Your First RC Toolkit — What to Buy, in What Order
Not a $200 tool set with eleven things you'll never touch. The four tools that do 90% of the work, the second wave, the consumables nobody lists, and the mistakes that cost the most.
Updated Jul 22, 2026 · RC Crash Crew
"What tools do I need?" is one of the most asked questions in RC, and the usual answer is a link to a $200 tool set that contains eleven things you will never touch and is missing two you need on day one.
This is the honest version: what to buy first, what to buy when you hit the wall the first purchase leaves, and what to leave alone until you actually need it. Roughly in the order money should leave your wallet.
First, throw away the tools in the box
Almost every ready-to-run RC includes a small bag of L-shaped hex keys and a plastic cross wrench. They are there so the box can say "everything you need is included."
They are the single most expensive tools you will ever own, because they round out screw heads. The tip is soft, the fit is loose, and an RC screw head is a 2 mm hole in a part that costs money. Once a hex head is rounded, that screw is not coming out with any tool, and you are drilling it, cutting it, or replacing the part it lives in.
Use them for the first hour if you must. Then stop.
This is not an upsell. It is the one place in this hobby where the cheap option is genuinely more expensive, and it is where most beginners lose their first part.
Buy these first — the four that do 90% of the work
1. A set of proper hex drivers
The screwdriver-handled kind, with a hardened tip. This is the single best purchase in RC and it is not close.
For a modern metric kit, four sizes cover nearly everything:
| Size | What it usually opens |
|---|---|
| 1.5 mm | Small cap screws, servo horns, pinion grub screws |
| 2.0 mm | The most common screw on the car, by a wide margin |
| 2.5 mm | Motor mount, bulkhead, suspension mounting |
| 3.0 mm | Larger scale, shock caps, wheel hex screws on 1/8 |
Older or American-designed kits — some Traxxas, Losi and Team Associated models — use imperial sizes: 0.050", 1/16", 5/64" and 3/32". A metric driver in an imperial screw feels *almost* right and rounds it out. Check your manual before you buy, and if you own both kinds of car, own both sets.
⚠️ A hex driver is a wear item. When the tip starts to feel sloppy in the screw, replace the driver, not the screws.
2. Nut drivers
The wrench in the box is a cross-shaped plastic thing that flexes. A proper nut driver does not.
The sizes you need depend on your scale, and this is one to check rather than assume — measure the nut or look it up in your manual. The common ones on 1/10 and 1/8 scale are 5.5 mm and 7.0 mm, with 17 mm appearing on larger-scale wheel nuts. Buying a small set covers the variation cheaply.
3. Side cutters (flush cutters)
For body clips, zip ties, wire, and trimming plastic sprues cleanly. A pair of hobby-grade flush cutters costs very little and stops you doing all of that with a knife, which is how people get cut.
4. A hobby knife with spare blades
Body trimming, sprue clean-up, cutting foam. Spare blades matter more than the handle — a blunt blade needs force, and force is how a knife slips. Change them far more often than feels necessary.
The second wave — when the first four run out of road
Thread lock (blue)
RC cars vibrate hard. Metal screws going into metal parts will come loose, and the ones you notice are the ones that fall out somewhere in a field.
- Use blue (medium strength, removable).
- Never red — that is permanent, and "permanent" on a 2 mm screw means you will destroy the part getting it out.
- Never on plastic. Threadlocker can attack some plastics and cause them to crack. Screws going into plastic hold by thread interference and do not need it.
- One small drop on the thread, not the head.
A ride height / setup gauge, or a simple steel rule
You cannot tune what you cannot measure, and "looks about level" is not a measurement. A basic steel rule gets you a long way before you need proper setup gauges.
Shock and turnbuckle wrenches
The moment you rebuild a shock or adjust a camber link, pliers stop being acceptable — they mark and weaken the parts. These are cheap, model-specific, and usually sold as a set.
A soldering iron
Not optional forever, but genuinely postponable if your connectors already match. When you get there, note that RC soldering is a different job from circuit-board soldering — heavy stranded copper needs a lot more thermal mass than a 25 W pencil iron has. There is a full guide on this site about soldering correctly, including the safety rule that comes before all the others.
A battery / cell checker
A small plug-in LiPo checker shows the voltage of every individual cell. It is inexpensive and it is how you find out a pack is dying before it fails in a way that matters. Anyone running lithium packs should own one.
The things worth waiting for
Buy these when a specific problem makes you want them — not before.
- A multimeter. Genuinely useful for chasing electrical faults, dead switches and suspect wiring. Almost nobody needs one in month one.
- Camber and toe gauges. Real tuning tools. They matter enormously once you are chasing handling, and mean nothing while you are still learning to drive.
- A rotary tool. Excellent for body work and modification, and excellent at destroying a part in half a second when your hand slips.
- A bearing puller / press. Worth it when you are rebuilding regularly, unnecessary for one gearbox.
- A tire balancer. For high-speed on-road running. Ignore it otherwise.
- A dedicated pit bag or tote. Not a tool, but the first thing that stops you losing tools.
The consumables nobody lists
Tools get all the attention and then a run is ruined by a missing 30-cent part.
- Body clips. You will lose them. Buy them in packs of twenty and keep spares in the car.
- CA glue (superglue), thin and medium. Thin wicks into a tire bead; medium fills and holds.
- Shock oil in a couple of weights either side of stock.
- Spare spur gear. It is designed to be the part that dies — so keep one.
- Screws. A small assortment of the common sizes for your car. The one you lose is always the one you need.
- Nitrile gloves for gluing and greasing. Cheap and they save a lot of scrubbing.
The mistakes that cost the most
Buying a big set instead of good singles. A 42-piece set at the price of four good drivers contains four good drivers' worth of steel spread across 42 tools. Buy fewer, better.
Using the wrong size because it "nearly fits." This is the number-one cause of rounded screws — a 2.0 mm driver in a 2.5 mm screw, or metric in imperial. If it does not seat with a definite click, it is the wrong tool.
Forcing a seized screw. Heat it gently, or use a proper screw extractor. Force converts a five-minute job into a new part.
Working over carpet. Every dropped screw, e-clip and spring finds carpet and is never seen again. A plain tray or a piece of light card on the bench costs nothing and saves the whole evening.
Losing track of which screw came from where. Take a photo before you take something apart. Your phone is a free tool and it is the one that saves the most rebuilds.
What this list deliberately does not do
It does not name brands. Tool brands vary enormously by country, price and what a local shop actually stocks, and a list of brand names written in one place is quietly wrong everywhere else. The properties that matter — a hardened tip, a handle you can grip, the correct size for your car — are the same whoever makes it.
If you want brand opinions, ask in the forums where people can tell you what they actually own and what it cost them. That question gets a much better answer from a person than from a page.