Killajb

@BuggyDad did you use any type of seal grease or green slime when you assembled the BBX shocks?

Those bee bodies are cute. I could see a race series with a standard basic chassis (TT-02) and silver can with bees bashing around a parking lot course. Oops, sorry , back to the original thread content. Ah, actually I do have some slight input. I was on the fence about picking up a DB-01 chassis and hopping it up, or trying to find a DB-01R/RR. However, when I adding up the cost f said hop-ups I ended up buying a mint YZ-4 belt drive instead. And yes, I'll run it in parking lots and such.

There is healthy market for buggies here in Japan (Yokomo, Kyosho, Genova). On the higher end of the scale, its either Yokomo, Associated, Xray or Schumacher mostly. I'm sure the minds at Tamiya could produce a modern buggy that would be competitive with the aforementioned brands, but probably not at a competitive price point.

Very sorry to hear about your misfortune. Being injured sucks in general, whether by accident or from occupational hazard. I have found however, that I gained more resolve after injury. After you've settled into your new schedule and truncated income, you can replace quantity with quality. Even if you can't get that shiny new kit (yet), you can look into diversifying your skillsets such as; improving your soldering techniques, learning how to shorten servo/esc/power switch leads, clean and rebuild your diffs, or rebuilding shocks and polishing shock shafts. Please excuse me if you have already done such. Just wanted to share a positive perspective from someone who was often facing the same challenges.

@Marchie I didn't have to drill our the cam lock parts at all, I just held the cam lock in place and got the M2x5 socket head cap screw started and allow it to thread its way into the cam lock.

I just picked up a set of camlock wheels and the black camlocks. I found that a M2x 5mm hex head cap screw on each side of the cam lock works just fine instead of the rare M2x11mm screw pins that Tamiya supplies. For reference, most alloy clamping drive hexes use an M2x 5mm hex head cap screw.

None to worry, I pulled the diff apart last night and checked my diff balls are anti-wear grease free. The MK3 plastic diff housing plates are fine too. I just re-assembled the diff and put it back in there. I'll torture test it and see how it holds up. I know, my plans change like the weather. In my defense, in this case I would yield the most information for the group if it fails or continues to work.

Very astute observation @Wooders28 (see what I did there, Astu- okay.. I'll see my way out) about the front and rear diffs when using a one-way shaft bearing. Since I am using the one-way bearing, I may very well just swap the front and rear diff outdrives as an extra precaution.

Wow, thank you so much for taking the time to explain it with such detail. This is the reason I love Tamiya Club so much. When I took the rear diff apart, the previous owner did not glue the MK3 differential housing plate to the MK6 diff plate. The MK6 and MK3 parts seemed okay, but the diff was dry and the diff balls had small flat spots on them, hence the diff action wasn't smooth. I bought new MK6 and MK3 parts and used anti-wear grease between the two (as opposed to "affixing using cement" as advised by the manual). I thought this would lessen the heat transfer between the two parts. To be fair, I had no idea it was a failure point but went with my prior experience with plastic diff drive cup parts from the TamTech gear series where I've melted a few plastic diff parts before doing this. So far it's working fine, but for the sake of clarity I will for sure report back if there are any issues down the road, and thank you again for such helpful info.

Thank you very much for the info!

Do tell @Wooders28, what happens with the rear diff? I rebuilt the diff with ceramic diff balls but otherwise everything else is stock and it handles 16t brushed power just fine. Maybe the slipper clutch option is saving me?

I caught on to the DF-03 a couple of months ago. Yes quite late to the party. I understand why there is such a large following. I picked up a used chassis that had the coveted slipper clutch option and one-way shaft bearing upgrade as well. The chassis was scratched up, and diffs were dry but otherwise all else was fine. I replaced the chassis ~ $7USD and rebuilt the diffs and dampers with better parts. Most expensive upgrades were carbon shock towers and alloy cvd's on front and rear. The end result is a very smooth and predictable car. I'm running a 16t double brushed motor and the drivetrain is fine.

Quite the rabbit hole of information.. but I'm intrigued now..https://www.anoplate.com/news-and-events/why-does-anodize-fade/

Blasphemy!

Very insteresting issue.. I have the Turbo Optima Re-Re and also went with Pargu's gold wheels. I bought them right after the kit was re-released and the gold anodized color is only slightly darker than the kit's gold color. If I were at the junction, I would try an experiment: I recently picked up a used kit with lots of Tamiya blue bling that looked nice in photos, but when it arrived I discovered all the blue alloy was much lighter shades of blue and it was apparent that the car was left out in sunlight for quite some time. You could try leaving the wheels somewhere where they will be exposed to sunlight for awhile and see if the color starts to lighten up. Or maybe I was outside staring at the sun too long yesterday..