Mad Ax
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Posts posted by Mad Ax
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Most favourite has varied over the years, depending on what I've had available. The King Blackfoot is a good contender, although it has its flaws. I loved racing it around my garden, although it hasn't had an outing for a while - the big set of custom upgrades I gave it a couple of years ago have made it more stable but have not necessarily made me want to drive it more.
The Blitzer Beetle would also be another strong option, although it got usurped by the G6-01. With a brushless system, this truck is just awesome. Yes, it will roll over a lot if provoked, but it's all about how you drive it. I love the robustness of the handling, there's a reassuring solidity to it and it looks great with the 1:10 scale pickup shell that I modified for it.
The XV-01T Asterion also really surprised me by how much fun it was in stock trim, with a mild brushless system and hard Tamiya tyres. Enough ground clearance to bounce over the grass without getting bogged down, plenty of grip on the grass but nice and loose on the patio slabs so I can powerslide it instead of rolling it.
I need to keep the lawn short this year so I can do more home running.
As for least favourite - it's hard to say, all Tamiyas have their flaws and there's been times when I've consigned all of them to the shelf, promising never to run them ever again.
For racing, it would be the TT01E trucks. I joined a local series because it seemed like an easy way to bypass the cost and hassle of touring car racing, and do something that looked scale. Club rules allowed oil shocks, bearings and propshaft, but everything else had to be stock, including tyres. The main problem for me was that gluing the tyre sidewalls to reduce front grip was banned, meaning every race was a rollfest. Other racers seemed to get the hang of it, but I never did, I like to be able to lean on a car in the bends and know it won't roll over, but I was coming last every week because I couldn't keep mine on its wheels. I eventually gave up. Knowing what I do now, there might be other ways I could tune out the grip - or even drive around it - but the time has passed.
That's not really a flaw with the trucks so much as an issue with the rules and the track surface.
For general bashing - sad to say, it's the Clod Buster. I wanted one for years, and even built a mod clod before I build a standard one. To be fair, the mod clod is a serious pain in the backside too - I don't know that I've ever finished a run without breaking something. My TXT-1 was the same. While the standard Clod is much more robust (I haven't broken anything so far), the steering is just impossible. I have a high-torque servo and the cranks screws are turned right in, the front is adjusted for maximum throw and the rear for minimum, but even then, the front barely does anything and the rear steers constantly even when I don't want it to. How people managed in the early days, I have no idea. It looks great, but it's just impossible.
I've really got to get around to making some servo-on-axle mounts for it, but otherwise I want to keep it stock, because there is a special charm about it.
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Today is the 1st day of the new Spending Period, so I placed an order for an aluminium motor mount, steel 17 tooth pinion, 1060 ESC and some new bullet connectors for motor and battery. I should have a bit of workshop time on Sunday, so if it all arrives on time, I might get it reassembled and maybe get the new battery tray made and installed. Would be good to get that sump guard on, too.
Then it'll be ready to race!
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Here's the ball diff in the front. Note the cracks in the bulkhead - I hadn't noticed these before I pulled it apart. I've got a new A parts tree on order for a different car, maybe this one will get a new bulkhead.
Gear diff installed.
Ball diff installed.
And all back together, the way Tamiya intended. Well, sort of.
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I managed to clean up the diff casing without too much trouble. I guess it's nylon, which has that sort of self-lubricating property and always feels slightly greasy. The gears were another story. They probably need a long soak in something like IPA. This tub has already got 2 sets of diff gears soaking from previous dismantlements - the IPA has probably long evaporated leaving nothing but a stinky dusty solution, but the magic had been worked already on some of the gears so I was able to clean them up.
Once the gears were mostly clean (this sounds trivial but was about 90 minutes with a small flat-bladed screwdriver and scalpel) I added some grease, sealed up the diff, checked there were no bad tight spots, then and span it with the drill to bed it in.
Then I opened it to see the grease had gone grey. There was still some nastiness on the teeth that came off easier after a run, and it all went back together again.
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I didn't have much time to work on the truck after that, as I was away with work and also racing in the BRCA Sportscar Endurance warm-up round, but I had a little time after work on Friday night. I didn't want to get messy cutting and filing the sump guard, so I decided to look at the diffs.
Here's the truck on the stand. Brief view of the rear body mounts. I'd love to cut out the back of the truck and build a custom cage, but brass will be too heavy and plastic may be too fragile even for gentle silvercan racing.
