casethejoint

>>I'm curious about ultra-sonic cleaners. Do those things work?<< Yes. >>Should we all have one?<< If you do a lot of restos, probably. You can use all the chemicals you normally would (degreaser, deruster etc) in it, as well as water and a tiny drop of washing up liquid if it's just grungy crud. They're brilliant - couldn't do a resto without one now. You can clean just as well by hand but it's horrible and takes ages. Most things come out of my ultrasonic cleaner absolutely spotless within 3-4 minutes. The way they work is the ultrasonic vibrations form tiny air bubbles in between your item and the crud on it, and basically lifts it off. Very very gentle but brutally effective. The other thing I highly recommend is a barrel polisher (some call them "lapidary polisher") with the green cone media (walnut shells for polishing). This gets you pretty close to bead blasting in terms of metal cleaning but without having to have a high CFM compressor. I leave pot-metal type parts (SRBs etc) in these for up to 2 days in green media for a "fresh out of the blister" look and then 1 day in walnut media if I need it shiny. They normally come in three sizes measured in pounds (weight). A 3lb one will take an SRB gear case. The ultrasonic cleaner and barrel polisher are probably my 2 most used (and appreciated) tools when restoring old buggies and cars.

We're not worthy. This is genius.

Excellent - thank you both, knew they must be out there somewhere

There always used to be a few on eBay, but searching (UK) showing nothing. Anyone know if any other online stores still sell these ?

Welcome to the nut house! Great collection of bits. How long until you retire? I'm sure we'd all like to see what you come up with

Absolutely stunning!

Dogbone time.... And then some uprights. Sort of ends up looking a bit like: Then it all drops in with a pin and couple of screws. Nice and easy. Starting to look like a roller.... Front next, pretty much the same thing. The mounts are just sitting in place - makes it a little tricky to get it all together without it falling apart. The manual says to great the inserts on the ends of this pin, but I chose instead to grease the female side as it was a little easier and less messy. Then they drop into place and this blue alloy stay is screwed into the chassis to hold it all together. I love simple design like this. Front uprights. Different colour dogbones, not sure why (different metal?). Again pretty straightforward. Then they drop into the place the same as the rear - couple of pins and stays. "Bit too much blue alloy and carbon on that Tamiya", said no-one. Ever.

Took a break from that to tackle the bit I really don't like, which is cutting out polycarb. Edged all the edges in rough with a Sharpie as a guide. ... and took my time with the cutting. No mistakes, thankfully. I've cleaned the edges with 600 grit silicone paper.

Will be box art. I don't usually (or at least not without a twist) but it seems appropriate here. I have some PS54 and also some TS Cobalt Green for the hard plastic fin and other bits. I did take a look at the stickers earlier, and sh*t myself :). There's a lot of stickers. And I mean... a lot. Scary. I might opt for painting the black rubber parts instead. Anyway we're not there yet, so fresh underpants at the ready we can start on that steering rack. I don't like making tie rods/turn buckles. But this tool does at least make it a tiny bit easier. A couple of screws and the steering rack is pretty much there. It's all double-ballraced and feels very smooth indeed. Best steering rig I've seen in a Tamiya. Couple of bolts and it's on the chassis. It really is smooth, and there is zero slop which is something I've never had in any RC car. Am very impressed.

You're absolutely right Graeme - I typed "injection" without even thinking about it. I'm sure they're vac moulded. Even so, someone had to make a former just for this kit. And yes they use them in biscuits but probably for sale in the millions. I still think it's representative of Tamiya putting quite a bit of effort into this packaging. I love it Time to finish off the bulkheads. Almost all blue, simple construction. Won't bore you with the detail, suffice to say it all goes together easily. Next up, steering rack....

Not much to say here other than easy to build and actually nice and smooth. Again if you were racing, you'd probably do some polishing and use a higher end ball and grease. But not for me, it would break my heart to have a high speed crash in this one, so keeping it all stock.

