The first person to take a Traxxas Summit and adapt it to be driven FPV and then post videos of his exploits was Wobby. He put a camera where the drivers head would be and attached the hand to the moving steering wheel and we all followed his adventures, as he drove around his Australian neighbourhood. It made us all want to rebuild our Summits to follow his lead and have our own FPV adventures, but building a model from scratch isn't that easy.
This is the point at which Replayreb, in 2010, came up with the idea of taking a steel Tonka jeep toy and adapting it to fit on the Traxxas Summit chassis. He was the originator of the Tonka Summit, and his build blog on RCGroups.com became the master plan that we have all worked to as we created our own individual Tonka Summit creations. We saw him add a remote controlled Dixie horn, and take us all for a drive around his local lake shore, he even took us on vacation with him to the the beach. The next people to come on the scene were Roadgrader and Calidave, they took it up a notch, as they each achieved range runs of over a mile, distances that haven't been beaten at the time of writing this. Calidave took up the batton and started to run with it, he developed the tonkasummit.com website to help to promote the hobby, and pushed it along with his action videos featuring aerial shots and multiple trucks racing around the Californian landscape. His videos started to be noticed by people other than those already interested in FPV trucks. |
But the person who took the FPV video up to another level, was FPVSCRacer, who posted a trilogy of videos "Geek Gets Girl" parts 1 & 2 plus the TV coverage, with over 2,700,000 hits on YouTube.
Also at this point in time we had healthyfatboy, showing us his hi tech additions to the Tonka Summit, culminating in a RC truck that will drive itself around a preprogrammed course. Next came FPVSummituk with his RockApe, a bright yellow truck that tried to be as sharp and detailed as possible. Many builds came and went over the next six months. Until Carguy from Quebec popped onto the scene with the Mystery Summit, complete with Scoobydoo sitting in the back, this started a trend to build themed trucks, from his lead we have had BabyBee and MyBee using the Transformer theme, Danmor, with his Flintstones theme, and not forgetting GlueHandBrian with his Muppets themed Tonka Truggy and some of the maddest and funniest videos posted so far. It was GHBrian who came up with what we should use as the our motto "BUILT NOT BOUGHT" as it really describes exactly what this Tonka Summit hobby is all about. Although it does eventually move from hobby to obsession as you get more into it. |
As you progress through the site you will come across many things to add to your Tonka Summit, from simple horns, additional lights, to engine sound modules, rc controlled radios, reversing cameras and even a computer controlling all the electronic gadgets built into the Tonka body. We have even seen a Tonka Summit towing a trailer with a boat on it, that is launched and then powered across the water, all by remote control.
The beauty of the Tonka Summit is that it allows you to think up the craziest of ideas, build them and present them to the rest of the group. If you have problems while creating the build, just ask the group, as, someone will have encountered something similar, and if they haven't, they will try to workout a fix for it. Then we have the videos, the group is stretched all around the world, from Australia, to Malaysia, the United Kingdom to the Netherlands and Sweden, to Canada and the USA. So the videos become a travel log of different scenery and cultures all seen from just ten inches above the ground. But please remember, this site is a Tonka build register that will hopefully help new recruits as they tackle their Tonka Summit builds. The FPV Tonka Summit thread on RCGroups.com is still our meeting place. |
"Built Not Bought"