So the ones that stuff up get the new BEC put in and sent back to the owner?

:lol:. Hey, I asked Patrick if I could put one through some tests, but I gues they felt the inhouse testers were good enough for the Monster.

<Pure Speculation>

I wonder if Castle is regretting not running a wide beta program for the Monster like they did with the Mamba?

</Pure Speculation>

Even if they did run more beta testers, the batch of bad parts they received would probably have still caused issues.

The idea of running a beta is to catch problems with the product before it ships to the paying public. I have every confidence that Castle will (or maybe has) resolve (d) the issues but it leaves a very bad taste in your mouth. Lack of confidence in the product...until the Rev 2.0 units come out. Maybe not all of the first batch are bad or have a problem but who knows when a first batch MMM will die, maybe it will be in the first 5 minutes or maybe it will be as you round the last corner on your way to a victory...then it puffs and you DNF...not fun.

I agree, if the issue is what we/they think it is.

Beta testing and product development has nothing to do with a bad component from a supplier.

True...they could've beta-tested until the cows came home, and still received a roll of bad components on the first production run. Just bad luck really. It sounds like they did a LOT of testing on the MMM anyway to me, even if it was in-house. Castle aren't going to release such a hotly anticipated product without making sure the design's virtually flawless IMO.

My point is that they could not control the quality of part that is causing the issue. Beta or not, they are not the manufacturer for the problematic part. How many beta testers would it have taken to spot the QC issue? 100? 200? That would put them 400 units behind just to break even, 200 betas and 200 production for all of the testers. That is a LOT of money, and would cost more than fixing this issue on all of the originally produced ESCs- damn near cost as much as the original production run just to make the betas and pay the testers!

Have they said that the "problem" is a faulty component? Is there a way to ID that component in currently shipped units?

Yea but... they would have less annoyed customers right now. And could possibly have saved a TON of bad press on this new controller advertised as "bulletproof." How much is that worth? If you ask CC now I bet they would gladly trade 400 units to make this little problem as if it never happened.

I know that I'm not really loving the MMM Bingo game. I have mine installed and its running OK so far, but I certainly don't have much confidence that it will keep running. I still drag my old esc with me to the track every time I run it. You just never know when/if you are going to need it.

Hey, I just wanted to test the controller :lol:.

lol, we're never happy are we? We're upset that there are a few bad components. But then, if they had taken more time to do testing, people would be upset at the additional wait. They can't win. :lol:

IIRC, it was the BEC IC chip. Some were simply part of a bad batch.

IMO, we can't blame them at all for this bad batch of chips. If it turns out to be more than that... then we can talk about blaming CC. But that's a big leap at this point

Nobody is blaming them. Its just annoying.

It seems to me like the failure rate is pretty high. It seems everyone that bought multiple esc's had at least one go bad. thats not 6 bad esc's in 1000, thats dozens, at least. The point im trying to make is it would make sense, if they had realy tested alot of the esc that were going out. say one in every 10 esc's they actualy hooked it up to a load and ran it for 10-15 min. They would get significant failures on the test bench. Most of wich would be this bec issue, that seems to be the cause of most if not all failures. then they could stop production and find out that this was a bad "roll" of components. It seems like way too many got out. So yes it gives a company that has had tremendous quality history, a black eye. If they had an almost zero failure rate of the second batch and on, that would be the biggest help to gain there credability back. That and quickly replacing all the defective units that are coming back now(which it looks like they are doing there best)
Has anyone got there replacement esc's back?