In the RC Driver offices, we’ve been busy running lots of RC stuff, shocker I know. But what we’re running is not necessarily what this magazine in your hands is geared towards. Being in our shoes, we’re exposed to pretty much everything in the hobby industry and luckily, we get to try out a lot of stuff beyond the surface realm, but although our positions are unique, we think that we’re not the only ones venturing out from the car world.
We’ve been spending a lot of time going to a local pond to run small boats, nothing really competition-grade, just easy to use, ready-to-run boats. Boats are an easy crossover for a car guy because they use similar electronics and their driving attitudes are similar to RC cars. Cut the wheel too hard and the boat will spin out, blip the throttle to get the nose of the boat out of water and punch the trigger to get that full-speed action. Boats have been a natural crossover for many and a reason why we include one in each issue of RC Driver; many RC enthusiasts have a boat in their collection.
Beyond boats, we have moved into a new area of RC fun and that is with flight, specifically helicopter flight. In the office, we’ve dabbled in coaxial helicopters and have even incl
uded them on the pages of RC Driver, but there is a new wave of ‘copters that have grabbed our attention more than the docile coaxials: multi-rotors. All of the RC Driver editors now have a small multi-rotor among their RC collection and we’ve been having a fun time learning the characteristics of how they fly. They are really easy to hover and are hands-off for the most part, but spinning and flipping the machines are also fairly easy and for car guys who love to get lots of air off of jumps, we really have taken to our quad-rotors.
Add to your RC hobby! Get RC Driver, Fly RC, Robot or RC Heli Pilot Magazines HERE
Inevitably, car guys want to figure out how to race whatever they are in control of and we’ve even fashioned a way to race our quads. Our conference room is pretty wide open, so we built a quad-copter “track” in the space. We raided the photo studio for light, scenery poles and even the tri-pods. Good thing our photographer was on vacation. Then we found some red holiday ribbon in the storage closet and went to work building our track. The course wound up being a simple dogleg over with an underpass where the quads had to fly under a pole. One of the corners was a small table that the quad had to land on. Additionally, there was a squeeze play where we had to fly our quad above a pole between a short gap and the ceiling. At first we attempted side-by-side racing, but with the rush of wanting to get in the lead, we had nothing but crashes, and marshaling a quad-copter race didn’t sound all that safe. We wound up doing time trials around the course and our races were safer and more fun.
We’re pretty excited about our new-found fun in the RC world and we don’t see ourselves moving on any time soon. The question we have is, are we alone in our cross-over endeavors? Who else out there has added a new RC segment to their car addiction? We want to hear from you, what you fly or run and do you want to see more outside RC car stuff on the pages of RC Driver; let us know. Drop us an email at editorsinbox@rcdriver.com
