?)
It seems water tight, but the O ring is very fragile, so be careful how you put it back together.
I use some vasolene to help keep the water out. (don’t glue it). The ballast in mine was also a little light. A small fishing sinker glued into the nose cone
fixed it and now it works fantastic !Overall, they’re a cool little machine. 8/10
😀sorry, overseas. won’t be back till october.
sorry, overseas. won t be back till october.
can’t see why not. Balsa is in the “hard wood” catagory. yeah, I know… it doesn’t feel like that.
Balsa is a bit like fibre glass. Add a good resin or dope to it and it is like concrete. I’ve seen balsawood planes collide with gum trees and the tree trunk came off second best !
If you want a REALLY cool idea for making bodies…. try this ………..Start with a block of candle wax.
Carve it down to exactly how you want it to look,
OR
take an existing shell you want to modify and
push it into soft play dough and pull it out, then melt the candle wax into it. Vola ! you have a wax
template.step 2. Take your wax ‘positive’ and mix up some plaster of paris. Place the wax model into it, but don’t submerg it.
Let the plaster set, when it is done, use a hot air gun, or hair drier or flame to melt out the wax.you now have a ‘negative’.
Now you can use this as a mould for the shell itself.
You want to make sure your shell isn’t going to stick to the mould. use something like graphite, vasoline etc.The material you use can be epoxy glue or fibreglass resin, with or without the fibre glass.
Pour it into the mould and add some sort of tag/handle that you can use to pull the shell out of the mould.
If you can’t pull the shell out, you will have to break the mould and your shell will turely be one of a kind.
I don’t actually know, I only had about 5 minutes to look at it. The controller is the same as most other micro electric planes, so I’d say the range is about 300-500m. It would also handle very similar, the best feature is you could nose dive it into the ground and not break it. You could in theory just stuff it into a backpack, and it would just flop back into shape when you pull it out, but nerf/sponge material has a bit of a memory so I wouldn’t recomend that. They were selling for about $25aud, so you could expect to see them here for about $100. Doh !!
check out http://www.microrccenter.com
look in forum.. Tim is a young fella in NZ who built a micro HC. He’s also built a bit sub and a few planes. I read a few forums when I get the chance, mostly this one because it’s australian and that one because it seems to have the most users.
with broad topics.That’s not the problem, getting to and from HK is 🙂
I’m currently looking for the mob that makes or distributes them. They’re bound to cost a lot less.
The semi trucks cost $25 in HK just 3 months ago, now crazy clarks is selling them for $15, you can bet they are getting them into the country for less than $5. The BCG cars probably leave the factory at $2-3each. I was horrified to see hobby shops selling them for $35. But whe you work out the cost of having to travel to HK and then buy the stuff ship it and not get any money back on defective units, it all adds to the cost
Freight and import duty are the killers. Big companies have more money and can ship large amounts offsetting the cost. The BCG subs don’t come in small bubbles like the cars, the box is big and just 5 of them would fill a bag. If they were small I could get a lot into a box and post them.
HK postage is expensive, which is why the guys selling stuff on Ebay australia (like bit planes) say you have to pay $50 shipping even though they are in melbourne. Zzzzzt. No, they’re in Hong Kong,
they pay no tax and you pay all the shipping, and you take all the risk. If the unit doesn’t work, though luck.
Consolidated freight is the best way, but you need a large amount of people to pay cash up front, with enough to send somebody over to pack a crate and ship it back, and then you still have to pay your share of the duty when it gets here. something like $2 each item etc. I have a friend over there that I’m hoping will send me stuff if I line his pocket with a few $$ each time he sends something.
Postage still being a killer ! -
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