Remote control cars, although being so small, can achieve really great speeds. This is really an amazing engineering achievement. You must have wondered what actually get these little things to go zipping around so swiftly. These machines may look minuscule but in what ever they do – accelerate, brake or drift – there is a whole world of engineering and mechanics that is operating and state of the art control systems are at work which can be really complex at times. This article is targeted to make you learn how to get your RC car play some ticks and move really fast.

Though most of the remote controlled cars are built almost the same way, it’s not always that all the cars run at the same speeds. Obviously, in car races, some cars pick up more speed than the others. So what exactly makes these cars to be better than others? The secret is a simple upgrade that is known as shims. The shim is fitted in the substantial gap present in the car between the axle pin and the back hub.

Let’s try to understand what actually a shim is. Shim is generally a piece of metal that is generally thin in construction. Sometimes, the shim can be made of wood also. The purpose of placing the shim in a RC car is to prevent the car from dis-balancing and toppling especially when it runs over uneven roads or tracks such as stones, slopes etc. It helps in reducing the car’s sloppiness and increases its balance.

So what do you need to do for fitting a shim in your remote controlled car to get it really zipping around? Firstly, the car needs to be disassembled completely which means that all the parts have to be separated. Therefore, the car will be constructed from the starting with the rear hub to be fitted along with the shim at first, which will then be fitted with the bearing. A very important thing to take care of is that the dimensions of the shim and the ball bearing should match; otherwise the assembly will not work properly. This assembly will reduce the gap present between the axle pin and the ball bearing making your remote controlled car go amazingly fast.

The only problem that may be faced by fitting a shim as directed above is that if the dimension of the shim does not match with the bearing, it will result in binding of the tires of the car. To avoid this problem, just make sure that the shim is cut into the proper size according to the bearing. Use this simple way to ramp up your car speed.