you'll never find a Navajo

**PLEASE READ THIS** for anyone looking at this model displayed in my showroom and wondering if I will sell it? PLEASE DON’T ASK!!! I get numerous requests from TC members wanting to buy cars displayed in my Tamiyaclub showroom, and to be honest I get very annoyed when people ask to buy something that is clearly NOT FOR SALE!! This car is part of MY COLLECTION and as such I want to KEEP IT!! So please don’t Email on the off chance that I might sell it to you, if I want to sell any of my cars I will put them up for sale in my TRADE ROOM, so look there to see what cars I am prepared to sell otherwise don’t bother asking cos the only answer you will get is NO!!! thanks for reading this disclaimer. Regards wldnas.

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Here an odd’un? If like me you like to collect rare and obscure cars then quite often you will come across something unusual that you have never seen before, I like to think that my knowledge of the more unusual RC cars is quite extensive, but there will always be something else that I’ve never seen or come across before that will come along and surprise me, and this little car is one such thing? The T.A.G Navajo

My first encounter with one of these beasts was on Ebay many moons ago, when I whilst doing the regular rounds I found an strange looking machine with a sleekish looking Red body, weird suspension and some parts that look distinctly Kyosho? In fact as I recall it was originally listed as a Kyosho item, but at that time it was being sold by a German who as per usual wanted the typical Bank Transfer type payment so I could not bid on it even if I wanted to cos of the insurmountable difficulties in sending such a type of payment, so I passed it over and thought no more about it, then a number of months later the Same car with the same pictures was posted up again, and again I saw it and left it well alone, yet this time the seeds of doubt and intrigue had been well and truly rooted in my mind, what was this thing, who made it and what kind of suspension did it have on there?

These question slowly started to bug me all the more to the point where I made my mind up and decided to put in a concerted effort to get the bottom of things and get one of their weird machines, after much fruitless searching I saw another one on Ebay, this time it was listed as a Robbe car and quite clearly it had Robbe decals plastered all over it, now on the previous car it had the T.A.G models decals on that I’d seen on cars like the SG Coyote, this Robbe Navajo also had T.A.G models decals on, this was more than a little confusing to me :S but this car as with so many others was again being sold by a German seller with incompatible payment requirements so I had to let another one slip through my fingers, the only other thing I found after that was a NIB Navajo instructions manual and a few NIB bagged parts, I bought this of course but finding another car was getting tedious now, and as time dragged on I began to despair, I’d never find another one ever again…. Well, that is, until I had a little help ;)

You see now I have a spy on the inside ;) someone who can restlessly scan through Ebay Germany for rare RC stuff for me, and as he’s in Austria he has easy access to the European Banking Union and all the perks that entails including cheap and easy credit transfers :) this means that he can buy stuff for me from there and sell it back to me at cost price, and I only have to pay him to get what I want, who is this helpful fellow? Why it’s Professorslot of course ;) A.K.A Franz Knauseder, just recently he become my main trading contact in Europe, and has so far found me no end of interesting stuff, this has also included a Navajo or two ;) but this car here isn’t one of them? Ohh-No ;) this car came from Ebay as after Franz had procured 2 used examples of the curious Navajo car, then this MIB example appeared on Ebay USA, proving the old adage that you spend ages waiting for one bus to come along, and then three come at once ;) but as I have not got them other two cars from Franz yet, they are another story for another Showroom entry, this ones about the MIB ;)

So quite by chance a MIB Navajo shows up on Ebay, well I was a little overdrawn at the time it appeared and to be honest I was struggling to afford it (as I had already placed some pretty heavy orders for 4 other MIB kits from 2 other TC members) so I could not afford to spend much on this, so I set my self a rigid target of $100 with which to buy it, also the auction ended very early in the morning for me, and I just couldn’t be asked to get up especially to win it, so I placed on my Max bid late the previous night and hoped for the best… I need not have worried ;) cos I won it for just under $70 :) however when the parcel was shipped I had not anticipated the seller bumping up the value on the shipping label for insurance purposes, and as the price was quite low I didn’t think it necessary to de-value it to my more usual $40 so I never bothered to request that they did, however when the parcel arrived, what did it have… a Bloody Customs HIT!! :( for £17.56 and that was cos the seller had valued and insured the parcel for $100, and even though the “GIFT” box was ticked it still got stung, so now I know for sure that it’s on the declared value alone that Parcels are judged and stopped by the Customs people.

