Thursday, August 16, 2007

Taiwan trip - part 2

Ok so after taipei, i stopped over at taichung for a few days. Its a less vibrant city , things move at a slower pace. Align and thunder tiger factories are located in taichung county but a quite a distant away, naturally the RC stuff are cheaper here due the the close proximity. This is where i got most of the goodies.
Visited 3 shops in the list.
The first shop was syhobby.com which is walkable (25mins) from the train station area where most of the hotels are. Although the shop front looks abit old, it has quite a comprehensive stock list, from cars,tank to planes , helis and even boat. They have some nice gliders but boxes are quite big to carry back...

Next stop was ACME-model. Its located at the outskirts in some sort of industrial area, about 15mins ride by cab from train station. Shop doesn't stock much stuff as they do more mail orders. Warning : Quite hard to find cab back from there.
I did most of the shopping at RC extreme sports. Mostly heli and planes stuff, 10mins by cab from train station. Carries the full Align stuff at quite good price. Shop looks family owned, father, mother, 2 kids were all helping out and owner has good contacts with the Align factory. I wanted the trex600 pro kit which they ran out at that moment, he gave a call to the Align factory and asked if i could wait awhile. So 1.5 hrs later, the align guys delivered the kit fresh from the factory. Hohoho. It so happened that the new Align pipe was just out from the factory, so i grabbed what ever i could. Too bad they don't ship overseas...

The pipe looks like the hatori 522 , abit bigger though. Beautiful chrome finishing and comes with nice little accessories.Compared with a 522.
Got a few pairs of CF 600A Align blades as well, which had some good reviews. Quite good finishing, value for money blades.

Edit 23/08 : Warning some issues with this sets of blades throwing leads out here. Hope its just isolated cases, no flying with these sets til it get solved.

Edit 16/09 : The affected blades were the FGXXXXX series. I had a pair which was affected, contacted Walter at Rotor hobby and he was kind enough to help me send back to Align for replacement even though i didnt buy the blades from him. Thumbs up for him again!!. Got my blades back, going to try them soon.
So a few guys asked how i carried back so all those stuff. Well i asked for a big box from the shop packed all the stuff in, and pad with dirty clothes to make sure they didnt move about. Taped up the sides of the box with masking tape and check-in as Fragile item at the airport. The stuff reached back in pristine condition.

More reviews after i tried out out those stuff. For those looking for Align/TT stuff, taichung may be worth a visit, as its only 2.5hrs train ride away from taipei. Can do all 3 shops in a day. Thats it in Taiwan, didn't explore the southern parts, Kaohsiung has a large lists of shops as well, maybe next time...

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

wahhaha.. I like R/C trip report
btw did they stop u from taking pics?

mazon said...

i took those pics outside the shops. most of them are quite friendly so it was ok.

Anonymous said...

Who knows where to download XRumer 5.0 Palladium?
Help, please. All recommend this program to effectively advertise on the Internet, this is the best program!

Anonymous said...

I found rcextreme in Taichung because of your blog, thanks, nice shop, nice people, nice price.

Now I travelling back to Germany with tons of sparepart in my luggage.

Anonymous said...

did you visit any shops in taipei?