terry.sc

The Prostock motors use upright brushes, so any upright brushes will work fine. Brushes come in many different compounds and cuts, mainly for motor tuning amongst racers. High silver content brushes are harder wearing, but they wear out the comm on the armature much faster, and a lot of the more exotic compounds will need replacing after a handful of runs. Just use whatever are classified as 'standard' brushes and you will be fine. I personally almost always prefer Reedy 737 brushes, but they don't come with the eyelets on the end of the tails and have to be soldered to the brush holder. If you need ones with eyelets the Etronix Sport Tuned brushes are a good all rounder.

Cutting foam tyre is common practice, usually for on road though so you cut both the sides and the tread. There are dedicated tyre truers designed for the purpose, like these. To do it yourself you can do it with a power drill or a pillar drill and some 80 grit sandpaper. Firstly stick the sandpaper onto a flat board 2-3 inches wide by 6 inches long either with glue or double sided tape. Find a bolt with the same diameter as the hole through the wheel, you need to be able to put the wheel on the bolt and tighten it up with a nut so it is held centrally. You then put the bolt into the drills chuck and clamp the drill down to a solid surface so it can't move, but with the wheel clear of the surface. Now turn the drill on at a slow speed to make sure it isn't wobbling, adjust wheel if necessary. If it's all spinning fine, increase the speed and push the sandpapered board against the side of the wheel that's turning away from you, so you have to pull the board to stop it flying away. This will take off all the high spots and give a good finish the side of the tyre. It will also leave a pile of tyre dust and quite often a lot of smoke so do it somewhere that doesn't mind getting dirty. It's one of those things that are a lot easier to show someone than explain it.

You're right, they can't be compared. The Wild One is loved by people who run them, the Avante was thrown in a corner if anyone had tried racing one. The Avante attained it's cult status because it was expensive and overcomplicated, so unattainable by most. The Wild One is more scale and a good basher with a couple of tweaks, something that can't be said for the Avante. Coming from a racing background, I would still prefer a Wild One over an Avante any day. And the Avante has no TRF history at all either. If you are referring to the false praise TamiyaUSA put on their website, can I refer you to my correction here.

Strangely enough you will see hundreds of 300 plus chassis on r/c tracks every week, it's still cheaper than most high end touring cars and 4wd buggies.

If it is a nicad they can be discharged down to zero, in fact in the old days we used to short them out with a resistor when we stored them to keep them dead flat, but also to prevent cell reversal which kills the cells. To be safe discharge nicads no lower than 0.5v per cell or 3.6v a pack. Nimh cells should only be discharged down to 0.9v per cell, or 5.4v a pack, any lower and there is a chance that the cells won't accept a charge again. Ideally you also want to discharge them at at least 10 amps, discharging at 1 amp is useful to finish off a flat battery though. If you discharge a fully charged pack at 1 amp after a few times it 'learns' to discharge at that rate, so when you put it in the car it will only discharge slowly so only use it on packs that have already been run down in the car. Of course as the cells are never discharged down to zero volts they are never fully flattened, so when charging them you will never get a reading that gives the absolute total capacity of the cells.

You could also add it the other TV/Movie threads http://www.tamiyaclub.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=42538 http://www.tamiyaclub.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=9543 http://www.tamiyaclub.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=5481

Not surprisingly it's one of Yokomos Esprit range of motors. They were a machine wound motor available in a range of winds, Yokomo made them late 80s to early 90s. The removable endbell means we know it isn't a 27 turn stock, as for what wind it is you will have to take it apart and see what's printed on the armature as it could be anything down to a 12 turn, but with the Torque name it's likely to be a high turn like 19-23 turns.

