Review: CEN Racing Reeper SC Short Course Truck

CEN Racing has been coming out with some pretty cool rides lately, with most being oddly fun releases in the scale department. Then, they announced the Reeper SC, a 1/10 scale Short Course truck that, in all honesty, I thought was just going to be another cool truck that went kind of fast.

And then I drove it.

And it impressed the hell outta me – in speed, handling and durability!

So, let’s dive into what makes this truck so good and follow that up with a full performance review.

Main Features

1. The beauty of this beast starts with the stellar-looking body set. It’s definitely not an angular masterpiece but instead has lots of harder grooves and addons that give it a very masculine feel. The front end has wide wheel arches and a hood scoop that tapers back to the window-less cab, filled with a partial interior and a pair of driver figures. Deep inset door panels are flanked by bulging flairs while a pair of molded-plastic skid rails are attached to the roof to help protect the body. Out back, fire extinguishers are hooked to the roll cage and a functional spare mounted in the body cutout. Tubular bumpers are also included on the front and rear of the truck. The body does come pre-loaded with a few stickers with CEN including a couple additional sheets to add as you’d like. Personally, I loved the entire flat-black look and opted to not put any stickers on it.

2. If you’ve been around RC for awhile, the chassis setup on the Reeper SC may look somewhat familiar, maybe like the HPI Savage series of trucks? Both of these share a similar TVP design – or Twin-Vertical Plate – basically two vertical, 3mm thick aluminum plates that sandwich the electronics and center transmission, capped on both ends with the diff housings. Multiple attachment points and a couple flat lower plates (with cutouts) create a solid spine for the truck. And, if that’s not enough, X-bracing on the front and rear further beef up durability. The object of this setup is sheer strength – you’re going to have a hard time bending or breaking this chassis. There is, however, a downside to this setup – I’ll talk about that later.

3. The suspension is a standard 4-wheel independent design – molded lower suspension arms with adjustable turnbuckles up top. The large-volume shocks do have plastic bodies but are threaded for easy adjustment. Steel hinge pins, aluminum hinge pin braces and some meaty front caster / rear c-hub blocks show that CEN has built this truck for combat. There’s also a good bit of tuning adjustment, basically all the important stuff you’d expect from a race-level RTR. I also have to call out the plastic suspension arm inserts – remove them or replace them with a different material to adjust the flex characteristics – something you typically only find in high-end offroad offerings. Finally, the KMC-style wheels are wrapped with rubber that has some thick spacing between the lugs, good for all different kinds of terrain.

4. The electronics package is quite impressive as well – Beast 80A 2S/3S LiPo-compatible waterproof ESC, 4000kV brushless motor and an official Savox metal-geared servo. The 2-channel receiver is loaded into a water-resistant box, safely tucked neatly between the twin-vertical plates. The battery slides into the chassis along the driver’s side and is held in place with a single velcro strap. To keep things cool while you’re gettin’ it at your local bash spot, CEN has included a fan on the ESC AND one mounted inside the rear upper plastic cover above the motor. Nice added features.

5. To manage the extreme power from the 3S system, CEN has added a grocery list of durability must-haves – full ball bearings, inner and outer metal differential gears, an aluminum center driveshaft and a Mod8 spur gear (and pinion). Massive telecsoping driveshafts lead out to all 4 wheels, ending in thick axles capped with solid plastic wheel hexes.

Performance

I was on the fence as to where to drive this – mild offroading or ‘Send It’? Well, CEN didn’t name it the Reeper for nothing, so I decided to try a new local spot (to me) – lots of open offroading, jumps of various sizes and, of course, some loose dirt for some great roosting-action. Little did I know that the jumps would be so blown out, however that did give me a chance to test out the truck’s durability (not on purpose, of course).

Speed
I brought both a 2S and 3S pack with me for the test run, starting with the 2S to keep things mild. Well, there’s nothing mild about 2S on this truck – it is shockingly fast with some rippin’ acceleration, alot more than I expected. High-speed passes were exactly that – high-speed passes. It had plenty of rip up the hills and over the flat-ish land – 2S was plenty of power, yet was still very driveable. So much so that, after about 20 minutes of blasting around, I decided to skip the 3S battery entirely. This was fun, it was fast and, I knew if I went up in power, it may have been much faster, but it would certainly suffer from driveability issues. I loved it the way it was.

Handling
The handling was surprisingly good as well. It did the dance over the unequal ground and cornered nicely. The only real issue I had was over some of the jumps but, to be fair, they were pretty blown out – deep ruts on the jumps face upset the Reeper during lift off and, well, landings were a bit rough. However, when I did get it right, the thing flew very well with great control in the air. I’m looking to get a good set of offroad tires mounted and hitting a proper track to see if it has any chops at the competitive level.

Suspension
I’d say the suspension passed with flying colors – the entire setup, including the shocks, seemed like a great starting point for most drivers. There was a little bit of on-throttle push but nothing crazy and everything felt solid – no odd handling traits.

Durability
If you watch the video, you’ll see that I didn’t take it easy on the Reeper. Now, to clarify, I didn’t go out to beat it up – I honestly wanted to drive it hard but keep it on all 4 wheels. Again, those jumps were killer and if you didn’t get it right, you were flying through the air like a psycho ballerina. Unfortunately (or fortunately), those errant jumps had the truck landing on everything BUT the wheels, testing the entire truck’s durability, surviving with flying colors – no broken or bent parts and the body was still in excellent shape.

Maintenance
While not a normal category, I thought it was something that needed to be mentioned. The Reeper is very compact, which is a good thing, until it’s not – like when you need to do any kind of maintenance under those top plastic covers. There’s alot of screws to remove and ‘things’ to move out of the way. If you don’t pay attention, this can definitely be an issue when you’re putting it back together. In more than one instance I wish I had a 3rd hand.

I also have to mention the interesting shocks towers. They’re similar to the suspension arms – a hollow part with an insert that screws into place. I’m not sure if this is a tuning option or a way to use ‘less plastic’, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen something like this before on something other than the suspension arms. Not really an issue, just different.

GALLERY

LINKS

CEN Racing, cenracingusa.com
ProTek, amainhobbies.com/protek