Do I need a hardened steel pinion gear?

[NurturantQuasar]

I got a hardened steel spur gear for my slash 4x4 but I have a standard pinion. What could happen if I run it without a hardened steel pinion?
Also yes I know the draw backs of a steel spur gear such as moving the weak point to somewhere else, added rotation mass, noise, ect.

 

[olds97_lss]

A hardened spur will chew through a steel pinion pretty quickly if it's also not hardened. You can run it, but it will likely not last very long. Shouldn't really hurt anything except the pinion.

 

[BobP]

A hardened spur will chew through a steel pinion pretty quickly if it's also not hardened. You can run it, but it will likely not last very long. Shouldn't really hurt anything except the pinion.

If the gear mesh is aligned properly and the proper gap how would that tear up a steel pinion? They come stock with a plastic spur and a steel pinion. I could be completely mistaken but I I would like to know because I have hardened steel Spur Gears and stock pinion on most all of my Traxxas cars

 

[olds97_lss]

To be honest, I ran whatever pinion on my plastic spur trucks and only hardened on my steel spur trucks. The only time I fried a "pinion" quickly was when I was running nitro and had a standard CB running against a tool steel spur. The spur was narrow like a 1/8th buggy and it cut right through the bell in about a tanks worth.

On my plastic spur traxxas trucks, especially my stampede, I noticed the spur/pinion gets really noisy pretty quickly and the pinion looks all dinged up after a couple months of bash sessions. Now I run hardened pinions in it and my ERBEv2 as well and they seem to last forever. The hardened pinion in my outcast shows some wear, but it's been a year or so on the same one, it runs a steel narrow spur.

With that, I haven't tried running a non-hardened pinion on my outcast to see what happens. I'm just assuming it would have a short life considering the torque a brushless truck has compared to the short life my non-hardened bell had on my nitro.