RC cars are resilient, and as long as you’re not ramming them into things nonstop, they shouldn’t experience any serious damage for quite some time. However, after a while, every car’s body takes a few too many hits, and it looks horrible.
This can be a serious problem if you’re at the point where you’re buying high-end RC cars like Traxxas models.
Fortunately, there are a few things you can do to squeeze every bit of performance out of your body before it’s time to buy a new one.
Here are 3 simple repairs you can do on your own.
1: Clean and Refurbish
The first, and simplest, thing you can do about a tattered car body is clean it and touch up the problem areas. Even if you take care not to run into things or otherwise trash your body out, it will get dirty, fade, and start to look like junk.
Cleaning it is easy. Remove the body from the car to avoid damaging any of its electronics or mechanical components and grab a bucket. Some warm water and mild dish soap are more than enough to scrub the car clean. Try not to scrub too hard. You don’t want to remove paint or decals when you clean it.
For the refurbishment part, we’re only covering small defects in this section.
If there’s a rough patch from scraping a curb or bumping into something, now is the time to take care of it.
Scuffs can usually be fixed with the cleaning method we talked about, but deeper scars and rough patches need to be sanded out and repainted. Find a matching paint for your body’s color, sand off the scuff with the highest grit sandpaper you can get, and then paint over it to blend it in with the rest of the body.
2: Plastic Welding
You’re eventually going to smack something hard enough to crack your RC car’s body or split a piece off. That can be devastating if you’re a competitive racer or you’re building nicer cars.
Luckily, you don’t need to immediately buy a new car. You can “weld” plastic.
There are commercial plastic repair kits on the market.
A plastic repair kit will allow you to weld your body back together, and most even come with plastic patches in case you lose a chunk of your body.
This is a last resort type of response. You should avoid putting your car in situations that cause cracks and chips. However, it will eventually happen regardless.
3: Replace the Body Kit
Unfortunately, you can only clean and weld your body kit for so long.
A lot of RC car owners immediately think they need to buy a new car in this case. That’s not true. You can simply replace the body kit. At least, if you’re running a build that uses standard sizes and doesn’t do anything strange with its layout, that is.
Let’s take Traxxas for example. Not only does the company make some of the best cars available, but they do offer body kits.
4. Prolong Your RC Car’s Life with a Premium Product
These basic steps will be necessary for everyone, but you can get the most for your money by buying a good product to begin with. Traxxas has you covered. They produce the best USA-made RC cars available, and unless you intentionally mistreat your Traxxas car, you’ll get years of use out of it before you need to start worrying about repairs.
