How RC Crash Crew works

Yes — 100% free, forever. No subscriptions, no premium tier, no ads selling your data. Building your rigs, logging crashes, finding places to run and asking the RC AI all cost nothing.

A lot — all free. Build searchable rigs in the Rig Builder (pick a factory model and specs prefill); give every LiPo a Battery Passport and every motor/ESC/servo a Component Passport; save and clone tuning Setup Sheets; log runs, crashes, repairs and builds; look up real parts and part numbers in the Parts Catalog; find tracks and bash spots on the live map; see who is running right now; discover hobby shops; buy and sell in the Marketplace; join crews and events; read and write guides; and ask the members-only RC Crew AI about your specific rig.

No — that is the whole point. Log one run and it updates everything for you: each battery you used gains a charge cycle, every component installed on that rig clocks its runtime, the rig's total hours tick up, and any maintenance countdowns move. One action, everything stays current. No spreadsheets, no double entry.

Every rig keeps a living dossier — what it started as plus every part, setup, battery, crash, repair and run. When you ask the AI a question it reads that real history, so instead of generic internet advice it can say things like "you already upgraded to a steel spur after stripping the stock one." It answers from YOUR truck, not a forum thread.

Yes, two — both free, no login needed. "What Kind of RC Person Are You?" (/quiz) is a fun personality quiz that matches you to an RC archetype (basher, scale crawler, race-day tuner, and more) based on how you actually run the hobby. The Glossary Quiz (/glossary/quiz) tests you on real RC terminology pulled straight from the site's own 230-term Glossary — good for beginners learning the lingo or veterans who want to see what they know.

Yes — RC Crash Crew is a progressive web app. On Android/Chrome tap the "Install" hint (or the menu → Install app); on iPhone use Share → Add to Home Screen. It opens full-screen like a real app, loads fast, and the pages you've visited still open when you're offline at the track.

You can browse rigs, guides, the places map, the parts and model catalogs and hobby shops without an account. Join free to build your own rigs, give your gear passports, log runs and crashes, sell in the marketplace, and unlock the members-only RC Crew AI.

All of it — cars, trucks, crawlers, drift, monster, short course, motorcycles, tractors, boats, submarines, planes, helicopters, drones/FPV, tanks, military/tactical trucks, construction and heavy equipment, and novelty builds, plus mini and micro. And it's not just a label: the Rig Builder actually changes what it asks for. A boat gets prop/strut/rudder fields, not pinion and diff. A submarine gets ballast and dive-plane fields. A helicopter gets rotor and gyro fields instead of tires. An FPV drone gets frame size and a flight controller/VTX section. A plane gets wingspan and propulsion. Heavy equipment gets tracks-or-wheels plus hydraulics fields. A motorcycle gets a gyro/stability field a car doesn't need. If your RC type isn't modeled yet, pick "Other" and you still get every field — and tell us, we'll keep adding real ones. If you run it, break it and fix it, it belongs here — in its own real vocabulary, not a car form with the labels crossed out.

The RC Crash Crew Gazette is a real, daily front page for the whole RC hobby — racing results, new product news, and industry/regulatory updates pulled from real RC outlets and always linked back to the source, plus a real Mishaps column from the crew's own Crash Bay reports. One section — the daily comic — is intentionally NOT real news; it's a lighthearted AI-drawn cartoon, clearly labeled as such. A fresh edition posts once a day at /gazette, and members can opt in to get it emailed every morning from Settings.

Yes. Anyone can add a hobby shop to the community map for free — no account needed to be found. If it's not already there, submit it in a minute at Hobby Shops → Add a shop.

Click "Claim this shop" on your listing, tell us how we can verify it's really yours (a work email at the shop's domain, the shop's listed phone number, a link to your business license, or your name on the shop's own website — whatever you've got), and a moderator reviews it, usually quickly. Once approved: your listing gets a ✅ Verified badge, becomes fully searchable, and a "Set up your free shop" button appears — that's the door into your actual storefront admin panel. Nothing on the storefront is public yet at that point; you build it out, then flip it on yourself in Settings when you're ready (see the next question for everything you get).

A free, members-only AI assistant that knows RC. It can read your saved rig and explain what works, what won't and why — from gearing and LiPo safety to tuning and troubleshooting.

Some of it. Alongside articles written by trusted crew members, RC Crew AI researches real RC parts and topics and publishes its own wiki articles every couple of days. Every AI-written article is clearly tagged 🤖 so you always know what you're reading, and any trusted member can edit or improve one — same as any other article.

Yes — hit "Message" on anyone's profile to start a private one-to-one conversation. The envelope icon in the top nav shows unread messages, and you can report a message straight to the moderators from inside the thread.

Yes — every member gets a personal invite link at /invite. Anyone who signs up through it is credited to you, and you two automatically start following each other. There's a public Invite Leaderboard ranking who's brought in the most real members — pure bragging rights, no rewards or points, plus a set of Recruiting badges as you go.

