LaTrax Teton Review!

This is a four wheel. Drive 1 18th scale monster truck. You can get for around 130 140, depending on where you get it now. The latrax line, um latrex, is a sub brand of traxxas and they have been around for a very very long time, eu acredito, even before traxxas um, they originally made a bunch of like rc arnold cars in the late 70s early 80s. I believe um, but after after that they really fell off and really you didn’t hear about the tracks for a very long time. Until this modern version came out a fun fact about the tracks, though uh uh. Supposedly they are the ones that pioneered the pistol grip style, radio for rc. So i guess we have them to thank for that, Mas, speaking of the radio before we get into truck real quick, i want to get some of the boring stuff out of the way. The radio it comes with is a the same tq radio that comes with all the traxxas vehicles, so nothing really fancy there. Only thing that’s different is obviously the stickers and the wheel is no longer chrome. Um. The car also comes with a battery a six cell. Nickel metal hydride battery pack it’s the same one, that the 16 scale traxxas line uses as well as a charger, a wall charger this time with the led light, it’s a very slow charger, but it does work for people that need one um.

And finally, we can talk about the teton, so the teton is the most expensive out of the three latrax vehicles it’s available as the rally which is the on road vehicle, friction shocks, bushings plastic, gears, shorter on road suspension and it’s also available as the pre runner, Which is the exact same thing as this? So it has ball: bearings oil shocks off road, longer off road suspension, tougher bumpers, metal gears, so they’re, Basicamente, the same. The teton is more expensive because they include the larger wheels and tires and that’s. Basicamente, the only reason. It’S more expensive it’s only a 10 uptick in price, though so, if you’re not super into the monster, Caminhão, look or absolutely need to have a monster truck, you can easily get the pre runner and have the basically the same truck uh with just smaller wheels and Tires and a larger body, but speaking of the body, the color of these attracts and tracks vehicles in general tend to change very often so i can’t really comment on that, but the version i have is this nice gunmetal, blue and white version. I really like the look of this paint scheme. Traxxas does really nice graphics on their bodies, also it’s very unique in the rc monster truck world, because it is an suv style body. Suv style bodies are usually not very common on rc monitor trucks because it makes the rear body posts a lot more vulnerable. When you crash it’s, going to grind down your body posts up here and also since it’s longer in the back, it has a tendency to break a lot easier.

Um trexus has thought of that a bit, Embora, so they give you a lot extra meat. On top of these posts, where the holes are so, it will have to be ground down pretty far before you actually um wear them down. You can see how much meat there is right there, the body clips that this thing uses are these smaller mini sized body clips. So if you lose these, you have to get smaller ones. Então, just keep that in mind. The wheels and tires are also very nice. Um they’re, just air filled no foam inserts um they’re decently, soft, not soft and compound just soft, because probably they’re, because they’re thin um the tires are also not glued onto the wheels for some reason. They’Re just just they just have a really thick bead to it. Então, se você quiser, you should glue those, especially if you’re running more power, the wheels look very nice and they’re really durable. And i just really overall, like the look of these wheels and tires, the wheels are held on with a 2.5 millimeter flanged and serrated screw so um. It should keep that wheel on there nice and tight and it’s a nice beefy um hex um size for the wheel, nut so that’s, very nice to see the bumpers front and rear are different and they are flexible enough to not break but stiff enough to support Itself so that’s also very good to see the body is polycarbonate.

It is very thin, Embora, so uh take for that. What you will you may want to share this up with some duct tape or sugar or something um. If you plan on doing some hard hard dashing but taking the body off, você pode ver, it is based on a on road chassis. As i mentioned, the rally is based on the same thing. The good thing about that is, it is a very low center of gravity and it’s. A very traditional four wheel, drive setup, so it should be pretty easy to work on and you can see the suspension here. The thing that tracks this dead right with this is um, even though it’s based on the on road chassis, they set up the suspension very, very well it’s, engineered very nicely, so it has a nice range of suspension, travel um. It also has plenty of droop in the suspension, de modo que é, also very nice. A lot of uh suspensions tend to not have enough droop, so just they just tend to come up like that, and the shocks are one of the best shocks i’ve ever seen on the rtr vehicle they’re set up very nicely the spring rate, the oil they’re. Just very smooth and very nice – i’m dropping it like this. You can see you can barely see the suspension working, which is a good thing and when i pick it up, you see there’s still plenty of droop there. So very nice setup on the suspension very, very happy with that everything else on this is plastic.

The shocks themselves are also plastic shock, towers, chassis. All the links are plastic. The drive shafts are plastic. The only part that is metal on this is obviously the pinion gear for the motor the center drive. Shaft is metal and the diff gears and all the gears in the diff are metal. So the electronics that it comes with are the same ones that traxxas vehicles come with the mini one says the same: xl 2.5 style just rebranded has training mode, lipo, cutoff, all that good stuff, traxxas connector, obviously um waterproof receiver box. Here that houses your traxxas receiver, a the same battery, como eu mencionei, as the traxxas um 116 scale line, the one you’ll get with this truck will actually say latrax on it, but i just have happened to have the traxxas one in here. No momento, the battery tray is also very easy to use. The clip is just one body clip and it just slides off like that and it’s very easy to clip on just line it up with those little two tabs in the inside there and they just slide on and keeps the battery nice and secure. Então isso é. Muito bom, on the other side, we see the motor and servo the servo is a mini size servo. I will talk about that later. Um and the motor is a 370 size motor, so a little bit smaller than typical, 118 scale vehicles. So a little bit proprietary in the motor there, so you will have to do some modification to the motor mount and stuff if you want to upgrade it to a typical 380 size motor.