No, totally irrelevant to r/c cars. The only place any sort of metering is used is amongst the speed record cars, and that's only so they have some idea of top speed when practising so they just use a gps. The Eagle Tree data logger has been around for years, but really no one in racing uses them. As he used to import them to the UK years ago sosidge should know how useful they are more than anyone.Aircraft run with a constant load on the motor from the drag on the prop, car motors have a heavy load when accelerating from standstill, then a much smaller load (can be down as low as 10%) when running at speed, and no load at all when slowing for a corner. There's a world of difference between running on a track and the motor in a plane. Using a watt meter in a race car won't give you any useful information, for example a very high peak current might happen once or twice in a 5 minute race while on another track you could have a lower peak current but occurring more often, which has a better chance of overheating the motor. You also have to factor in that race spec car ESCs have fully programmable throttle profiles, so you can tune the power sent to the motor at high frequencies, so the reading your watt meter gives you can bear no relation to what the ESC is actually pumping out to the motor. The only way a watt meter can give any useful information to a car racer is to enable you to download the full real time information to a computer so you can see what it's doing, and quite frankly it has been shown with the Eagle Tree system that it's a lot of work for something that's not really relevant. It's the same thing with ESCs. Aircraft ESCs are rated by current drawn, car ESCs are rated by motor wind as there isn't a constant power delivery to the motor. Car ESCs used to be rated by current draw, but some high performance ESCs could handle an instantaneous current of over 1500amps and 400amps constant, yet were still damaged due to back EMF problems when braking and voltage spikes from the high speed switching. Kind of hard to explain to an aircraft flyer that a 400A rated ESC is overloaded by a 50A rated motor. We don't check for imbalance, we just use decent balance chargers and we don't use no name soft pack lipos in cars. In fact if you are ever planning on racing you will find there's strict lists of which packs have been tested by the BRCA to ensure they are safe for racing and only those on the list are allowed to be used. The only monitoring equipment you will find in any car racers pit is a temperature monitor to see how hot the motor has got at the end of a race, to see whether you can go faster by gearing up. In the old days when nimhs had a smaller capacity, any serious racer had a discharger specifically to see how much capacity was left in the cells again to see if you can gear up for more speed and last the race without dumping. No car racer is going to be too concerned by keeping within safety parameters, when they know increasing motor timing, motor timing boost, throttle profile or gear ratio will give them more speed with a small risk of damaging anything.

To create a round hole in a mould it is easier to drill a hole in both sides and insert a pin that is fastened in one side and goes into a hole in the other side to give a clean edge. To remove the hole just cut the pin down and insert something into the hole in the other side. Looking at the Scorcher body the outer surfaces have been cleaned up to remove any marks, while the inside surface has just had shorter pins fitted as it isn't necessary to spend time and money cleaning up the small recesses.

It doesn't matter what do you with it, the electronics inside are designed to output 3.5A and that's it, and the reason for the 3500mah limit is because there's a timer in the circuit that cuts off if it is still charging after an hour. The charger has no idea what capacity battery is connected, it just stops charging when the voltage peaks when it is fully charged. You can charge higher capacity batteries by restarting the charger when it stops, although the current limit and inefficiencies in the charging process means it will take at least two hours to charge a 5000mah pack.

I guess you've not looked inside a Monster/Blitzer Beetle or 2009 Scorcher body then, both have had the previous version body mount holes filled in and can be clearly seen inside the body. It's why the 2009 Scorcher uses the Monster/Blitzer body rather than Tamiya changing the arches as very few people care about the difference. For a short run item like the Scorcher there's no reason for them to make a whole new body mould except to appease a small handful of pedants. As for the Bruiser, the new Hilux body is the old Mountaineer mould that has been modified, with the Mountaineer body being the bruiser front half with modified Bruiser rear half. Tamiya did a short production run of Mountaineer bodies from the moulds before modifying it that were available at the 2007 Tamiya Summer Fair. The Hilux kit even includes stickers designed to cover the holes used to screw the sliders onto the bottom of the doors on the Mountaineer/Bruiser, and the rear half still has the recess in the bed for the body clips on the Bruiser and Mountaineer. Not surprisingly I would expect a Mountaineer rerelease before a Bruiser one, and to be honest most of the market will have bought one of the three high lifts already. Although you can never say it will never happen.

The bumper is from the early days of r/c, so you were expected to work out how to fit it yourself. Bolting the lower fitting to the gearbox is it, and the top fitting depended on which cage or roll bar, and which shock setup you had on your SRB. The standard SRB shock/cage mounts usually weren't there on racing SRBs.

Pictures are in Rads showroom http://www.tamiyaclub.com/showroom_model.a...940&id=1892

Not bad for no name cells. In theory the capacity listed on the cell should be a minimum capacity when new. Over time the capacity will reduce as the cells age as the chemicals inside are cycled. At the other end of the scale I run GP 3700 cells and when new they were tested and gave almost 4500mah capacity - the number on the label should be the minimum capacity. The performance also matches decent race spec lipo packs as well. The reason is that they are Race Prep worlds spec cells, the cream of the crop with a list price of £75 a pack. The matchers bought thousands of cells and hand picked the best ones for the decent race packs, mid range cells going into high quality basher packs and the lower spec ones going into cheap packs. There is a noticeable performance difference between cheap cells and the big name brands.