A trusted member proposes a bulk-buy deal — an item, a unit price, and a target quantity. Other members commit how many they want, and the deal auto-marks "funded" the instant committed quantity hits the target. It's non-custodial: RC Crash Crew only tracks who's committed to what — payment and shipping happen off-platform between the organizer and everyone who committed, same as the Marketplace.

The mod team runs a themed contest with three windows: entries open, then close as voting opens, then voting closes and the winner is decided by vote count. Your entry photo comes straight from your own photo library — no separate upload. You can't vote for your own entry, and one vote per member, changeable until voting closes.

Only if you turn it on. The weekly digest is off by default — flip it on in Settings and, once a week, if there's actually something new (your notifications, fresh crew activity), you'll get a short email. Nothing new means no email that week. Every email has a one-click unsubscribe.

Head to Feedback (members-only) — submit a bug, feature idea, or general thought, vote on what other members have submitted, and follow the discussion. The team sets a real status (open/planned/in progress/done) and can reply right on the item.

Yes — on Identify My RC, upload a photo and the AI describes what it sees, then matches it against our real model database. If there's no visible brand or model text, it honestly says so instead of guessing — same rule as everywhere else on the site: real matches only, never invented ones.

On your rig's edit page, the AI Rig Inspector lets you upload a few photos — chassis, electronics, whatever shows the details — and it tries to identify the chassis/body, spot likely upgrades (motor, ESC, wheels), and draft a condition report. It never saves anything on its own: you review what it found and click to copy in whatever's right, same as everywhere else the AI touches your data.

Yes — every pass builds on the last one instead of replacing it. Run it again with a closer photo and it can correct an earlier vague guess (e.g. "looks stock" becomes a confirmed Castle Sensored motor once it can actually see the label) and it'll pick up anything new in the frame, like an FPV camera it hadn't spotted before. Everything it's found across every pass shows up on your edit page as an AI-Detected Inventory list — confirm what's right, dismiss what's wrong. Only what you confirm ever appears on your public battle card.

Yes — Workshops is a page just for your actual build space: photos of the bench, tool wall, storage, 3D printer corner, whatever it really looks like, plus a simple list of the tools you use. It's browsable at /workshops, shows up as a tab on your profile, and the crew can comment and drop a 🔥 on it same as anything else here.

Yes — pick your vehicle type first and everything changes to match. Setup Sheets: cars/trucks get camber/toe/shock-oil/pinion-spur, boats get strut angle/turn fin/trim tabs/prop pitch, planes get CG/control throws/dihedral/decalage, FPV drones get PID gains/rates/filter cutoffs. The Tuning Guide is the same — a car's "understeer" fix has nothing to do with a boat's "blowover" fix or a drone's "prop wash" fix, so each vehicle type gets its own real, researched set of symptoms and ranked fixes. Tanks are the one type without a Setup Sheet or Tuning Guide entry — there's genuinely no established RC tank tuning culture to build one from, so we didn't fake one.

Yes — 18 languages and counting: English (the default), Español, Français, Deutsch, Português, Italiano, Русский, 日本語, 中文, 한국어, Nederlands, Polski, Tiếng Việt, Bahasa Indonesia, ไทย, हिन्दी, Türkçe and Українська — it translates the nav menus, footer and homepage and keeps you on the same page. Guests switch anytime from the footer language menu; members pick their language once at signup (or anytime after, from Settings) and it's remembered on their account — including which language their verify/reset emails come in — so there's no footer picker to hunt for once you're signed in. First-time guests also get sent to their own language automatically, based on their browser's language setting — only once, and only if we actually support it, so nobody gets guessed at wrong or bounced around. Individual feature pages (Polls, Setups, and the rest) stay in English for now, and member-written content (Wiki articles, forum posts, marketplace listings) stays in whatever language it was posted in and is never auto-translated, so nothing technical or safety-related gets garbled by a machine translation.