So that is unfortunate, but at least it does connect into traditional bullet connectors. So as long as you do the mechanical changes, the connection should still work. Bem, so that’s a lot of rambling about the car on the desk i’m sure you guys want to see how this thing drives. So let’s take this out and see how it runs starting off driving on an on road surface. You can see the truck is very peppy and accelerates very fast, um it’s objectively, not that fast, but again, like a lot of the mini cars. I review because the car is so small and the car is also very responsive to your your throttle, input and control input. It feels a lot faster than it is, and even though it has, it is running a tiny 370 size motor, which is even smaller for 18 scale terms and a 6l nickel metal hydride battery pack is more than enough to get this thing up and running um Enough to make have a power power up curves and do jumps and just be a really exciting truck to drive even on a relatively small area and a relatively flat surface, like this um here i’m doing a bunch of uh bashing with it on on this little Curved corner right here of this parking lot and it it stood up, pretty well um, durability, wise and just handling wise it’s, just it’s a lot of fun to drive. I will talk a little bit more about durability in a second because um, the truck.

As you see it, right here is actually not stock, so i will talk about durability a little bit later, but overall performance on roads and on just a parking lot. Bashing surface uh, very good i’m, really happy with the way this thing drives on this. On the surface, on a more off road surface, here we have a relatively rough surface as far as these tiny little cars go. Um and the suspension like i mentioned earlier, is very well tuned and very well set up so it’s able to suck up all the bumps really well it’s, not really bouncing around as much as a lot of other tiny small scale. Rc cars do, and also on top of that would be low center of gravity. The car is able to go over the rough terrain without much fuss and again that tiny motor and battery produces enough power, so the truck can go pretty close to full speed. Eu sou.. Not getting bogged down at all, even on the offload surface, a bunch of leaves and sticks and patches of grass and stuff, so even off road i’m. More than happy with the performance with this thing and traxxas is really living up there living up to their reputation. For producing pretty high performing vehicles as far as our bachelors are are concerned. Now i mentioned durability earlier on here’s a nice little segway, the arms on the latrex teton are these little arms, the same ones, that’s on the pre runner version and they’re made out of a pretty they’re supposed to be a pretty flexible plastic.

But you can see, some of them are really brittle, so the the quality of the arms don’t seem like they’re, very consistent. Some of them have enough flex and give to them where they will be plenty durable, but some of them are just far too brittle. You can see how sharp that corner is right there where it broke, and it was just in on on one uh, one hit to the a arm to a uh on the ground, on the jump and it just absolutely shattered. Uh even cut up a couple of the other arms to see if i could replicate it, and another arm was just as brittle so you can see here, i put all rpm arms on it um they are. They come in pairs. So if you want to replace all of them, you have to get two of them, but after putting the rpm arms, you can see the rpm arms are a lot more beefy. I didn’t really have any other um durability issues with it. Uh chassis wide mechanically, Como aquele, i did have to replace the servo uh. I think i mentioned that earlier. If i did it, um yeah the servo also stripped out, so i did replace it with the save box server but driving it again, um this time, Eu sou. On the off road track, again, uh jumping it on this little dirt, mound here and again with the with the decent power that this thing has and the very well tuned suspension.

It jumps very well. Uh low center of gravity also helps it jump pretty level in the air, so it jumps really well lands the jump really well and it’s fun. Even on this 10th scale, uh track surface, just just bashing it around a lot of fun to drive. Another note i do have to make, Embora, is on this particular run. I did burn out my motor and the dips also went out eventually so the diffs on this don’t seem like, even though they are metal they don’t seem like they are the highest quality discs, de modo que é, something you want to be careful of. You also want to be very careful of the temperatures of your of your uh motor. You really want to let it cool down completely before you switch out the battery pack and go for another run, because the tiny motor really isn’t big enough for um. This truck and i feel like it’s a geared little hide for that higher performance, so the motor is something you want to watch out for the gears are also something you want to watch out for and of course, the servo is going to strip out and the Arms also broke on you, so even though overall it’s, a very high performing vehicle, hasn’t, been the most reliable vehicle for me. So that’s a little bit unfortunate, you saw back there. I splashed around the water a little bit. Felizmente, the the tracks electronics are still pretty decent.

The waterproofing is excellent, but yeah not the most reliable truck mechanically for me um, but nonetheless it was a lot of fun to drive and if you’re willing to put a bit more money into it – and you really don’t want to get a bigger car. And you really want to stay with this small scale stuff or you want something for your kid to drive around or something like that and you don’t mind putting some money into it um. This is probably a good truck to have it’s very fun to drive. Uh performs very well just kind of yeah you’re. Just gon na have to be a little bit more mindful about some of the mechanical uh reliability of this little truck, but overall um pretty decent truck.