Why are Castle ESCs so expensive?

[RIPFENCE]

As long as you know what you are getting upfront that is more then half the battle!!

[video200]

Castle go boom: Replacement sent free of charge!

Chinese go boom:

unless you live outside the US. my exsperiance with castle is. great on the phone and by mails.
i still had to pay $150 for a replacement + postage both ways and sinse they was unable\forgot\whatever to mark the parcle with "replacement" i got a 25% VAT added to the whole deal.

but ones thats saied. i LOVE my hydra.

[Flying Scotsman]

Now if you were talking single malt whisky. there is a huge difference to the price quality equation......ESCs are just a fuse and if you go to their rated max specs BOOM..The Germans probably design the best ESCs but one has had some problems with their newest design.

Douggie

[Hydromaniac]

Castle go boom: Replacement sent free of charge!

Chinese go boom:

One of the reasons I prefer Castle.

[Doby]

Myself and a few other members have sent controllers back to HK and they have been replaced free of charge.....it just takes a while sometimes.

[BondoBrushless]

The Castle ESCs are assembled here in the states and have the best customer support of any company out there. Small price to pay for peace of mind and have top qaulity ?

[driftah]

now with the turnigy it depends on if you want warranty asap or maybe just to toss it in the mail wait and hope but maybe while your waiting for it like doby said....buy another and have a spare for still less money lol..the castle warranty may be quicker but obviously you do pay for it up frontContoversially I love the mamba monster car esc's go figure and they are reasonable and easy to get lmao...bottom line for me is runtime and you still do have to wait for castle replacement,that is why i keep 2 esc's on hand always.

[electric]

My experiences is I have blown up one Castle 120hv(my fault) and one Turnigy 180 (I was running a data logger at the time and it should not have blown). That said, I mailed in the Turnigy and it was replaced free of charge(less my 10 bucks or so for shipping). The second one has not failed and is still running great.

I kept my castle for awhile to send it in to get a credit and buy a replacement, but even with the replacement discount it is cheaper to buy a turnigy which, so far are working great.

I guess I would say if Castle was within 20% of the cost of the turnigy I would probably pay the premium for another one, but the spread in price is so huge that it makes it an issue. Let me finish by saying I still believe the Castle is better, but the cost for performance is high for a sport boater.

[NativePaul]

Why are Castle ESCs so expensive?

They aren't, if you look at the prices of any of the other ESC makers that do their own R&D like Shulze, YGE, MGM, Hacker, Jetti, Kontronik etc then you will see that Castle Creations are actually at the cheaper end of the scale. However there have been some extremely cheap cloned ESCs like the one in the picture you posted coming out of China recently which make Castles look expensive by comparison.

The Chinese can offer these prices because of the lack of R&D and the wage rate in China but both of these have negatives too, no R&D is cheap but means that their ESCs will always be a little behind the times for example 4 of the ESC makers listed above have built in datalogging and castle will be adding it soon. The low wage rates are cheap and they can just employ more people to hand solder components rather than spending large amounts of money on expensive CNC pick and place soldering stations saving even more money, but the accuracy will not be as good which means they have to use thicker thermal tape which doesn't conduct heat as well and still some of the FETs may not touch the tape which means even if they had the same design and same components the un-cooled FETs on the Chinese version will blow long before the original article.

[ray schrauwen]

The Castle ESCs are assembled here in the states and have the best customer support of any company out there. Small price to pay for peace of mind and have top qaulity ?

I would like to see a picture of that to satisfy my curiousity. This could mean all they do is solder the boards together and add leads for all I know???

Castle is not Top Quality, Schulze, yes.

[ray schrauwen]

The last thing I'll say about any esc's is the the capacitors are DISPOSABLE items!

Once you come to terms with this you can understand what esc you need to buy.

All capacitors wear out, then BOOM! Esc fails.

If Castle, Warranty or core credit.

If Turnigy, then Warranty, no core credit but, Warranty comes from China, don't expect it fast.

What else is there to be said? Maybe add some of the best Caps you can find will lengthen the life of your esc and Maybe, just maybe if people would start using anti-spark for 4S + setups, they would have less experience on the BURN factor.

Capacitor Dielctric does not like the sudden jolts like the spark created on plug in, you guys getting this yet....

[Boomer]

Ray,
Please share with me and any other dolts that may not be familar with "anti-spark". I would like to incorporate this practice into my set up routine. I don't like that spark and would like understand how to prevent it.
Thank you

[LiPo Power]

I am 100% with Ray on this subject.
All ESC's are good if used properly.
Last season I was using Doby's SV-27 very old ESC several times with good quality cap installed.. Ohh wait! There was propably few other guys using this ESc before me in emergancy on few diferent boats, motors and props. Well, guess what? This ESc is still going and going like Energizer Bunny...
T-180 from China is made using USA's FEDS.... and on and on. Capacitors is the key in my opinion and that is why I will allways use them to mod my ESC's
Just my few cents....
Robert

[LiPo Power]

If you can, post a picture....

Ray,
Please share with me and any other dolts that may not be familar with "anti-spark". I would like to incorporate this practice into my set up routine. I don't like that spark and would like understand how to prevent it.
Thank you

[BondoBrushless]

This might help as well ?

http://scriptasylum.com/rc_speed/nospark.html