Anyway enough of the doom and gloom, what about the kit, well it’s a MIB even if the box itself isn’t exactly “MINT” :S the top is OK but both sides are badly faded and it’s showing signs of the ingress of dampness, inside the kit the decals sheet has also suffered from this a bit and started to lift in one corner, the rest of the kit is pretty simplistic, the tires and wheels are in separate loose bags in the main space along with the crude lexan body and the main chassis tub, the decal sheet and instructions manual are under this with a pain white card box off to one side, in this box are the rest of the parts all grouped up in separate numbered bags, pretty basic no thrills kit box, one thing that dose stand out at this point is the finish on the main plastic parts, the quality of the plastic does look a little suspect to me but on the outside of the main chassis tub and most of the other main they have a dappled textured finish which is quite strange? But for some reason I kinda like it and it gives the car a nice satin sheen where the surface of these parts is visible :)

The mechanics of the car itself are very rudimentary, to start with you have the low and narrow chassis tub, this has a longitudinal box down the middle where the battery sits that has a flap underneath for access, at the front of the tub there is a red moulding that fits over the top that has the front suspension mounts coming off it diagonally either side, the lower wish bones are fitted via screws and captive pillow balls to holes on the underside of the front chassis, the lower suspension arms work through a swing axle fashion and between the end of this and the top of the front shock mounts are the upright and spring assemblies but more on those later, the steering is the usual servo mounted on posts with a saver fitted off which the tie rods run through holes in the chassis sides and attach to the steering uprights, further back in the chassis tub is the speed controller, a crude rotary job with a PCB plate on which the contact rotor travels, spring loaded contacts keep in touch with the contact surface and the resistors are soldered onto small legs on either side, down the side of the battery box go the Receiver and speedo servo mounted into the small recesses by good old servo tape.

The rear of the chassis tub has a small collection of slotted screw mountings into which the gearbox slots, the gearbox is two moulded half’s that also incorporate the diagonal rear suspension mounts same as on the front, inside the housing is a butch looking diff that’s supplied by a simple double gear train of un-bushed gears driven at the opposite end by the mid-ish mounted motor, the rear suspension is much the same as the front without the steering capability, the body mounts are fitted on the rear suspension supports and off the switch mount towards the front of the chassis, finally we move onto the body, it’s a rather crude yet sleek-ish looking number with thin slit like windows in the cockpit, the rear wing is actually directly built into the overall design, but as the front section of the chassis also forms the start of the body, the lexan potion starts quarter of the way back from the front, the rest of the body is deep skirted to virtually obscure all of the chassis tub yet has some quite cumbersome angles and strange bumps on the side pods along side the cockpit, there is no visible front bumper to this kit and the wheels are very simple thin spoked white plastic units of the normal T.A.G design.

So what have I missed? Ohh yes that odd looking suspension system ;) well that’s where this car is unique to all other RC buggies that have gone or since, for it has a suspension design that is common place on real cars of this world, in fact it’s seems inconceivable to me that no-one else has ever thought of using this system on an RC car before, given that probably about 85-90% of all new road cars sold in this world have this distinctive suspension design, it has a name you know? And that name is the Mac Phearson Strut suspension system :) what it does is utilise a single arm at the bottom and the solid fixed mount at the top, in-between the Shock and upright are merged into one unit that’s slightly angled to take into account the geometry needed to make it system work, it really simplicity itself, although the set up on the Navajo really is a crude and simplistic as they could make it, the uprights are ball jointed at the bottom, then the angled seat for the shock is moulded onto, there is a simple long damper rod that passes through a hole in the top of the upper shock mounts that screws into the top part of the upright, the spring then just takes up the space in-between.

It’s difficult to picture from my description so I’ve included a box pic below that shows the layout in more detail, at first glance it looks much like the front suspension on a Hornet, Grasshopper or Striker, but there is a subtle difference as the upright is directly angled to the upper mount so it runs straight and true throughout its travel, and boy has this thing got travel, the quoted ground clearance on the box is 40mm that quite considerable when compared to modern Tamiya Touring car based chassis models, but there it is, this cars one point of interest, it’s claim to fame and the main reason why I bought it cos I loves a weird and interesting design in a car :) so when will I build it, probably not for some time, I’ve got no less that 5 MIB kits this month so it will have to join the queue, even so I’ve got two more used built one coming I can mess with so no real point in building this one just yet, I can bide my time, and no new radio for this one either? Cos it’s just not worth it.

UPDATE: I've since sold both of my other T.A.G Navajo's, I've added pictures of them here so that you can see them, I sold the unpainted body off one of the cars to my good friend and US TC member Wickedvette (Dave Cantrell) the other cars I made one good car out of the two and touched up the paintwork on the other body, I used most of the new spares that I had to build this model and the end result was quite good, but I was offered another equally Rare car in a trade and as I had the M.I.B one I let the others go so now all I have is the M.I.B which I have no plans of building any time soon.