Buy kits not RTR's, this will help when something breaks you will know how much you have to disassemble. Stainless steel screws or Titanium both are less prone to stripping out. Always run a oiled airfilter, make it last longer use a easy to make yourself prefilter, 0.25$ old lady kneehigh's available at all drugstores. Always shutoff a nitro by plugging the exhaust, not by pinching the fuel line which creates a lean condition bad for the bearings. The more the nitro content means less lubricating oil in all preblended nitro (glow type) fuels. Modern nitro motors can run 15-25% easy any motor. Race motors are hard to tune, usually the more number of ports the harder to tune it. Buy quality name brand major components. Gearmesh very critical. Use hardened clutchbells. Ventilated ones are good too, better if both hardened and ventilated. Use quality sealed bearings, rubber sealed keeps out dirt better than metal shields do. Newer Lipo RX battery packs will give longer run times over Nimh or Nicad both are old tech. Make sure receiver (RX) and servo's can take the voltage. Know the jargon, understand the acronyms used in the hobby. Strong fast servos with metal gears are best. Don't replace all of the plastic with aluminum, plastic can sometimes take a hit and bend.
Aluminum can take a hit and stay bent, not being elastic. Buy a popular model. Buy spare parts. Buy those little pill baggies, mark them accordingly, put spares into compartmented plastic trays with lids like for fishing tackle. Use after run oil, even a lightweight oil like sewing machine oil is better than none at all, spin motor, put oil down through glowplug hole and down carb throat. Get spare glowplug, airfilters, and glowplug ignitors, body pins, axle hexes and hex pins. Reinforce areas in body where body posts go thru. Nitros get very dirty, they virtually secrete oil, dirt and grass sticks to the oil, your motor overheats and seizes. Free up a motor that has seized quickly by removing glowplug put oil down it leave glowplug out of it use starterbox or mechanical means of breaking motor free. Do not use pullstart or electricstarter with a wand on a seized motor, unless you want to break something or get hurt. Nitros idle fairly fast and rap up to 30,000-40,000 rpm on the high end. That starter wand can become a dangerous flying object, after it has messed up the backend of a rotostart, on a seized motor. Pullstarts are a joke. If you just have to have one get a motor that has a pullstart/spinstart (rotostart) combo. Don't pull pullstart cord out more than 10 inches or so, you'll pull it completely out, why they are not good. Use a starter box if your model has a exposed flywheel. If you can before you get too into it see about some non curing sealant and seal around inside edge of motor backing plate, remove it from motor to do this, and around outer edge of carb not inner edge. This should help with vacuum leaks and motor oils secretion. Do not do this with the heatsink (cylinderhead) to crankcase cylinder body. Where these attach this is usually a very critical area tolerances are very precise and shouldn't be altered. Use simple green when motor is dead cold to help clean it of buildup dirt oil and debris, use rubbing alcohol in a spray bottle to remove residue again only when stone cold. Get a few rc specialty tools: clutch spring install tool, shock shaft pliers, ball end pliers, a quality set of ball end Allen wrenches, a quality set of hex nut drivers, long reach flat screw driver for throttle carb adjustment, needle nose pliers, miniature locking pliers, and a miniature adjustable crescent wrench. Buy extra: set screws(grub screws), e clips (e rings), circlips, a generic spare screw set of different sizes and types, o rings for any and all parts that have o rings. What you don't ever use is worth something as a new part to someone else in the future. Expect it to be expensive, it has been since the 1970's. Have fun.
in my own opinion for the price, a little goes a long way! But everyone has their own way of doing things?