If you are using the second bearings you can hold the bearing in place by slipping a length of aluminium or brass tube over the axle, cutting it to fit between the bearing and UJ. The second bearings only work if the rear axles line up with the swing arm pivots, and that you get the UJ in the exact right place as well. The second bearing doesn't even support the axle either, the axle is held up by the outer bearing and the UJ. To check if everything lines up put the UJ on the gearbox output , then push the axle through the two bearings in the swing arm. If everything is perfect the axle should slide straight into the UJ. Most of the time, especially on cars that have been run, the axle won't line up with the UJ at all. Of course if you do manage to get it right the first time you catch the rear wheel on something it will bend the swing arm which will put a lot of side load on the bearings and axle, using the single bearings if you hit something the bearing just moves slightly in the swing arm to compensate. Plenty of reasons a second bearing is a bad idea, and not one good reason to fit them.

PS 54 Cobalt Green, the paint Tamiya brought out for the 30th Anniversary Porsche.

Not surprised your LHS doesn't know what a Sand Scorcher is, it's either a 30 year old car or a fairly new car that's been released by a manufacturer the shop doesn't deal with. Remember vintage r/c is about as small a niche as you can get in the world of r/c cars, do you know (without looking it up!) what a Sand Skipper, a Traxxas Rally or a HPI Mini Trophy is? Considering any successful LHS today will spend most of it's time selling RTR nitros to bashers and then dealing with getting the nitro engines running reliably and repairing broken wishbones I'm not surprised they don't know anything about vintage r/c. Each r/c car shop will have it's own niche in the hobby, I wouldn't expect a shop selling lots of 1/8th rallycross buggies to know anything about Tamiya cars, in the same way I wouldn't expect Time Tunnel Models or Fusion Hobbies to know anything about nitro monster trucks or crawlers. If anyone considers the Scorcher pinion the wrong way round then they haven't seen any modern 2wd race buggy pinion either. If they just deal with basher buggies or touring cars then it will look odd to them though. I have yet to find an independent hobby shop that isn't friendly and will go out of their way to help if you are friendly to them. The difference is I don't see visiting an LHS in the same way I visit a supermarket, I don't just go in and buy a pinion or wishbone or whatever then leave. If they are r/c car specialists then you already have a common subject to talk about, and it's easy to talk r/c cars if you visit at a quiet time. Get to know your LHS and they will help you out, there's one local shop to me that is known for being run by a grumpy shop owner, yet the same owner spent 6 months trying to chase up a special order part which had to come to the UK from the USA. Unless a shop actually sold you your car then never assume that they know everything about your car or your interest. From the shop keepers point of view they get plenty of customers these days who have bought their cars over the internet because they are cheaper than at the LHS, yet they expect the LHS (which has made no money from the deal) to sort out any problems with the car, then the customer gets bored with r/c and he never visits the shop again. Strangely enough if you've bought your car and radio gear from your LHS and buy stuff regularly from them they usually tend to be more interested in keeping you running, knowing that you will come back for spares and more equipment when you upgrade. If you don't go regularly for all those bits and pieces you need then you are just one more of the passing customers that he might never see again, so there's no reason for him to go out of his way to help. Remember, don't use your LHS and you will end up with none. Manchester, UK where I live has a population of 2.5 million people, yet we have only 3 hobby shops selling r/c cars, with the nearest being a 25 mile round trip for the smallest part. Do you really want the same situation where you have to mail order everything, even if you just want a bearing or tin of paint.

