Brushless in a RadioShack Car: The ProPulse Mega Pro Conversion (60-9539)
October 23, 2026
In 2006, brushless power was race gear. It lived in serious 1:10 buggies and trucks, it cost serious money, and putting it in a 1:18 car from RadioShack was the kind of idea most people had for about a minute before checking the price. Megatech actually sold the conversion anyway — a matched Mega Pro brushless motor and speed control, listed in the back of the ProPulse User’s Guide as the 60-9539 High Performance Brushless Motor and ESC set. This truck is a built example of that conversion, and it is very rare, because the number of people who bought the set, installed it, and kept the car can probably be counted without taking your shoes off.
The hardware
The motor is Megatech’s Mega Pro brushless unit, part MTC73091 — a 6600Kv motor in the 180 size, the can format the ProPulse chassis was built around, finished in blue with deep cooling fins. In the truck it’s mounted with its pinion meshed to the spur gear, solder-tab leads coming off the back of the can the way a proper install should be done.
The speed control is the matching Mega Pro Brushless ESC, part MTC73090, rated for 7.2 to 12 volts at 20 amps, in the same blue finned case style, with its ON/OFF switch mounted where the driver could reach it. It carries the protection features Megatech listed on the box — over-heating and discharge-voltage protection — which mattered in a small car where everything runs hot and close together.
What gives the conversion away in the photos is the wiring. A brushed ProPulse has two motor wires. This truck has the brushless system’s heavy-gauge three-phase leads — red, yellow, and black — routed across the chassis and tidied with zip ties. Whoever built this car did it carefully and meant it to stay built.
Underneath the electronics, the truck itself is the black-chassis version of the platform: black chassis plate, black suspension arms and shocks, and a set of big chevron-pattern knobby tires with noticeably more bite than the standard rubber. It’s a different car from our twin motor truck — that one wears the blue aluminum; this one is all business in black, which suits what it is: the fast one.
Why it matters
ProPulse’s whole story is that RadioShack briefly sold a genuinely hobby-grade 1:18 platform with a real upgrade catalog behind it, and almost nobody noticed before it was gone. The brushless set is the far end of that catalog — the most expensive, most technically ambitious option Megatech offered for these cars, sold through a toy-store channel to buyers who mostly never knew it existed. The User’s Guide doesn’t even picture an installed system; the catalog page just lists it. A documented, complete, running-gear install is the kind of evidence that disappears first and matters most later, when someone restoring one of these cars in twenty years needs to know how the factory system actually went together.
It also settles a practical question: yes, the conversion was real, it was a matched Megatech system rather than a home-brew, and it fit the standard chassis without butchery. The parts numbers are on the boxes — MTC73091 for the motor, MTC73090 for the ESC — and the pair was sold as 60-9539.
Finding one today
Honestly: you won’t, easily. The motors and ESCs surface occasionally as new old stock — we list them when we have them, as out-of-stock reference listings when we don’t — but a complete built car is another order of scarcity. If you’re piecing a conversion together, start from the boxes and the catalog page rather than forum memory; the Manual Library has the User’s Guide catalog pages scanned, including the page that lists the 60-9539 set. And if you’re starting from a stock truck, sort the basics first — gears, shocks, tires — because brushless power finds every weak part in a 1:18 drivetrain in about one battery pack.
Like the twin motor truck, this car is part of the collection and isn’t for sale. It’s here so the conversion is on the record, photographed properly, while a complete example still exists to photograph.
