casethejoint

I have been inspired recently by the awesome Funco Rough Rider based buggies by @ScaleXtreme :- ... and @TamTom and others here, and I've always fancied building one. So I have decided this is to be my next project My issue with all those that I've seen so far is the rear track width. The original SRB is not very scale in this respect - it's far too wide. Makes for better handling of course, but to me it's never looked quite right. So I decided to start with this problem to see if I could solve it. What I noticed is that there's a spacing bit of metal in the rear swing arms, that's about 10mm, and I think could be removed with a little black magic. So this is where I started, bye bye little 10mm piece of pot metal:- ... and mated back up again, looking something like this:- Now, I know what you're thinking : "But Dean, the shocks won't clear the rear wheels!". I know, I had the same thought. But in the spirit of making it up as I go along I thought I'd proceed and see where I got to. So I cleaned up the cuts with little filing to get a good face edge:- I need to get some bulk and strength back into this piece, so I fabricated a collar from some alloy tubing:- This fits like this:- ... and made a jig for myself with a vice and a piece of 6mm dowel to keep the hole clear and enable me to put it all together:- Glue of choice for this type of thing for me is J B Weld, so I mixed some of that up, filled it into my fabricated collar and clamped it all together (the collar is a tight fit). And it came out like this:- Which will take about 10mm off each side of the track width. Happy with that, so I proceed to put together a gearcase from some spares that I had (won't show you pics of that, you all know what an SRB gearcase looks like - nothing special here, no diff or anything, but I did ballrace it of course and also used some stainless screws). I then built up the one shortened side that I'd built to see how it all hangs together:- Looks pretty good. Made some shortened drive shafts:- ... and popped a wheel on to check out how bad the shock problem is. Now it gets interesting. Believe it or not, if I can mount it like this:- ... it just clears So I think this is going to work! I have already planned to make some slightly narrower tires by cutting out a ring of tread and re-gluing (waiting for my flexible CA to be delivered) to get some scale looking tires. For that I'll have to shave off a couple of mm from the wheels and I think that will ultimately give me the track width that I'm after for this build. So I finished off the other side and here's where I'm up to, now waiting on the JB Weld to cure.

Hi guys, After the dishcloth, my next test will be some 3mm thick activated carbon foam. As far as I've been able to find out, there are three pore sizes for different grades of filtration - the 3mm stuff seems to be "small". I'll let you know how that works out. I might need to try different sizes. @Mad Ax - if you have height with your design (and so large air volume that the paint is moving around in), I don't think a 20 watt bathroom extractor type fan would cut it for you. With my design (where I've tried to limit volume and also create a funnel effect) it's just on the limit. With my airbrushing it's about perfect. I use mostly acrylics and so I'm painting in the 10-12 PSi range which is pretty light and low paint volume so the fan can keep up quite easy. When I spray a rattle can, which obviously has higher pressure + paint volume I find I am having to spray slightly more slowly to allow the fan to clear the booth out. Maybe 25% slower than normal (eg pauses in between passes). This may not necessarily be a bad thing - anything that slows you down can have the added benefit of making you concentrate more. Don't know if it'll affect paint finish (I really doubt it) or my natural flow but time will tell. Also worth noting - I read a lot about how an immediate right angle (like I have in my design) in the ducting can cause turbulence which is not ideal. That's why most commercial booths vent straight out the back. Again, I'll experiment and see if it's a problem. I wanted a side exhaust so that I could get a maximum (60cm) work area to match my workbench and not have anything protruding out the back. But I may have to review that. With your bench design, you may have the opportunity to put a false floor/base above your bench and put a fan underneath, effectively pulling the air downwards. I noticed that a lot of the high end booths do that and a lot of people in various threads I read swear it's the best way to do it. Also, one other other idea I came across when researching that might suit yours is someone used an old oven/hob extractor hood to great effect. You get the filter already there, a few hundred watt fan, speed control etc all built-in and all you would need to do is add the 100mm ducting. Probably plenty of old extractors like that on eBay.

