Jim O’Halloran’s Weblog

Published December 30th, 2005 by Jim O'Halloran

Hyper 7 Journal - Part 1 (Assembly)

I’ve been thinking about getting a nitro car (off-road) for a while now, it looked like a bit of fun. The cars are bigger and can handle a lot ore in terms of jumps and rough terrain and so forth. I really liked the look and go-anywhere attitude of the nitro trucks, but they proved a bit expensive for my budget.

An added incentive is that the Morphett Vale track is onloy about 2 minutes from home. It’s just been rebuilt and Southern Districts is starting to run nitro off-road racing there. I’ll probably still keep racing electrics competitively, but I wanted to get a nitro car for a bit of fun and social racing close to home.

So I started looking around, at Nitro cars. The 1/10th scale nitro trucks were affordable, but just weren’t much bigger than the electric cars I’ve had before. 1/8th scale trucks were just way too expensive. Entrylevel 1/8th scale buggies were in my price range though, so that looked like a good compromise between size and price.

The choice came down to a couple of different cars the GV Rex-X or the HoBao/OFNA Hyper 7 TQ Sport RTR. Both cars had local support (the Rex-X from SA Hobby Centre and Model Mania, the Hyper 7 from Hobby Habit), both cars had reasonable feature sets, and both were within my price range. In the end I went with the Hyper 7 for a couple of reasons, firstly a mate of mine has had a HoBao car before (a Hyper 10 electric touring car) which was a great car for the price, and the guys at Hobby Habit are always good with spares and advice. After doing some shopping on price I bought the car on eBay from mtbjuls (highly recommended, awesome service, had my car in under a week), and saved a bundle of cash.

The car arrived pretty much fully assembled, complete with radio gear, plug spanner and fuel bottle. Not included and required to run the car is a glow plug, glow warmer, fuel and betteries (12xAA). Based on juls’ recommendation I got some 20% nitro fuel and an OS No. 8 plug. I also bought a cheap nitro starter pack which included a rechargable glow warmer.

The Hyper 7 includes full build instructuins which is great for maintenance later on, but the included instructions don’t really help much with the run in of the motor and other important things for the first time nito owner. Again juls’ was helpful here (awesome service all round).

Basically all that’s required in terms of assembly is to fit the batteries to the receiver, thread the antenna wire, fit the rear wing, and the body shell. Batteries were easy, and the instructions are helpful for the rear wing. The body shell needs a hole drilled in the rear for the rear body post (the rest is pre cut and drilled). The overspray film was still on the shell, so I removed that and applied a few of the supplied stickers, no dramas there.

The antenna wire presented a minor challenge as the supplied antenna tube drops right through the hole int he radio box and doesn’t wedge in place. I resolved this one by taking the lid off of the radio box, tying a small knot in the antenna, then threading it through the tube. The cap on top stops the wire coming out of the tube, and the knot in the bottom stops the tube from coming out of the radio box. The antenna does flop around a bit while the car is running, but it works ok.

When I powered up the radio to make sure allw as well there, I was initially confused by the throttle linkages and how that all worked (I’ve never owned a nitro car before). After a minute it dawned on me that the brakes were coming on at full throttle. A flick of the servo reversing switch on the supplied transmitter and everything started to make sense. Not a major drama, but something that would have caught me out if I hadn’ttaken the time to fully understand things.

A few minor gripes at this stage…. The instructions don’t mention what weight oil is in the shocks though, it would be nice to know what the standard setup is. The steering servo looks a little weak, standing still it struggles to move the front wheels more than about half their travel, but once moving this isn’t a problem. The supplied radio is a 27MHz unit, I’ll probably replace the receiver with a 29MHz unit at some stage as my other gear is all 29MHz. Likewise, I’ll look at replacing the onboard 4xAA receiver battery with a rechargable pack.

First impressions… Looks like a great car overall. The suspension feels very soft and smooth, although the front end droops pretty low for an off-road car. Overall build quality of the car looks good, all the parts look solid. Can’t wait to give it a good run!

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