So finally! After years and years of rocking the good ol’ ROLL PIN, the industry has finally decided to adapt the wheel hex as the standard for wheel mounting system. In the 1/10th offroad world it’s a 12mm hex to be exact. Well, unless you’re Durango…they use a 14mm system. You don’t know how happy this makes me b/c now I can try my wheels and tires on all 3 of the major 2wd buggies!! Also, hex wheels don’t break roll pins leaving you with a DNF in your qualifier or main! Another bonus is that it’s much harder to spin a wheel with hexes than a wheel with a roll pin. I remember the days when a perfectly good set of tires would have be tossed in the garbage b/c a wheel nut decided to slowly work its way out (OMG really?).

In short, roll pins = horrible idea that should have NOT lasted past the testing phase. I still can’t wrap my head around how it passed the design and test phase and even made it into production (kind of like the Pontiac Aztek). HOW?! Then there was the solid “Factory Team” pin that just…………… fall out. Yah stronger, but you had to use a bit of glue or just lose them constantly. Hex = oh so easy.

So finally my B4.1 can use the same rear wheels as my RB5/RB6, and the TLR 22! For the 1st time in RC history, you can use the same wheels on MULTIPLE platforms and brands. It really has become the “IN” thing for RC companies because in this review, I’m gonna spec 8 brands of wheels!

So my question here is……..who makes the best wheel (sort of)?

I wanted to make it easy. For those who wanted to know the numbers and have a source…here you go.

In no way are these scientific tests but I wanted to compare the different rear wheel options out there now. So I checked out things like wheel stiffness, gloss, pre-holed, and lastly the weight. So basically, I’ll leave it up to you to decide which wheel you want to buy based on a few stats you render more important. Always good to have options.

 – Data Acquisition –

Holes: Unfortunately, not all wheels come pre-molded with holes. To me, this could make a difference as it adds a step if it has no holes. Simply, Y for yes it has holes and N for no holes.

Yellow: Score is 1-3. 1 being a not so yellow, yellow. Sometimes manufacturers make their florescent yellow a little greenish. 2 is a medium yellow. 3 being the best yellow of the bunch. This is just my opinion as you may see the colors differently.

Gloss: Gloss can add cost so some companies like to skip this to save a few pennies. Gloss coatings help make the wheels easier to clean and look cleaner than the non-gloss porous wheels. This is important when you run on sauce tracks. Score is 0 – 3. 0 means no gloss and 2 being high gloss. 3 is for the glossiest wheel of them all (compared to each other).

Flex: There are soft wheels and there are hard wheels. This is just a finger squeeze test and not a carefully calculated science experiment for comparison sake. 1 is soft and 3 is stiffer. 4 is just to denote the stiffest wheel on the chart compared to each other. **AKA wheel is measured without optional stiffener.

Weight: This is for a pair of rear wheels. Although most of the wheels are close in weight, a few grams of rotating mass could affect drive characteristics.

The Wheel Chart

Almost all the brands will fit each car with a little handy work. For instance, the Kyosho wheel will fit the AE car but you have to do a little bit of reaming to fit the standard axle. Sometimes you have to use a serrated nut to get it to work b/c there isn’t enough threads to lock it down in a safe manner. The one you might have trouble with is trying to adapt the TLR wheel to the other vehicles since they use a super long axle.

Anyways, have you noticed a difference between the different rear wheel options??? What is your favorite wheel and why?