"Reissued in 30 years! !
The legendary Racing Buggy "Buggy Champ" is completely reissued! !
Released in 1979, BUGGY CHAMP, the key player of the Electric RC buggy boom, is coming back.
Equipped with a 2 mm thick FRP and reinforced duralumin plate main frame, die-cast suspension arms, and transparent parts of radio deck without changing the basic structure.
Structural changes were made to improve the strengthened front uprights, oil dampers and corresponding ESC. Experience the reailistc body and dynamic running, this is the model for entusiastic RC fans.
A faithful reproduction of the original chassis, featuring the front double trailing arm, torsion-bar type rear suspension, gear case, front axle, rear sus arm, front sus arm and wheel hub are reproduced in new die-cast type.
★ Overall length 400 mm
★ Full ball bearing
★ Same blister packing
★ Plastic white body is easy to paint
★ Exclusive Li-Fe battery sold separately."
And the original Tamiya promo vid of the Rough Rider from Youtube,
This must be the biggest news for Tamiya collectors at the moment, the rerelease of the vintage Rough Rider/Buggy Champ. What differs this rerelease from previous rereleases is that the original RR/BC has a lot of die-cast metal components. I always thought, even if Tamiya does rerelease these vintage metal models, the metal components would be replaced with some durable plastic counterparts. Boy am I glad I was WRONG! Pics have just surfaced on TamiyaClub by poster RA1028 from the 09 Shizuoka Hobby Show and we have confirmation by a Tamiya representative that the parts are indeed metal! Wooooooooohoooooooooooo!!!
I think the scheduled release date is in July. The price is going to be 34000 Japanese Yen, which is about $340USD. Holy crap! Convert that to Canadian and that's $400! I hope that the street price will be less.
Another aspect I forgot to mention is the return of blister packaging. You can see the in my NIB pics of the rere's in my TAMIYA-THON posts that the in-box packaging are just cardboard boxes. Although this is an awesome return for NIB collectors, I doubt I can afford to get one to build and one for NIB, so I am not TOO excited about the blister packaging except for the initial thrill when openning them.
And here's my 1/16 Tamtech Buggy Champ, this is a GB-02 chassis in the Tamtech series which consists of 1/16 counterparts of several popular vintage buggies such as the Frog, the Hornet, and the Fox. They are just fun to bash with because they are pretty much indestructable. Mine has a brushless motor which propels the little guy to probably 30mph and I have yet to break anything on it (touch wood).
These off-road RC car keep going even under difficult conditions. In the video, they are also water resistible. Cool!
ReplyDeleteMetal is worth it! Btw will it rust?
ReplyDeleteNot sure what type of metal they are using for this upcoming one. But the old one did rust, so you had to clean it after every run.
ReplyDelete@Dennis: Ya! One of the coolest things about these vintage buggies is that they are water-proof. Even after 30 years, the whole factory water-proofing thing was just introduced I think a year or two ago by another company.
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