Yes — everything below is real and free, no tier, no percentage cut, ever. Once claimed, a shop's own admin panel (yourshop → Manage store) has all of this: Look & feel — your own logo, banner and color theme, plus a real page builder (add, reorder and edit blocks: hero, about, products, featured, gallery, hours, map, contact, text, locations, newsletter, social, blog, events) so the page feels like your own site, not a template with your name slapped on. Selling — a full product catalog (images, variants/options, sale price, stock tracking, backorder, pre-order, consignment items), a real cart and checkout, and your choice of payment: your own Stripe, your own PayPal (with a sandbox/test mode so you can try the whole flow with fake money first), an external payment link, or manual/pay-in-person instructions — money always goes straight to you, we never touch it or take a cut. Orders — a full order queue with status tracking, automatic buyer + owner emails, and stock that adjusts itself. Marketing — a contacts list (auto-built from orders or added by hand, exportable to CSV), a real newsletter tool (compose and send a real email campaign to your subscribers, with a one-click unsubscribe built in), and your own shop blog (write and publish real posts, shown on your page and indexed by Google once verified). Coupons — post real coupons on your free listing page, separate from the storefront. Staff — invite employees by username or email and hand them exactly the permissions they need (products, orders, design, payments, shipping, team, marketing) — nothing more. Beyond retail — a repair/service ticket system with real status tracking, a special-order & trade-in request queue, race series with online registration and results, classes with signups, events, a loyalty points + gift card + membership program, a referral program, layaway/payment-plan tracking, and SMS campaigns (using your own Twilio/Telnyx account) — build out whichever of these actually fit your shop and ignore the rest. Numbers — a real analytics dashboard: revenue, average order value, best-sellers, and your full customer list. You can build all of this out before going live — nothing shows to customers until you flip the storefront on yourself in Settings.

Yes — Crews are free, public or private groups by region with a real members list and a group wall for updates, meetup plans and photos. Anyone can start one; public crews are discoverable and searchable, private crews just stay off the public directory (hand the link to whoever you want to invite) — either way, one click joins.

Yes — a radio gets its own page, separate from any one rig, because that's how they actually work: most hobbyists run a handful of radios across a whole garage of vehicles. Add your radio (brand, model, protocol, telemetry), then link it to every rig it controls. On each rig, say whether it's running the stock radio it came with or your own — and if it's yours, jot down the model-memory slot, telemetry sensors, rates/curves, and any special features (launch control, logical switches, voice alerts) right there. It automatically pulls in whatever receiver, servos and gyro you've logged on that rig too, so the whole radio system shows up together, not scattered as separate unrelated parts — and the RC Crew AI reads that same connected picture when it answers questions about your rig. Got an exported config file (EdgeTX .yml, Spektrum .spm) or a PDF setup sheet? Share it through the File Library and it shows up linked to that rig.

Real discussion, organized by topic — six boards (general RC, cars/trucks, crawlers/scale, boats, air/FPV, builds/mods). Browse without an account; join free to start a thread or reply. Nothing fancy — just threads and replies, kept on-topic by real moderators.

Just by using the site — there's no form to fill out. Log your 1st run, build your 10th rig, write your first wiki article, enter a race — real activity you're already doing unlocks badges automatically in the background, and once earned, a badge is yours for good. It's a flat catalog of about 30 badges, not a level or rank you climb — see which ones you've got (and which are still open) on your profile's Badges tab or the /badges catalog.

No timing hardware — it's real results from a real event, typed in by a verified scorer (usually someone who was actually there). They enter the event, class, date and every driver's finishing position, laps and time, and that becomes a permanent public results page. Any driver row that matches a real @username automatically shows up on that member's own Race History profile tab and feeds into site-wide Rankings and Series standings. You can also post an upcoming race before it happens so members can sign up for a spot — results get added once it's run.

Standardized courses anyone can run at home or at the club and post a real result to — gate-crawling lines, drift boxes, bash sprints, boat buoy runs, FPV time trials. A trusted member defines the course, then anyone verified can submit their result (a time, a lap count, or for gate courses a gates-cleared/missed/touched breakdown that the site itself scores, so nobody can just type in a fake #1). Every course has its own public leaderboard, and you can attach a proof video.

A plain-English reference for real RC rock-crawling/scale competition classes — 1.9 Scale, 2.2, Super Class, Trail & Scale, Rock Racer, Micro and more. There's nothing to submit here; it's a browsable explainer of what defines each class, typical tires and drivetrain, and real example chassis, with a reminder that exact rules vary by sanctioning body (SORRCA, USRCCA) or your local club.

A moderator posts an official challenge — a metric (time, speed, distance or score) and sometimes an end date — and any member can submit an entry: your number, optionally linked to one of your own rigs, plus a proof video if you've got one. The leaderboard always shows your single best entry, ranked correctly whether lower or higher wins. Bragging rights only — no betting, no prizes handled by the site.

Yes, once you're a verified member — ask a question with 2 to 6 options at /polls/new. Everyone verified gets one vote per poll, results update live, and changing your mind just moves your vote instead of adding a second one. You (or an admin) can delete a poll you created.

A real how-to library for RC body painting and weathering — backing, masking, hairspray chipping, oil wash, dry-brushing, salt weathering, pigments, decals, candy/pearl — nine techniques, each explained step by step. It's not a separate upload: tag a photo you've already added to your Photos album with the technique you used, and it joins that technique's public gallery for others to see.

Yes — pick 🌑 Dark, ☀️ Light or 🎨 Color from the theme buttons in the footer, on any page. It switches instantly, no account needed, and remembers your choice on that device for next time. Business/shop storefront pages keep their own owner-set look regardless of your site theme, since that's the shop's own branding, not RC Crash Crew's.