I finally got around to this last weekend. I have been thinking about making one for ages, mostly so that I can spray larger stuff indoors, in the garage, when it's too wet/too cold. And also for airbrush work which is always in my garage (where the compressor lives). I've seen a few videos of these on YouTube, and lots of talk about the danger of sparks from bushed motor fans etc. Largely I have dismissed these, as most of what I spray is water-based acrylic and the flammable stuff I spray (mostly rattle can paint and lacquers) simply isn't in a concentrated enough form to explode when not under compression. So worst case scenario it might burn. Which is not a big deal for me and I have a fire extinguisher nearby and handy. So what kick-started this for me and got me going was I saw this in my local B&Q for £25:- ... which is the full kit including extractor fan and 3m of hosing, plus a couple of useful fittings for the hosing. The fan is 20 watts. It sounded too lightweight to me to be effective enough but I figured in any event I'm going to need a baffle/filter box with a 100mm hole in it, some fittings and some hose. So I can always put a more powerful inline fan in later if I want to. My basic design is a 6mm MDF based box with a 100mm hole in one end and the fan mounted. The filter frame is 2 parts of 6mm MDF with 4 slots cut in them (I did both at once with a jigsaw) that enables me to "sandwich" a filling of filter material in between them. The outside one of the pair is bolted into place with M3 nuts which you can see in the pic below. These will be replaced with wing nuts when they arrive which will make changing the filter easier. Currently my filter is a dishcloth ;). Thought I'd at least test that - some proper filter material is on way to me. This gives you a sense of dimensions:- The dishcloth filter clogs up pretty quickly as you can see. This is Ford Tasman Blue I'm painting an F350 tailgate with:- I took the vacuum cleaner to the dish cloth filter and found I could clean it out again fairly easily. It clogs up even more quickly with lacquer. In fact that pretty much turns it into fibreglass All that said, it's working surprisingly well. The 20 watt fan is proving a lot more effective than I thought it would and if I'm careful and don't try and paint too fast I can ensure that no overspray ends up in the garage. In theory I can also vent the hosing to the outside to remove fumes etc, but haven't got that far yet. I can make the unit a little more efficient by sealing a few of the gaps I have and I'll also try the new filter material this weekend if it arrives in time and will let you know how that improves things.

Oh PS, for beach running I would suggest don't put in a diff, just in case you were thinking of that upgrade. You're better off without one when you're on sand.

In my experience the Buggy Champ has better tires for sand (Sand Scorcher even more so), and I would say a well sealed (at the wire entry points) radio box is probably slightly better for running on sand and near water. They're far from waterproof and water (and sand) *will* get in, but at least your steering servo isn't completely exposed. Use sealant on the gearbox too, whatever your ultimate choice. Handling-wise I've never noticed all that much in it. They both handle pretty badly, which is what makes them fun ;). Use green slime on the shocks - lots of people on here say they have badly leaking shocks on their SRB Runners. I've always built mine with green slime and they've been fine.

Keep it. Those of us of similar age can all guarantee you will regret it if you sell it. You can now re-live that . I think that's probably what most of us are doing...

I'm interested in seeing that. I wonder if 3D printing will also push down the cost of decent CNC milling equipment which for many things is as good/better than 3D printing?

That's not a mistake, that just automatically qualifies you as an epic individual I threw away a bunch of R/C stuff in about 1986 before I realised that it would become collectable and I'd come full circle back to it one day. Now I never ever throw anything away, ever.

Not sure what word is 2 or 3 steps up from "epic" but that's the word. Fantastic build!

White KC or Yellow KC Daylighter? Big game, enjoy.

Great! Are you still at the same address? I'll whack it in the post for you tomorrow. Agree about the roll-bar - that pic conclusively tells us that white is out I can help you with the stickers for the lights too - I got these a while ago on eBay so have quite a few :). If you want to pick which ones you want I'll put in same envelope.

We might be in luck here Erich.... can you check dimensions? This is about 23mm wide and about 4mm deep.

Will have a look today - can you let me know the dimensions of that part? I've got a bunch of loose spares I can go through. Looking good though :). Are you going to do the tire lettering? White would be interesting - never seen that done before. My best results with roll bars has been to do them in matt black, although I know you have some issues getting matt paints in Chile.

Welcome to the nut house Great find and great story! Can you post some pics?

Thanks guys - now completed and in my showroom:- https://www.tamiyaclub.com/showroom_model.asp?cid=130760 I decided to leave the decals as is and subtle for now. Might add a couple extra some other time once I've lived with it a bit, Thanks for watching

Oh, I forgot - I did get the front grille mounted properly: A bit of approx right size plastruct rod with a hole drilled in the middle did the trick.... I used the original screws to mount this, as the button heads on the stainless set I have are a little bigger and I don't like as much. I gave these a quick coat of gloss black with a brush and they look great (eg nearly invisible).