As I mentioned before, as standard these trucks have a ball diff in the rear and a gear diff up front. However I had swapped them around, torquing up the ball diff in the front for added traction on the trails and locking the rear with epoxy. This is no good for racing, so the diff had to come out.
Evidence of glue leakage visible. It took a lot of effort to crack this open.
Eventually I had to position my pliers thus and hit it wi'ammer
Eew. That hasn't been opened in 18 years. Crystalised epoxy.
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I also decided to start making an aluminium sump guard. The stock bumper doesn't look entirely bad with the standard shock towers, but once you add the Manta Ray towers there's too much gap under the body. I filled a lot of it up with custom arch liners (I need to photograph that) but never got around to making a proper sump guard like the real truck.
I didn't want to add too much weight to the front end, so I went with 1mm sheet. It might not stand up to heavy abuse, but I'll see how it goes.
I had to do a lot of this by eye, and make little trims and adjustments as I went to clear parts of the suspension and chassis.
Very rough cut. The final thing will be a V-shape, not a huge ugly rectangle.
It still needs a brace against the shock tower to secure the upper part and give it some rigidity, but that's sort of how it will work. Cutting it to size now that it's bent will be a challenge, though!
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The following day I had some time to kill, so I decided to start tidying up the truck. The wiring was in an awful state and there was all that horrid vulcanised balloon to get rid of, so I decided to strip the whole thing down and give it a very light clean. I don't want to remove all that vintage patina.
I keep some soapy water in an old window cleaner bottle in the workshop, mostly I use it for damping down the spray bench to prevent dust before painting, but it's handy for all sorts of things, including an impromptu body cleaning.
Why clean it? Well, I didn't really want to clean the body, because I like the dirt, but I decided that, if this was going to be a race truck, it needed a race livery. In fact my project list has a Team Bluegroove body in the future purchases section, so I can give it a more racey paintjob, but it isn't necessary. This isn't supposed to look like a proper big-sponsor race truck, this is supposed to look like something a bunch of paycheque racers cobbled together in their shed with bare minimal sponsorship from wherever they could get it - 10% off the plugs if you put the sticker on your truck, kinda thing.
I wasn't really sure about this when I first did it, but it's grown on me. It's got a certain basic appeal. I half-considered masking off some parts and putting some yellow stripes on, but it works OK without it.
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Yeah. Exactly how it works I couldn't say, but looks like that middle wire is able to return the voltage of any of the cells.
Would be interesting to test the voltage on a 2S version and see if it reads the same as a regular 2S balance wire.
I'm guessing having the balance wire always connected to the ESC means it can safely cut off if one of the cells goes under voltage, and maybe there is some self-balancing going on with that circuit. Who knows?
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7 hours ago, alvinlwh said:
I originally think like you but they have 3-6S with the same setup. Not sure how that works?
Interesting. Unless the middle cable carries serial data and there's a chip in the battery transmitting the voltage for each cell? Part of me wants to open one up to see how it works, but it's why I'm not personally a fan of these innovations - keep it simple and let people buy their own batteries.
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1 hour ago, F-150 said:
the G-2 battery has no separate balance lead ..it's literally one lead, somehow balances through the main connector.
If your battery is the same one in the photo above, the balance lead is the little skinny one between the red and black. On a conventional battery, the skinny black and red wires on the separate balance plug are connected to the same parts of the battery as the main black and yellow power wires. The adapter lead just splits it out into a conventional harness.
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Maybe a daft question, but isn't there an adapter to convert to a regular battery connector for charging / discharging on a regular charger?
Something like this perhaps..? I don't know what your "smart" battery connector looks like. I expect it's not as smart as it claims.
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I'd love to be able to get to this, it would be an epic road trip. There's also a 380 meet on at BMR, so I could get to Junkies in the morning for some bashing and then head down to BMR for some fun racing.
But, alas, I've already got a weekender for the BRCA Sportscar Endurance championship in April, and the following weekend I'm back in Matlock for the Scale Nationals, so it's a bit extravagant to have yet another weekend out.
I will definitely try to get along to more Junkies meets once the crazy season is over.
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In brief - it was great! OK, the grass was just starting to show the first spring growth, and the tyres wanted to come off the rims, and the locked rear diff made it harder to drive, but it's still a good fun backyard basher. Fast enough in the straights, looks very scale in the corners, and no nasty handling traits. I think the taller stand and softer shocks help it lean into the corners, which makes it look more realistic, but lack of pace on long grass and lack of grip on the patio stones meant it didn't want to roll over. I'm sure it will be much more fun once I've trimmed the grass down. I plan to be pretty aggressive with the lawn this year to get some more home running in.
