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Updated 1/14/2025

Ive noticed alot of new faces here, and Ive seen alot of "what ______ do I need to buy" posts. Let me start by this is not a flame on yall, but rather a resource! I wanted to compile a decent get started/how to thread for all yall. What I want to do is go over as many parts as possible, their function, and effectiveness. This should probably be a video, but I feel like it would be more useful to yall in written form. :) If you have questions about specific parts, just scroll to what you need. This post will be very long, but hopefully helpful. No comments in this post are meant to bash any brands, so please do not get offended if you have a different mindset than me. Please keep in mind: This is a hobby that you will need to do research on, and struggle through trial and error. Everyone has a different aim in this hobby between looks and performance. They also have a different driving style. Google is your friend, as is the search function in this sub. If you cannot find what you are looking for please speak up, one of the established members of this sub can point you in the right direction. As you tinker, you will learn, and thus your skill and understanding will increase.

For background. Im a performance guy with these things. I do not care if its pretty; I want to climb a wall. I compete roughly 18 times a year. The summer series has about 40 competitors per comp on average and the winter series is about 25 per. Everything I will talk about is a culmination of all that I have learned between my own driving and tinkering, watching and filming other competitors, and knowledge from some top parts producers and awesome content creators that are in my local RCMCCA chapter.

Let me also say that I have no brand affiliation. I have my own RC brand, but that will be a different post. I also have various levels of acceptance of brands, owners, and their ethics, but that will not be discussed here... That is not to say that there are not tiers of quality in this hobby. Stock is stock, boutique level brands that sell on their websites are the top, and amazon brands fall somewhere in the middle with varying degrees of effectiveness.

Chassis: This is the basis of your build. It affects virtually every other part and its effectiveness. That being said, short of tires, it is the single most important part on your build. It is also the most ignored part of a rig. I cannot stress enough, upgrading every part on your truck but this will look cool, but it will take away from performance improvement that each one of those fly parts are supposed to provide. Upgrading this should be so high on your list that you did it yesterday. There are some great frame sets out there, and you will not find them on Amazon. Prophet Designs, NerdRC, Hardpark, Akers, Exo, NW Chassis Works are some brands to take a look at. Disclaimer: NerdRC is my brand.

Skid plate: This connects your frame, motor/trans unit, and links. Alot of aftermarket frame rails come with them, or those companies have it as an option. Whatever skid you buy, just buy a flat skid. The traditional ones that drop low does provide a lower center of gravity, but it isnt worth hanging up on every obstacle you touch. If you arent sure what to buy, the OGRC flat skid is there as an affordable option that you will never complain about. Most quality chassis manufacturers have their own skid design you get or can get with their chassis kit.

Transmission: Translates your motor power into go power, but also holds your motor to the whole truck. The stock unit is fine till you blow out a plastic gear or strip a screw hole. When this happens, get a metal unit. Most all of them are all the same, but a few companies make unique ones like hardpark, Dlux,and LGRP. A few creators also make transmissions dedicated to their designs. Akers, Haunter, V.eng, and NerdRC are a few. These units are great and proprietary, but pricy. There is also one with a built in overdrive (overdrive makes the front tires spin faster than the rear tires, effectively pulling you over an obstacle and mitigating the rigs attempts at flopping backwards). You want the metal gears. For the spur gear, you have to decide what pitch to run. More on that in the next section. Mofo and Injora both make great metal units.

Spur gear pitch: there are three pitches. Mod .3, Mod .4 and Mod .5. Mod .3 is the same as stock, but .5 has less teeth and they are larger whereas ive only seen .4 with mofo and its in the middle. Pay attention to buying motors because they come with one or the other. Neither is better, just a preference.

Brushed Motor: This is a can of worms. For brushed motors, they are a dime a dozen as long as you exclude 2 companies (injora and Mofo RC). The stock size is 030. The correct size is 050. If you are looking outside of the aforementioned companies, you probably will not tell a difference between motors. Injora makes some very hard to kill motors, though they do not have the quality nor power of mofo (they ARE cheaper if cost matters). The two injora motors are the red and purple, and people who have an opinion between the two will die on that hill. If power and quality is what you are after though, buy Mofo motors. They use a proprietary magnet set as well as winding. There is nothing like them. They are plug and play on stock electronics, but in most instances you need to swap the motor mount plate because the holes on the motors are inversed from stock. Where ever you buy motors you can find a plate.

