They also have a full metal one too. The drives on these are really weak and you can't do much with it but they make mods for them to make them stronger. But for 50 bucks it's still a good deal.




Dallas

The 580 is full metal with metal geared linear actuators. It definitely has enough power to dig without stalling on the clutch... But the 580 is $450-750 depending on where you buy it from.

I have the 580 and it works great.

My 5 year old daughter and I both got one for Christmas from Santa for some light sandbox use. They are cheaper yet on Wish.com... maybe a bit suspiciously cheap.

edit: Also the video above is the $500 Huina 580. The $30 (or $50 from Gearbest) excavator is the el-cheapo Huina 1550. It looks waaay more clunky than the nice smooth movement of the excavator in the video, but looks like it would still work.


Here's a video on how to mod the cheap one into something a little more usable

Huina Metal Strength Main Arm Second Arm Bucket Arm Driving Rod for RC Excavator (12 min 1 sec)

Huina Metal Strength Main Arm Second Arm Bucket Arm Driving Rod for RC Excavator (16 min 17 sec)

Okay Christmas happened and we tried out the two excavators I got from Wish.com.
One of the excavators wouldn't work from the get-go so I opened it up and found one of the wires touching two pads. I re-soldered it so it was only touching it's designated pad and that seemed to fix it... for a while. 20 minutes or so later the excavator stopped working entirely. Perhaps something was damaged due to the wire cross or maybe another issue altogether but was a "on par" Christmas with at least something breaking immediately.

On the carpet I found it really hard to scoop up regular objects. Everything would just slide around, balls would roll away. I found that larger driveway gravel rocks however worked decent due to their heavier weight. You could actually scoop them up.

In the sandbox you couldn't really "dig" very well due to the fact that the bucket servo was too weak. The controller was clunky and the button layout seemed unintuitive but all in all I still thought it was really fun for a $30 excavator. I get a kick out of hauling little rocks around the living room with it and my daughter and I are having a blast trying to figure the thing out in the sandbox.

Despite having one insta-break on me I plan to replace it with another and have two going at the same time.

huina digger (3 min 57 sec)

In the first post, the excavator in the top pic is a 580 (or 1580) 1/14 scale fully controlable arm... but the 4 pictures below are of Huina 1510, 11 channel excavator 1/16th scale with the boom and arm set that follows a cycle... the arms and bucket are not individually movable... I bought one and was totally disappointed with it once I found the digging arm is not realistic.... that, and the stupid music it has (disco music) instead of engine noise.... it has the dozer type blade across the front of the tracks. The 580 doesn't have the dozer blade.

The 1510 looks great.... but I wouldn't get anything less than a 1550 and put screw servo arms rather than the weak constantly clicking 1550 geared arms.... but at least the bucket, boom and arm work like a real excavator... and upgrade the transmitter to something a bit more user friendly...