R/C Club (image:gamepeople.co.uk)
I’ve been invovled in a wide variety of GeekDad style groups, from gaming to craft to geocaching, but my latest disocvery is easily the most exciting. With a few friends I’ve setup, what we hope will become, a radio controlled car club. Each of us have had cars of our own in the past, a combination of Tamiya kits and Nyko toys, and wanted to revisit this with our kids.
We decided to each get hold of the same cars so that racing them would be compeitive – or at least based on our driving skill. As I had a little experience with them, we settled on the diminuative 1/14th Carisma R/C touring cars. They are small enough to suit an indoor circuit, but fast enough that you have to wrestle them around corners. They also come ready built so we could get going straight away, as well as being serviced by a full set of spares and upgrade parts.
We recently had our inaugural Carisma R/C Car Club meeting, and wrote up our experience:
Our first location was a local town hall space. Unfortunately, as we discovered, the polished surface didn’t suite the road tires the cars came with. But this simply added to the challenge of getting around our oval track.
We had prepped from the meet with a couple of spare batteries and some fast chargers. But in practice the packed in batteries lasted the hour – about 20 minutes racing interspersed with pit stops and discussions about the next course layout.
Running the Carisma’s inside made it obvious how overpowered they were for their diminutive 1/14th size. There were magical moments where one of us would execute a perfect drift around a corner, met with approving man sounds. And equally, there were moments where we over cooked things and ended up burying the poor little cars in the wall – resulting in a few broken parts by the end of the evening.
So far it’s been a lot of fun, and we are raring to meet again. I was surprised how simple and cheap it was. We now have an avid queue of dads wanting to sign up, and big plans for our next meeting.
