The Worlds most ugly Monster Truck - Aristocraft Hitec Wildebeest

I think I am addicted to these cheap korean cars. I search ebay for Tamiya and Kyosho and end up with this. But it was cheap, so cheap I could not refuse. The car came complete but electronics. So it was a perfect starting point for a restauration project.

This truck has chain driven 4WD with two bevel gear diffs. It has big monster wheels with Tamiya compatible wheel adapters (5 hole type, Monster Beetle and others), Monster Beetle wheels fit perfect.

The car was stripped, cleaned and rebuilt afterwards. Ball bearings and electronics were added and off it went, first very slow, because I forgot to mount a very important part, the reduction gear. I did not mount it at first, because there was no bushing on the motor side, so the gear would pop off under load. But after the first test drive I realized that I would need the reduction gear, so I build a replacement for the missing bushing, which works fine now.

The truck is fitted with a Sagami GZ-1200 Motor sold by Conrad Electronics (a piece of rc-history, maybe), and it goes quite well now that the reduction gear is working. It can do wheelies, if you wish, but I want to use this car for offroad driving, so this is not important for me.

Update: So I came round to driving this Monster. And I was surprised, because it just handles different then you would expect from such a big truck. It handles more like a small, lightweight buggy, but in fact it is a lightweight buggy with a big ugly truck body.

While driving I recognized a grinding sound coming from the gearbox and so I disassembled the gearbox to find a broken plastic bushing inside it. And I did find something else, steel bevel gears inside of the differential, whereas the Aristocraft buggies have plastic bevel gears. So this truck was built to last? Or is this just because of the bigger tires needing more torque? We will see about that.