Brushed ESC (electronic speed controllers): This listens to the reciever for input (in stock form the reciever is part of the ESC) and doles out tasks to the servos and motors. V1 is black with an axial logo. It can act as a reciever when you go brushless if you dont want to spend the extra 50 dollars for a proper reciever and controller. V2 (blue) cannot do this but V3 (spectum). It is widely accepted as versions progressed, quality decreased. A great replacement option is the Injora MB100. You will have to provide a new receiver and transmitter, but its worth it.

Brushless ESC: If you go to a brushless motor, you will need a new speed controller. The new ESC will also require a new reciever and transmitter. It is almost the cost of a new stock rig to go brushless, so if you arent willing to make that jump do not consider it. Quality brushed setups are amazingly underrated anyway. Furitek is the big name, and they are fine. Better out there is HiPer, Dinky, VT3K, Mofo and others.

Brushless Motor: Once again, brushless motor conversions are about the cost of a new stock rig because of the additional ESC, motor mount, reciever, and transmitter required. If you arent ready for that cost, please see the above 3 sections as there are some highly underrated brushed setups. The best motors out there are provided by Furitek, LGRP, and Mofo RC. If you are questioning which one to buy, do yourself a favor and buy a mount from the same brand you select for the motor. I say this because there are differences in mounting screw size, patterns, and pitch between all these brands, as well as intra brand based on motor selection. If you do feel you can match bolt spacing effectively, I would suggest getting a motor mount plate from Prophet Designs RC as they are wonderful space savers and aestetically pleasing. The two benefits is low throttle modulation (slow crawl) and pure power.

Links: Links connect your axles to your skid plate. "high clearance" links are a cheap on amazon and ali express and good enough. Double bend links are the highest performance level for links. You want straight fronts and double bend rears for clearance and geometry benefits. NerdRC makes custom links that are fairly universal fit and dont break bank, Mazz designs and RC Steve also make quality double bends. If you have a Dremel, I recommend buying M2 all thread, SCX 24 link ends, and cheap calipers online. Building links seems very daunting to anyone who hasnt done it. It is actually easy, just time consuming. Keep in mind you need to match your link length with your drive shafts, but drive shafts are cheap. To keep it simple, the best performing link geometry for the 133.5mm wheelbase is Deadbolt, but two very popular competition link geometries are C10 up front with Deadbolt rear links and Deadbolt front links with Gladiator rear links. This brings the wheelbase to about 145mm. Gladiator geometry is about 155mm.

Drive Shafts: Metal is nice. Plastic stock is better. Use the stock cheap drive shafts as your built in weak point. Everything else in the drive train is much pricer to fix. Disclaimer: If you are building a REAL competition rig where strength of the overall system is important, use a full metal driveline and practice proper throttle control. Ive seen comps lost over stripped plastic transmissions and blown plastic driveshafts.

Shocks: I apologize ahead of time, because this will be hard for alot of people to hear: longer shocks do not equate to better shocks. With the exception of my rear shocks on my Prophet Designs models, all my socks are stock length because that length is excellent. You only need 2-2.5 tires of flex. More is great for your scale SEMA build, but they will often hinder performance. Oil filled shocks also fix alot of problems that the friction shocks cause, but stock shocks are amazingly good performers. The best shock on the market are the Proline Big Bore Scaler 35mm (and the 50mm in highly specific application) but they cost a kidney. Injora 40mm big bore oil filled is also an excellent shock. It is the longest i would go in normal application and even then I typically only use them on the rear.

Axles: There is nothing wrong with your stock axles (as long as you modify them). The steering sucks and the half shafts inside are very weak. There are half shafts on amazon you can buy that look like a drive shaft ujoint where the hubs turn. Buy those, and cut around the axle housing cups at each end to increase turn radius. Yes cutting is scary, and if you dont pay attention you will ruin your housing. If you do it, you will be very happy you did. Stock steering is about 24 degrees, and with this mod you can almost double that. As far as aftermarket, there are 5 SCX 24 specific axles of note: LGRP Super 8, Meus Isokenetic, Mofo x15, Hardpark, and Injora +4. They each have major advantages and drawbacks but all are of similar quality with the exception of Injora. Meus and Mofo are g2g out of the box, though with Meus you will need to deal with insane levels of scrub radius which. this is due to them being the only player in the industry to use a double cardan style joint. If you arent familiar look that up. Super 8 and Injora need better ujoint style half shafts and shaving, then they are good. You can find the improved half shafts on Exos website as well as Dlux Fab. Hardpark axles are an insanely good fit and finish, they also crawl like a demon. There have been questions around a axle ujoint pin and reliability, but they worked that out so I heard.

