The Best beginnner Small Nitro Boat?

[MikDee]

Looking for opinions of whats the best SMALL beginner nitro boat?,,, nitro viper, nitro vee, nitro falcon, nitro war zone, nitro Cen Aqua Jet, etc.???,,,

[Randy Naylor]

Any small Mono is the best. Things to look for is: The hull should not be made of Plastic the vibration work hardens the hull bottom and the ABS will crack and fall apart. I use the ABS for the radio box only it does work good for this. Rubber motor mounts and a good water tight radio box. The .11 to .21 motors are hard to lean down too much and damage the parts, so any motor in this size is good. use good fuel save your rod and bearings. (O'Donnell is the best)

[MikDee]

Wow, very informative, thanks Randy!,,, but actually what you're saying is, don't get any plastic boat?,,, how about fibreglas?,,, nowadays a wood boat usually isn't available unless you build it yourself (Dumas),,,

[Tor H]

A fiberglass hull is defenetly the best choise, i would also recomand a outboard engine, it`s much more easy to operate.
Check out Prather boats, Deep vee hulls

[Mike Zaborowski]

Mikdee

Don't rule out a wood boat. I tend to agree on the outbaoard tunnel hull as your best choice. Remember wood has many advantages.

Check out the latest from the Model Shop below

www.grimracer.com

Grimracer

[Sorcerer 001]

Stay away from the Traxxas Nitro Vee. While I like the features that it had, and the looks, Randy is right: Plastic and nitro don't mix. After a month of use, the hull started cracking.
The other major problem with this boat was the fact that they placed the radio gear right below open vents in the hatch, and didn't think about a sealed radio box. They give you a lexan cover, but it's really only good for deflecting light splashes. Heavy condensation will collect under the cover, and eventually soak the servos and Rx. This happened the first day I ran the boat, I had to watch the boat run in a tight circle for 15 minutes, until it ran out of fuel. It was too risky to send out our retrieval boat while the Vee was still moving.
The "Return to Shore" system is a great thing in theory, but it never worked quite right for me, and I took it off. The little mechanism that makes the system work would flop around, and sometimes cause the engine to stall.
After removing the RTS system, I also removed the electric starter, the one way bearing started slipping, and I just got sick of dropping the battery pack in the sand. I installed a pull start, which has worked great all along.
I've done some port work on the motor, and changed out the stock Traxxas carb for an OS carb robbed off of an old .12 CV. I've also decided not to run the 10% nitro fuel that Traxxas recommends, and have been running 30%. The boat now has great power, and really gets it on the straights, but it's pure evil in the corners. It hooks horribly and unexpectedly. Any air under the transom will allow the prop to flip the boat 180 degrees in a fraction of a second. The turn fin seems like it never comes out of the water, but maybe there's not enough to make much of a difference.
Also, on power, the boat is tough to steer in either direction, but then it'll do the hooking thing.
Traxxas claims the boat does 22 mph out of the box properly tuned. I can't even guess how fast it is now, but it's well beyond what the boat was designed to do. I'm still running the stock prop and exhaust, and I'm afraid to do anything else to the boat without figuring out the handling problems.

[AndyKunz]

Is your boat nose heavy?

Or perhaps the rudder is driving the nose down in the turns? This is great in a hydro, but from what I've been told, bad for a mono.

Andy
The Mono Un-expert

[Sorcerer 001]

On power, the boat rides at a near-perfect attitude, with the nose slightly high. If you give it some steering input and hit anything larger than a 1/2" ripple, it'll snap-turn. What it looks like is that once the prop is half out of the water, it walks the tail of the boat around. It'll do this every once in a while with no steering input, as well.
I've been racing r/c cars for over 20 years, but this boat stuff is a whole different ball game. My wife bought me the Nitro Vee for my birthday, and to be honest, I really enjoy running it (when it's running). Even with it's evil ways, I've run the thing tank after tank for hours at a time. I've gone through nearly a gallon of fuel in a day. I'm so used to running well set up sedans, trucks, and buggies, it's actually kind of fun dealing with some unpredictability. But, I'm getting sick of flipping the boat in it's lid all the time, and next time out I'm going to try several more things.

[Vlad-sr]

Do somebody else than Prather make good out board mono hull?

[MikDee]

Ok, great info, I just found this here almost a month late,,, I guess all the fear I had about this boat is true, poor RTS system & poor Elect. start, and an exposed radio box,,, sounds like once you got the bugs out, it worked fine for you except for what sounds like the "outdrive effect",,,

[Eric Perez]

Well, I'll put my .02 worth. If you already have the equipment for .12 gas cars then you could be flying around the pond with one of these with minimal monetary investment -That's what I did!

It will take time to build, but once you're done it will be all worth it. I get 30+ MPH without a lot of effort with a sport .12 pullstart engine.

WOF construction makes the boat easy to build and strong to wistand the abuse of both Electric and Nitro setups.

I've heard of reports of people running 6-8 cell 05 motors with the Aggressor CAT and ended up with good results.

Hope this helps.

Eric Perez