Hobby King, formerly Hobby City, formerly United Hobbies, is a Hong Kong-based hobby site with a wide selection of modeling products, as you probably would guess, made in China.
I’ve recently gotten a couple of brushless motors and lipo batteries from them. In the first order, things processed through their system fairly fast. I placed my order on Oct 22 and had it by about November 7th. I was pleased. My next order was placed on November 24th and didn’t leave the warehouse until December 4th. I’m not sure what the hold up was but I got notification from the post office that I needed to sign for it on Dec 13th. Another recent order was placed February 19th, it left the warehouse on February 29th and arrived in Arizona on March 7th.
The big draw for Hobby King is price. Many will say you get what you pay for and they may be right. I’m also smart enough to know that you can pay an unwarranted premium for some brands, too. With several orders and products used for a while I'm generally pleased. I've had very good luck with motors, both HTX and Turnigy. I've had mixed results with ESCs. The HexTronik brand of ESCs seem to run very hot even when well below its amp rating and one completely shorted out. Fortunately it was on the ground so besides the ESC nothing was lost. I put a HXT 2835 brushless inrunner in an Easy Star and was amazed at the power and used Turnigy 2209 outrunners for my Twinstar II and been equally pleased.
The traffic on the message boards lately has had an ever increasing amount of recommended configurations using Hobby King products. My guess is that the price difference is so great that it is hard to ignore. I've gotten some batteries from them that were one-third the price of name brands. I figure that even if they only last half as long and I use two of them, I'm still money ahead.
You'll want to make sure you have enough to make the shipping costs worth while. If you get a bunch of stuff at a time and use all the weight, it's a pretty good deal. You wouldn't want to buy one propeller at a time, though.
Hobby King’s web site is fun and easy to use. I particularly liked the clever marketing ploy of letting you know how much weight you have left in the current shipping category. Shipping is priced by gram so the shopping cart keeps a running total. Below the cart are products at or below the weight you have remaining. Smart idea. The desire to buy another couple of grams of stuff to get close to the shipping break point can be overwhelming – which is of course the idea. Payments clear through PayPal with credit cards or your PayPal account.
Visit Hobby King now.