So - a plan has been hatched! I want to get this car back together with the diffs as they should be, tyres glued, modern ESC and modified tub to accept a shorty battery. Plus some more scale updates to the body, along with a race livery.
Then I'm going to demo it as the Club 380 meet and see how well it runs on the grass track, and how it compares to the 380-powered buggies, to see if Club 380 want to open up another class for scale racing trucks.
More pics to follow!
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So, where are we now? Well, the car has had very few photos taken since then, although it has evolved. It got a 2.4GHz receiver, so it lost that daft antenna, it got a different front bumper that came from a different project that I bought, and it got the lugs snipped off the tyres to make them better for crawling. This was totally a thing back in the day, when soft, sticky crawler tyres weren't a thing. This mod gave a little more bite to the tyre.
It also had a locked rear diff. This was a thing for crawling with a TA02T - the standard truck has a ball diff in the rear and a gear diff in the front, but you can tighten up the ball diff and move it up front, then lock the gear diff with epoxy and stick it in the back. This helps traction on the loose stuff a lot, but makes it terrible for spirited driving.
It also got some HPI Vintage wheels, which totally look the part but I suspect these were only added because I stole the stock wheels for something else and it had been sitting around on its belly for a decade. At least this way it could go on display.
Also - and I only found this out yesterday - at some point, it got UJs all round. I don't remember doing this, but it was probably a result of breaking too many dogbones on crawler duty. The locked rear diff is too hard on the stock plastic-ended dogbone, and I remember eating a couple of them back when it was my go-to crawler car.
So - why the new thread? It hasn't had a battery in it for probably a decade. I've had proper crawlers for that long, and never saw it as good track fodder for a bash-worthy truck because the Novak 55 is too slow. The only thing I briefly remember is running it near a local stream during a dog walk, and that would have been at least 7 years ago, probably longer. I only remember it because I broke the motor mount landing from a jump - a common problem with these.
Well, 2 reasons. First, I've been going through a lot of my old stuff recently and looking for Quick Wins that I can get up to spec, or at least, get a project plan listed out, so I've got something to do if I get stalled on another project.
Second, the whole Club 380 thing has got me thinking a lot about the joy of slower cars, and things I can run around my garden without having to feather the throttle. I'm planning on going to a Club 380 meet in May, and I mentioned to the organisers that a 4wd truck class would be great, especially for these trucks and for the sporty CC01 variants like the Pajero Rally and the VW Touareg. 380s may overheat running these heavier 4wd cars, but a stock silvercan should be about right, I think, and the scale look of the cars should make them perfect for the whole realistic racing scene.
There's another little thing here too - staying active during my lunchbreaks, instead of staring at the TV or just working through. These kinds of simple restomod projects are great for getting me on my feet.
So, during a lunchbreak 2 weeks ago, I pulled the old green Ford out of storage and dusted it off.
Here's how it looked. It probably still had the same dirt on from the photoshoot in 2008, above.
The shell has survived remarkably well - a little flaky paint between cab and bed, but no major splits or cracks anywhere.
The paint is starting to come off these old BFGs but that just makes it look more authentic. I'm pretty sure you can't get these any more, and the decals look awful and don't stay stuck, so I want to keep these as my runner tyres. I love the aggressive look of the cut lugs
Under the body, it was a mess. The Novak FiftyFive looks to have been wired up with cheap automotive wire and even cheaper crimp connectors (gold plated motor plugs were a thing of my dreams in 2008) and the ubiquitous TEU-101BK ESC was been wired up to a LiPo cutoff system. Wired being the operative word, since there are literally wires everywhere - it's a total mess.
Also the balloons over the ESC and (long-removed) Rx have degraded and turned into acrylic paint. But, to my surprise, it's complete - apart from a missing battery clip (my LiPos are too big for it anyway) there's nothing wrong with the truck - throw in battery and receiver and it will run! Even the motor mount was fine, so I guess I must have replaced it at some point. I thought it had a broken dogbone too, but that's probably just an automatic memory, since it pretty much always had a broken dogbone.
I wanted to know how well it would go with a silvercan, so I found an unused one, stuck in a receiver, and went for a test drive in the garden.
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These action photos were taken almost exactly 1 year after the initial photoshoot, in the same location - just 3 days separated them from being exactly a year apart. I took 159 photos, all of which are in the album linked above, if you want to go look at dozens of out-of-focus action shots. These are some of my faves.