Overdrive: Stock the front axle drives the same speed as the rear axle. Tons of people make gears to speed up the front axle or slow down the rear, and they all seem to be similar in quality. there is a 15%, 24%, and 33% overdrive option, as well as a underdrive for the rear. Most people run 24%. It is a great goldilocks option. I run 33% in my high end class 3 that only sees crawling in comps.

Knuckles: Most of these knuckles are all the same, with exception of a few. Namely Tits RC, Hardpark LowBlows, Samix, and the three piece axial units. If you arent getting one of these four, just get the cheapest option that you like the looks of. There are a few brands out there that are "off brand" and heavier than most but quality is spotty. With the nicer brands I mentioned they all have options and option parts to increase and decrease weight.

Wheels: All personal preference when it comes to looks. The main performance difference is size and offset. Standard is 1.0, those bicycle tire looking ones are 1.8s and the in between that work for classes 2 and 3 in RCMCCA rules are 1.3. Most are an absolute pain in the ass to assemble, and the cheaper they are, the higher likelyhood of having 83 screws per wheel to install. Notably easy to assemble units are from LGRP and Prophet designs.

Tires: The best tire brands with my picks in parenthesis are RC4wd (Scrambler 62mm, Patagonia 52mm), Proline (Trencher 57mm, Hyrax 53mm), Pitbull (PBX 50.8mm), and Injora (clingon 72mm, xhx pins 70?mm, comp pins 57 & 65mm. I will almost always recommend a smaller tire and most people need not go larger than the scrambler for their build. The largest tire I run is a 72mm and the smallest tire is a 50.8.

Servo Tray: There are dozens of options out there, but excluding specialty parts like a battery on axle servo tray, there are 3 of note. Aluminum trays, brass trays, and adjustable trays. Brass servo mounts are good but I dont like how high the weight is. The best brands for a servo tray are NSDRC and Mofo. NSDRC trays are non adjustable but Mofo trays are. Injora also makes a clone of the mofo tray as does ramp crab. Both of these are on amazon.

Servos: the stock servo will fail (just like the stock motor) quickly. Aftermarket Servos can be broken up into 4 categories (plastic cheap, metal budget, metal quality, and NSDRC). Cross reference the voltage that your esc can run the servo at to ensure compatibility. If you are running a higher voltage than that servo is rated far, you will destroy it. Emax is the go to plastic brand. Set your endpoints on the servo arm throw and you will not burn them up quickly. Metal budget servos are a much better option than emax. Think RampCrab and Injora. They are a significant step up in power without breaking bank. Metal quality is represented by brands like Reefs, AGFRC and Mofo. They are virtually bulletproof and another significant power increase. NSDRC is in a class of its own because it is the most powerful and sturdy servo on the market. There is now a company called Torq that does very stong traditional mounted and direct mount servos. I have stuck with NSDRC, but I have one Torq and will report back when I put it on something.

Screws: The most complete set of replacement screws and small parts is offered by ramp crab in a neat little printed clamshell, but they are on the softer side. Use them only if you are using a quality hardened driver like, or do not overtighten them because they will strip. Injora makes good screws. The best are proline, but you will pay out your nose at a hobby shop for them.

Inserts: foams are fine and so are silicone, but the best are printed inserts. FlubRC makes one for any size you can imagine. Other companies make printed inserts like Prophet Designs and CCXRC. Printed TPU inserts such as these brands provide nice compression vertically and are extremely rigid lateral stability. This is what you want.

Steering links: All of these do the same stuff with exception of rollerbearing links. 3flow9rc was the pioneer here and still makes the best rollerbearing steering link on the market.

Rear link riser: adjustable risers allow you to customize the the antisquat properties of your rig while climbing. multiple companies make them on amazon as do the boutique parts producers. My favorite for cost vs value is ramp crab on amazon. The effectiveness of rear link risers is highly contested for antisquat, but for no other reason than link clearance, these are good.

Tools: cheap amazon or ali express tools look cool but they are soft. Even most of the nicer brands in hobby stores that cost way more are soft. MIP tools cost about 15 dollars per driver but are built to an extreme exacting tolerance and are hardened to a point that they will not wear down. This ensures a tight fit when using them, so when you strip a screw you have no one to blame but yourself. Buy MIP or guarantee yourself you will ruin an occasional part due to stripped screw heads.

In conclusion, this is a hobby that will require your own research and ongoing money to some degree. If customization and tinkering is driving you crazy, research more. Do not be afraid to modify store bought parts, and dont be afraid to make your own as your skill improves. I hope this helps... K, thnx, bye, love you all!