Resurrecting the Traxxas Rustler VXL From the Dead

 About 7 – 8 – 9 months ago my nephew decided to exit the RC car hobby. I figured I would pick up a couple of RC car projects. One was a Traxxas Rustler VXL, just a 2wd unit. The other one we will get to later.

The first thing I wanted to do was charge the battery. The battery that came with it was a LiPo 5000mAh battery. The charger that I received with the car as a package deal, is a Duratrax Onyx 230. This is a pretty cool little charger, even though it is old. When I last had an RC car was 25 years ago, and the car I had was a Gold pan RC10. So this is all new to me. The charger will save up to 10 different battery configurations and will handle NiMH, LiPo, LiIon, and LiFe battery types.

After I was able to get the battery charged and find 8 good AA batteries for the Radio. I was ready to see if the radio worked. To my surprise it didn’t. I did receive an extra radio and receiver with it. No matter what I did I could not get them to work. I tried different combinations of the radios, receivers, and tried different crystals in them as will. Still to no avail I could not get anything to work. Finally I gave up fucking around with the old shit, and ordered one of the least expensive radio I could find on Amazon.

If you are considering this radio, help the site out at no extra cost to you and buy one from Amazon.

The trigger is ultra thin and has the potential to break ( it has happened in the past). What sold me was the price tag. The fact that 70% of the reviews on Amazon were 5 star reviews and 4% were 1 star didn’t hurt to sell me on this controller. In my opinion, I feel that this controller delivers.

The possibility of the trigger breaking is there, but for the most part I have a feeling the item was mishandled either that or the part was faulty.

After all of this fusing around with the old Radio, and installing a new radio/receiver setup, the car seemed to run just fine, and the range is easily 150ft.