Pic dump warning.
At some point in the car's history it got a Novak FiftyFive crawler motor and party balloons over all the electrics, as I often drove it submerged, although I have no photographic evidence of when this occurred.
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These photos were taken back in November 2007, and show the details of how I made the body posts fit with the Manta Ray shock towers. I think I used 2-part epoxy to glue the posts on. I didn't think it would work but actually it lasted a very long time.
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It's Friday again, peeps! What are we all up to?
It's a reasonably quiet one for me, which is as well as things are going to get crazy over the next few months.
Friday - work from home until around 4:30. Late finish this week as I had to take my daughter to the dentist on Monday, which ate into my extra hours.
Probably chill out in the workshop ticking off some little items, cook a pizza and maybe think about relaxing in the studio for the end of the night. Failing that, finish watching the film that I fell asleep in front of last weekend.
Saturday - spend the day with my daughter. She asked if we could go for a walk in the woods, but she might have changed her mind already.
Go into town to buy a Mother's Day present after lunch, then meeting my wife in a café to have a nearly Mother's Day hot chocolate and slice of cake.
Cook a Bolognese in the evening and probably stream a film.
Sunday - up earlier than early due to the clock change, drive an hour into the countryside for the Southern Scale Trail Pay & Play Day. This is an open scale event in a disused quarry. I don't think there are any official trails to follow, but there's loads of terrain to have fun in (the official Southern Scale Trail event runs here with multiple trails in September every year). My local crawling buddy is busy, but I'm sure I'll make some trail buddies while I'm out in the woods.
I'll probably stop for a long walk somewhere on the way back, although if I'm going somewhere new I probably won't take the hillwalking truck. That's a shame, as it could do with a long run after the recent round of updates before it gets torn down for paint.
Chill out in the evening and upload my day's photos.
Have a great weekend, everyone
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10 hours ago, ThunderDragonCy said:
I remember seeing these photos before. Love the look and stance of this truck
Some of them are posted in the showroom entry, but I decided to start a build thread for a more in-depth showcase of the modifications and usage.
More to follow later
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A few months later, the truck got some mods. Manta ray shock towers and cheap 100mm with soft springs gave it more suspension travel and a taller stance. In October of 2007 I took it to Ham Hill - I can't remember if this was one of our Tamiyaclub meets or if this was a solo visit - back then I had the freedom to drive an hour or more to Ham Hill whenever I wanted. This was a Sunday afternoon, so it could have been a solo or a planned meet.
The Manta Ray shock tower mod is a genuinely good one for this truck - the tuck on the rear end it just about perfect, the tyre just about clears the body.
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In this photo you can see water on the screen, so this must have been after its first soaking.
A little dirt makes it so much more scale.
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Here's a blast from the past. An F150 that I built way back in 2007, when I was still fairly new to the Tamiya scene and these were still available NIB for a pretty low price. Back then the scale crawler scene was only just about to get going, so I had the slightly sideways idea of building this as a scale truck instead of the race truck that it's supposed to be. It's stayed with me for all these years, and now I have a reason to dust it off and give it a refresh, so for the first time ever it will get its own thread, detailing its history and setting out its plans for the future. Well, I hope I haven't done a build thread on this one before, anyway - it's been around for so long that maybe I have..?
Now bear with me here because there's a lot of history to get through, a lot of photos and not a lot of time, so it could take me a while to upload all of this. This could be a slow-burn thread to read over the next few weeks, maybe.
Let's start with a photo. Since I wanted this to be a trail truck, I painted it a flat, single colour. I was very nervous about painting back then so I didn't do anything fancy with the caged rear end - I just painted it black.
These photos were taken at a place called Stockhill, which was about a 40 minute drive from where I used to live. It's got some great terrain and was a popular proving ground for my early Tamiya builds, back when I was single with no responsibilities and I could just get up and go out at 8pm on a July school night and not come home until long after sunset. Back then I was also enjoying a little bit of photography, so I took dozens of photos of this truck to try to make it look scale. There's over 200 images in this album if you want to go check it out, I'll only show the important ones on this thread:
https://tcphotos.net/album/ePel
This was definitely a Golden Hour photoshoot, I couldn't have hoped for better weather to show off the truck's body before it got all scratched up on the trails.
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2 hours ago, ThunderDragonCy said:
This looks so fun. Thanks for the write up.
