Review on ARRMA RC Truck 1/8 KRATON 6S V5 4WD BLX Speed Monster Truck With Spektrum Firma RTR, Red, ARA8608V5T1 by Aaron Fowler

I can’t recommend an Arrma product. If you like spending more time wrenching on Rc’s than you do actually driving then this is the truck for you! I’ll start with the good and end with the bad. Also I’m not hard on any Rc. I’m definitely no Talbot. I’ve driven Slashes (2wd 3s & 4wd 2s), E-Revo 1.0 (6s), Typhon V3 (on 4&6s), and a TMaxx 3.3. The Kraton is fast and certainly has a presence…that’s it… Oh and tires make a nice rumbling roar over the yard. After 5 6s 6000mah packs the servo died. Which to get it replaced under warranty you’ll have to pay for shipping both ways (about $30) Out the box the steering is awful for multiple reasons. To start with the servo is under powered for truck. It’s not enough for the weight of the truck and the size of the tires. The bell crank assembly has 4 brass bushings…$600 truck…brass bushings. So you’ll probably want to swap those out for sealed bearings(about $10) The new servo saver design is non adjustable and it’s extremely loose. The servo saver ends up absorbing most of your steering at any kind of speed if you’re on anything other than a very low traction surface. At low speed, off throttle it’ll turn. Give it any throttle and the forward momentum with the grip of the tires just opens up the servo saver and you lose steering. So you can go a couple ways of "correcting” it. You can spend $20 and get the Hot Racing adjustable servo saver and hopefully with the power of God and anime on your side you can bust through all the thread locker on the stock servo saver. That’s if you can compress it enough in a vice to get access to the top nut. You can also go a different route which ends up costing about the same. You’ll need to put snap rings (2-3) on the servo saver to compress the spring to tighten it up. So you’ll need snap rings($6 at harbor freight) and snap ring pliers ($6-16 at harbor freight). Also make sure the top two screws for the bell crank aren’t too tight as well as the pillow balls because that’ll add more resistance and kill your servo. On the 7th pack (6 & 7 were on the same day) the front passenger side axle popped out the diff cup. I was jumping a ramp made of a cinder block on its side and a piece of plywood. So we’re talking a little over a foot and maybe 15-20mph. I look online and it’s a very common problem. People have all sorts of "fixes” for this. Taking out the pillow ball spacers. Shaving 2mm off your upper and lower A arms. Recessing the pillow balls into the arms about 2mm. Making bump stops out of fuel line. All of this to shorten the length of the A arms or limit the maximum compression of the suspension. The reason this happens is because the ring gear of the differential has to be shimmed towards the driver side of the vehicle to mesh with the pinion gear that’s coming off the center drive shaft. Just looking at the front of the truck you can see that the drivers side out drive sticks out further than the passenger side. So the passenger side has less out drive to sit in and so at full compression it can pop out much easier than the drivers side. Using a digital micrometer to measure the distance from the diff housing to the end of the out drive, the drivers side is further out by 1.5mm-2mm (variance because the out drive on the drivers side has .5mm of play so I need to buy a shim manufacturer so I have enough stock to get things right). Before I got the truck I bought a Radiolink Rc6gs V2 radio with receiver because I had heard nothing but bad about the Spektrum radios to the point I didn’t even bother running it with the stock radio. Stock the ESC is set to 22.5 degrees timing advance. Which is A LOT of timing. The motor is 2050kv rated, the more timing advance you run the higher the power draw. I don’t have a motor tester but I’m sure it’s putting a few hundred more kv through the motor. With all that power draw your going to have significantly higher temps and that will shorten the life span of the motor. Your run times will be shorter the more timing you have as well. Now that I’ve tackled the drive shaft debacle I’ve got yet another problem. I decided I was going to clean up the pinion and spur gear, check the mesh, and put a little dry lube on the gears since there is a bit of a ware spot on the pinion. I go to undo the motor adjustment screws. With the hex bit bottomed out in the screw head and with just a slight turn I rounded out not one but both screws. So when the my LHS opens up I’ll go and get more screws. In the meantime I guess I’ve got some drilling to do.Arrma tough…as a care bare stare.