Doesn't make any difference to the performance. wobbling from side to side doesn't change the gear mesh. What's causing it is the use of universals. To reduce the wobble as much as possible you have to make sure the centre of the universal joint is exactly in line with the centres of the swing arm pivots. Even if you have done that the design of UJs means the UJ pivot will still move in and out and still wobble a bit. To remove all the wobble you would need to fit proper CVD joints, and I'm not talking about the r/c car version which is just a rebuildable universal joint but a proper CVD like the Litemodz CVS. The wobble is why the axle is supported by a single bearing, the first axles had two bearings, but running both bearings put a lot of strain on the axles and universals due to the universal design. Not common at all on a well serviced gearbox, though the gearbox isn't the quietest around, not helped by the cast metal case. Number one question, does the gearbox have bearings in there? The kit bronze bushings will wear out, and also wear the axles badly so even fitting ball bearings will still leave lots of play.Tilting the gearbox over will cause the gears and shafts to rock, and change the gear mesh. Only fix is to fit new axles in there. If you want to bulletproof the gearbox and take out some of the play, replace the idler gear with another layshaft gear. As the idler gear is loose on the shaft it can wear and move about, the layshaft gear means the gear is locked onto the shaft. To fit it just trim the layshaft down to the same length as the idler axle and pop it in.

Just go buy it at the trade counter, there's bound to be a branch near you and it's just like buying from Argos. Tried De-Solv-It Graffiti Remover on an old bodyshell, shifted the paint but also the body went cloudy and ruined the body. I have yet to find anything apart from nitro fuel that will remove paint without doing short or long term damage to a lexan body.

So do what every one else does and use the ESC as it is. Cheating by replacing components will make very little difference to performance and will just get you banned if you are found out. If you modified the ESC and won, would you be happy knowing you won by using an unfair advantage? If you are allowed to change the battery connectors changing to Deans or Powerpole connectors will give a greater power increase than changing the FETs, cleaning the grease out of the ballrace bearings an lubricating them with light oil will also improve efficiency. I presume as you have to use a TEU101-BK you are running a 540 or Sport Tuned, running them in properly and lubricating the bushings with a decent bushing oil will again give you more speed than replacing FETs, and none of them will get you banned from racing. After all the tuning, getting plenty of practice and learning to drive to carry as much speed as you can through the corners so you go down the straights as fast as you can will make the biggest difference to your lap times.

No you won't damage the ESC if you connect the wires the wrong way round, all that will happen is the motor runs backwards. If it runs backwards just swap the wires over.

5 pole armature identifies it as an aircraft motor. Usually they rev more but have less torque than car motors and they are designed to run at a steady speed, not stopping and starting. If you are looking at the number of turns as a way of matching it to an ESC, the narrower winding stacks means that the wire is shorter on each pole so it draws more current compared with a 3 pole motor, but the 550 length can again means you can't compare it to a normal size motor either. As aircraft motors are designed to run at a steady speed they are usually rated by current draw or motor size, rather than the actual wind. As for what ESC will work with it, you're just going to have to try it and see what happens.

You could try, and if you are pretty skilled with a soldering iron you might be successful, but for the cost of decent quality fets you can buy alternative ESCs that perform better.

Here we don't have any distinction between types of r/c car, as long as it's radio controlled it doesn't matter what it is. There are a few fans of the Quick drives here http://www.tamiyaclub.com/sig_member.asp?id=50 and I even have one myself Tamiya did sell parts for the Quick Drives, but finding them today is very difficult. The QD Clod came out ion the early 90s so you have to be lucky to find anyone who still has spares for it. A full parts list for the QD Clodbuster is on TamiyaUSAs website here and lists the body parts with numbers: Body 7800635 body sticker 7800587 roll bar 7800636 windows 7800634 Parts are hard to find, I would suggest contacting TC member Victor101car as he used to list a lot of QD spares and he now sells plenty of QD spares on ebay. As an alternative body you could have a look at the ministock bodies for Mardaves made by Kamtec, they have a 178mm wheelbase and are 170mm wide.

Most wheels are designed to fit on touring cars which the chassis are at full width so the face of the wheel is flat to keep within the 190mm width. With the TA02 being pretty old the chassis is only 185mm wide. To widen the rear you have two options, one is fit Tamiyas TG10 50808 axles and thicker hex drives from the 53345 TL01 toe in rear upright sprue to widen the axles. You then use normal touring car wheels. The other way is to look at drift wheels, available from HPI Racing and many Japanese companies available through Genki Dori Look at the amount of offset in each wheels description, standard touring car wheels have zero offset, 3mm offset will make the car 6mm wider, 5mm offset will make the car 10mm wider, etc. so you can choose wheels to go as wide as you want. As the wheels are sold in pairs you can choose different offsets for the front and rear.