Hi all. It's been a while since I've been able to find time to do anything Tamiya related (18 months or so I guess ). Anyway, I've had a bit of time lately and fancied getting my Tamiya wrench dirty. I have a part finished Funco SRB conversion on the bench (which I will get back to) but that requires some engineering effort/hard work and I fancied something a little more "ready to build". So I've had this baby on the shelf for a while now. I bought it about 5 odd years ago on eBay for £375 (I think), which was a bit of a steal then and looking at recent prices it was a great buy. I always intended to build it, I'm not one for NIBs staying that way forever. Everything gets built eventually :). That said, this is one of the few examples where I completely understand people leaving them NIB. For those that don't know much about this kit it was released in 2006 as a commemorative model to celebrate the original 934 from 1976. It's a lovely model and it's worth taking a good look at the packaging, as it's without any doubt for me the nicest that Tamiya has ever produced. This is high end blister packaging :). It's actually two part, and the outer skin lifts off to reveal the parts in the inner skin. Lots of blue in here. And lots of carbon. And lots of that reinforced plastic (the dark grey stuff). The kit itself feels very TRF, just in display packaging. TRF dampers I think, too. It comes with this nice fold out which explains about the model release. You can see Tamiya went to a lot of care and attention here. Great details. Someone loved designing and making this kit and really thought about the experience of the person owning and opening it up. Lovely job Tamiya. I'll try and do my bit by putting lots of care and attention into the build. The carbon is marked up "30th Anniversary". Again feels very TRF to me, nothing cheap about this kit (well, maybe a couple of small things - more on that later). Note the German flag colours here (from memory they did the same on the Black Porsche special edition?). Outer skin off one of the blister type packs. Again, the care and attention to detail here is great. If you think about it, someone had to make a pair of injection mould formers just to make these blister packs (inner and outer skin). Only usable on this (limited run) kit. Reminiscent of the 70's/80's kits like the SRB that were vac-formed on cardboard, but upscaled. Did I mention lots of blue here? OK, on with the build! So first step is to CA the carbon. And I skipped that. Two reasons - first, whenever I've tried to do it I've made a mess, and mine always look sloppy and I don't like that look. Secondly, I'm only ever going to run this lightly and carefully, for obvious reasons. So I'm not really interested in the re-enforcement, which I'm also a little dubious about as I've read mixed opinions on it here. So I went to what is technically step #2 which is middle section motor mount and spur arrangement. The manual does actually mention that threadlock isn't required. I'm not sure why - due to all the alloy, there's lots of metal on metal and I've never had an issue with using threadlock, so I used it anyway, on all screws going into alloy. Next up we'll attach that to the chassis and put together the main bulkhead supports. Black and blue Going to be a pretty chassis this one I think. It's based on the TA05MS, but slightly shorter to take the Porsche body. Diffs are up next. Pretty standard affairs, not quite TRF quality and here's where you start to notice a few things you'd probably change if you were racing this thing. Like the bearings, which are absolutely fine, just the typical packed with grease variety and probably good for long life but not speed. Again, speed isn't what this is about for me so I'm not upgrading them. Will be building the whole kit stock as intended.

EPIC.

I always liked the "wolf in sheeps clothing" idea and having already put some LIPO 7.4 2S cells into a vintage SRB style Tamiya case, I thought I'd try the same with a receiver. So here we have a FrSky (great value for money FASST compatible 2.4ghz Rx) going into an old Acoms MKII receiver: It's held down with some servo tape. Ever-so-slightly reconstructed the servo plug holes so that I could just pass everything through: ... and hey presto, one period looking SRB that's actually 7.4v LIPO with 2.4ghz FASST radio Oh, PS - yes the ESC is the original period Acoms. I don't have an old broken one otherwise I'd probably try putting a modern ESC inside the case

Sorry, I probably just should have left it. It was about Fibre-Lyte and how their service works. But I found their website and info. Great to know, certainly a bunch of stuff I now can get made