More to come in 3 weeks time. It's just over 2 weeks until the first official round, which was announced today as a 4 hour race at Stafford. They're also opening the track for practice on Saturday. I don't have the budget for a hotel at this short notice so I'll probably spend the night in the van. 4 hours racing plus quali plus 90 minute morning practice off the back of a whole day of practice plus a night in the van suddenly doesn't sound so appealing
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After over 2 hours of constant running, the car completed 282 laps and came in 4th overall, missing out on 3rd by just 4 laps and 2nd by 7. 1st were a long way out on 295, and their best lap was over a second faster than ours, but otherwise our laptimes were very competitive, and with a few less pitstops we could have challenged for a podium. It's a learning experience, and this round is non-championship, so it doesn't matter - we'll be at Stafford in April, taking everything we've learned onto the track to try to climb the ladder. Our battery issues give us huge scope for improvement.
In total, including practice, quali and the race, our car covered 137km and the total distance covered by all cars was 781km. That's a huge distance for tiny little bits of carbon fibre and aluminium.
Here's a video that one of the organisers put together showcasing some highlights of the day.
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I had misunderstood the rules, and was waiting at the bottom of the stairs when Jon came down. I didn't realise until Alistair came to relieve me later than I could have waited at the top of the stairs, but it didn't matter - it takes longer to change a battery than to climb some stairs. I got myself settled and ready, and then the car was on track, and I was pulling the throttle, and I was racing.
At the end of the pit straight is a tight right-hand hairpin, then a left kink which you have to be properly lined up for, otherwise the camber takes you into a nasty concrete barrier. Coming out of the hairpin the car pulled sharply to the right and scuffed over the grass, although thankfully missed the concrete barrier. A few laps later I had another big one, flipping the car over on the straight, but no damage was done besides 8 lost seconds, and otherwise my times were consistent. I was out at the same time as some slower drivers, and was able to get me elbows out on track and put in some passes, and hold off some other cars for long enough that they slid off track.
I ran for almost 15 minutes - long enough for my eyes to tear up and my feet to ache and my fingers to go numb - and before I was ready for it I was being called in for a driver change.
After that I was out on marshalling duties for 15 minutes, which mostly involved a relaxing rest on a camping chair. Our corner had a lot of minor slides off the track, but with only 6 cars and a 23.5T limit, I didn't have to work too hard. It was nice to rest my legs and back and do some stretches while I waited for my turn at pitting.
As the 1st hour turned into the 2nd, the rain started to fall harder. We'd had a good 40 minutes of dry running, and Jon reported that the front tyres were almost slicks. That would have been fine if it stayed dry, but with the weather getting wetter, we didn't weren't sure if we should suffer the time lost changing tyres or risk having a car that was hard to drive in the wet. We deliberated for a while as it got steadily worse, and then Jon had to go take the driving position, leaving me to make the snap decision to change tyres.
Changing tyres isn't easy under duress, as well as changing the battery and remembering not to reverse-polarity the ESC and fold up the front corner of the body that had been scraping on the ground since lap 10. I got it done, grabbed the car and threw it on the pit lane. The wheels span, but it didn't go anywhere. Something felt amiss. It wasn't on the ground.
The stubby aluminium pit stand had got damp in the rain, and had suction-fitted itself to the underside of the car, so when I put it on the track the wheels were in the air
A quick knock and it was running, the stand was recovered and I could breathe a sigh of relief, or actually a wince of pain, because I'd caught my knee on the wooden barrier that separates the pit lane from where the crew stand.
But never mind the pain - there'll be time to hurt later. I was off for a quick freshen up before my final stint.
When it came, it was over in the blink of an eye. I think I was out for a little over 10 minutes, putting in some steady times, although not spectacularly fast despite the fresher tyres, and before I was even in to my stride I was down again for a final marshalling stint while Alistair did battle with the lead cars to take us to the end of the race.
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F150 Baja Trail / Race Truck
in Monster Trucks, 4x4, Wheelie Rigs and Crawlers
Posted
I see what you're saying, and I think you're right. After all, it technically isn't a tailgate, it's a roll cage with something under it, so it wouldn't have those kinds of decals on.
I might re-think the back end.
Some parts arrived today, I was waiting for Workshop Sunday to get them fitted but managed to get a good run at it on my lunchbreak. The other options were hanging out the washing or cleaning the kitchen. That's all well and good but this truck's gotta be ready by the last week in May, dangit! I have no time for chores!!
Photos probably tomorrow.