VINTAGE!? Holy crap.
Sit by the fire kids as grandpa takes you on a walk down memory lane:
I was an active racer at the peak of my RC "career" when the transition from nitro to brushless took place. Tekno was a huge driving force in that movement.
They got their start making conversion kits which came with a motor mount, clutch conversion, and electronics trays which bolted right into your existing chassis after ripping out the nitro gear. They didn't start producing their own chassis until a couple years into it.
I remember talking with the owner Daniel through one of the RC forums and him helping me gather the pieces I needed to convert my Associated RC8. Back then, their parts shipped directly from Denmark and took a very long time to arrive...I was SO stoked to have the first electric 1:8 buggy at my track.
Production 1:8 size brushless ESCs and motors intended for land vehicles did not yet exist when the first conversion kits came out. My electronics kit consisted of a 2000kv non-water-cooled boat motor, an ESC also from a boat which was capable of running 20S lipo. I ran a big ol' brick of a 6S lipo and that buggy would blow glued tires off the wheels and throw double back flips off kickers if you didn't turn the throttle down lol. I eventually dropped down to 4S for racing. I remember the clutch conversion thing sometimes giving me a hard time, but I don't recall the exact details on that.
Obviously, there were no e-buggy classes back then, so I had to race with nitros and come in for a battery change during the super long A-Mains. I only had to come in for one pit to everyone else pitting 2 or 3 times. I have very fond memories of watching my dad and brother stumble through swapping those batteries while in the way of everyone else coming in for a quick fill up. Once I started winning the races, other racers followed suit and we started a class of conversion-kit e-buggies. That lasted for about a year and, during that time, Castle and Neu released some big ESCs and motors, then the first RTR electric Losis came out. It was a boom from there.
