Running RC Truck in Wet Leaves

Ready to run!

Wet leaves are the enemy of traction to cars big and rc.  The surface of leaves of slippery which makes them to lose traction with tire, but also the surface they rest on.  The result is out of control driving.  Yesterday I experienced both the crazy slickness of the leaves with my Honda SUV and Traxxas Slash 2WD.  The Traxxas has no stability control, but my Honda does.  Even the Honda had a hard time keeping traction, but I was always in control.  The wet leaves allowed me to do some burnouts and doughnuts, which aren’t hard to do with the slash 2WD with any amount low traction surfaces, but it was still fun kicking up the leaves.  I had to get some time in with my remote control truck before the snow starts flying.  I have a feeling the 2WD is going to be useless in the snow. 

All of this wheel spinning fun is taking its toll on the rubber, time for a tire rotation.

Traxxas Slash in wet leaves

Short Course Truck as an RC Trail Truck?

I’m pretty intrigued with getting a scale remote control trail truck, but budget priorities don’t allow for it right now.  I still want to explore the scene, and give our readers and YouTube viewers a chance to see what something other than a trail truck looks and acts like on the trail.  For this I used what many have a short coarse truck.  I used a stock Traxxas Slash 2WD, a monster truck would be better, but I wanted have a bit more of a challenge.  One of the complaints about the Slash is its high center of gravity with the standard chassis.  This is true on a track, but for general bashing and running around outdoors it is a plus.  Still for running on the trail the ground clearance is still not that great and the wide chassis is going to get into contact with everything, unlike the chassis on a trail truck.  However, this exercise isn’t about modifying the hell out of a Slash to turn it into a capable trail truck, it is about simply getting out and having fun on limited resources.

The trail I was running was flat to rolling hills and had blanket of leaves.  It had no big gullies, massive roots, or rocks to climb. A short course truck is not for technical crawling and will just lead to frustration if you try to do that.  The slash ran just fine trough the wet fall leaves without any trouble.  Although the leaves gave me almost no traction at the parking lot.  My biggest problem was running across sticks.  Small sticks often got wedged in the chassis and I had to drag them along.  The chassis would run up on higher sticks and give enough lift of the wheels to lose traction and just spin.  The Traxxas Slash handled small roots just fine.  Overall I enjoyed running the slash on the trail although; I have to admit it looked pretty dumb compared to scale jeeps and pickup trucks. 

Well I think I’ve been bitten by the scale trail truck bug and I’ll have to start saving my pennies.  I think the object of my desire is an Axial ACX10 Jeep of some sort.