Hi guys, So, battery pack.... I bought some 5000mAh sub-c cells on eBay for not a great deal of money. No idea what quality is like but I won't be running this much so I'm not too worried. The 6v original pack had already been opened by a previous owner - a bit rough around the edges but not too bad. So all I had to do was build the new pack and get it glued into place. 5 of these turned out to be a really good fit - nice and easy and plenty of room. I then soldered these and glued into place. Then put the pack pack together using some "go faster" striped from Halfords around the edge. That'll make it really easy to open again if I ever have to. I then switched 2 of the AS-3 servos out for the correct AS-2 (thanks to a swap with @wildwillydriver ). I noticed I was missing the gearbox tierod because the previous owner had all the servos oriented in one direction rather than the middle one swapped (so had 2 long tierods rather than one long one short). So I made a short one using an old SRB steering rod cut to size and bent into shape. Looking nice :). Boy I forgot how heavy these things are... Tomorrow I'll mount the antenna, fix the roof mountings and take it for a spin

They probably would too Erich, which reminds me - did you manage to get that front light for the Sand Rover? I managed to spend a little time today finishing up the gearshift (which is from a Sand Rover tree), the steering wheel and tidying up some of the interior lines. ... so I started on the decals. I stopped here because (a) I'm a fan of "less is more" and (b) I did actually put the silver/orange side stripes on one side, didn't like the look and removed them again. I will probably come back and add something more (I think a drivers name on the side would look cool, but I think I'll leave it here for now. Minimal I've test fitted the J-Man roof which is just awesome. Here's a few pics to show that off: Pretty nearly there - last few little jobs to do:- 1. Mount the front grille properly (I'm missing a little plastic spacer, so need to make one) 2. Mount the roof properly which I'll do after the grille. 3. Fix up the battery pack (will start on that tonight) 4. Fit the last servo and take it for a spin on the lawn Hopefully will get all four of those done by next weekend and if the weather is up for it I'll take a video...

Oh, PS - I think I mentioned this somewhere else in the thread, but I have to say if you're in the UK, the black paint I've used here is from Halfords and is called "Audi Brilliant Black". It is really quite the most amazing black I've ever painted with - the photos don't do justice but it has an amazing depth and richness to it. Highly recommended (would look awesome on a Porsche if anyone is currently building one of those).

Wow, thanks for the positive words of encouragement guys! I'm enjoying this build (patience is 99% of it). Bodywork is done, rubbed down to the finest grade micromesh (12000 I think) and really pops now . Only took about 5 hours of work - this one is a simple bodyshell but there sure is a lot of it! I then masked up just the floorpan area so that I could hit that with matt black with the airbrush: I'm finding it really hard to get decent shots of black in both natural and artificial light (is that a "thing" with photography or is it just because I'm doing this with a smartphone?) but it looks really good - I like the contrast between gloss and matt black. It's subtle but it's there and it makes the floor look like a floor. Once that was done I managed to get first coat on the seats too - they need another one and I need to clean the edges up a little: Best angle of contrast between gloss and matt black that I can get with the iPhone - hope you get the gist (it's better in the flesh): I then found these chrome guages in my box of bits and thought they're perfect for this build! So in they go, rev counter and speedo. I think the hole in between the seats is just part of the mould release process, so I created a little plate from plasticard that sits underneath and I painted that matt black - I'm calling it a tray. Somewhere I have some 1/10 scale keys, coins and bits and bobs that I'll put in there at some point. I also found a perfect gear shift for this (from a Sand Rover driver tree) which I've primed ready for paint. So this is as far as I've got this weekend, but I'm so close now I think next weekend I might actually be able to get it over the line and done! Thanks for watching

Hi gang, Sorry about the long delay - work and family stuff took over for a while (you know what it's like). Anyway, after a few months away from this awesome buggy (at least I know the paints dry by now!) I finally got around to taking over the kitchen sink and giving it a rub down with Micromesh. I'm about 3/4's of the way there. Wanted to give you a couple of pics to show you I haven't forgotten about this buggy or this thread. I do hope to finally have a decent chunk of time back next weekend and will look to finish it off. I need to paint the seats, other than that it's ready for final assembly.... Sorry the pics are not best quality - it's really really hard to get decent shots of something dark and shiny in artificial light.

Looks fantastic Erich - love that colour!! Really suits the Manx well. I think I might have found a couple of those front headlight bits as I noticed one in my spares box a few weeks ago. Thought of you but wasn't sure if you had one yet. Will have a look in there later and let you know...

Superb, gentle restoration. The radiobox looks amazing! What did you use to wetsand - micromesh?

Hope everyone had a great Xmas! Managed to get the driver done:- ... and have rubbed down the first clear coat and given it a second:- ... fair bit of orange peel and overspray on that shot, but that'll all flatten down. Will be doing that and final coat 3 of the clear later today I hope. In the meantime I've been working on the grill. Haven't decided yet how to best mask the headlights (going to be tricky) for the chrome. I've done 1 coat of very very thinned matt black for the inner grille so not looking too even just yet, but another coat should do it (it's also still slightly wet in this pic). The Chevvy badge is a highly thinned Tamiya lemon yellow which I dripped in with a brush and let it self level (few drops of Tamiya Retarder helps). Here's my man getting an early preview of his new ride:- I've also cleaned up those rear lenses which are now finished and ready to do:-

Nope, no backing out now. This definitely has to be run on the beach My experience is it's fine as long as you're sensible and clean it up afterwards.