wtcc5

Hi, if anyone has a King Blackfoot grill nib or in good condition, please let me know. Tamiya number is 0115225 J-parts. Thanks!

… and there it is Friday afternoon it will begin

Oof I had to dig deep into the builds section to find this thread again I still have two or three FF-01 projects hidden in boxes, but had no desire to work on them. And what I worked on today is just a small thing, that doesn't belong to these projects. When I started the in July 2020 with the FF-01, I had seen one very nice chassis with full tuning and Mondeo wheels. This picture stuck in my mind for a long time, it went away when I got the Primera fever and recently came up again. Right at the end of my FF-01 addiction I made a good deal (thanks to Michael Koos) for a mint full tuning chassis with new Mondeo body set (as posted here before). This chassis spent months in a box... until now! It was time to make the full tuning-Mondeo-chassis a reality. All this precious stuff I took my shelf queen Mondeo body and its wheels for this "project". The shelf queen chassis went into the box together with the new Mondeo body set and wheels. For the real full Hop-Up state only the aluminium diff was missing in this chassis: Also some of the tire decals needed replacement. I started with the diff: A little help: Finished and installed (hidden): Now the tires. New stickers for the look and the inserts help saving the rubber on the shelf: And here it is... one perfect Mondeo

First video from my side for a long time…

I am back from a very nice practice (satur-) day. With now really old tires I could improve by two tenth and now have the car right where I want it to be setup-wise. It turns and rotates with ease and the rear end is planted, but knows when to help with rotation. The balance is now exactly like I want it. Some good drivers were there too and so I got a good comparison how my car performs in comparison to the ETS 13.5t class. Good drivers with Awesomatix were running their best laps around 9.5s. The world champion Dominik Greiner drove 9.2s - 9.3s. I ended up with 9.8s as fastest lap right before my tire set died (I hope to have the 9.7s in the bag with a fresh set). So that was an awesome day. The car so good to drive also brought back a little confidence regarding my skills. The printed damper stays held up well. The stupid "hiccups" also nearly disappeared. Well, with this setup they aren't so easy to make... I still destroyed a part when I had a coming together on track after a misunderstanding: Without a bearing inside (I ran without anti-roll-bars in the end) this part is of course not strong enough to withstand an impact... My setup: And a short video of the car and a run: https://youtu.be/EH1zKIyjZJk If you haven't already, I would like to invite you to check out my youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/KR1ae/videos

I accumulated a lot of parts and hardware already: Now, I am just waiting for the chassis plate. I hope/guess it will arrive early next week…

Sometimes I have the impression, that Tamiya Germany or Seidel have huge box with parts and they just grab and bag them if someone orders them (like the blue Dyna Blaster shockbodies).

Win-win situation I wish Tamico would do this favor to me some time. I have anti-wear-grease for a lifetime, but my threadlock is from 2009.

The time before last time, I wasn't happy with the balance as I found the rear not predictable. Yesterday then the car was on rails. I discovered a lot of dirt on the outside of the tires, that was really hard to remove. It was as black as the rubber, so I must have missed it and thought my setup was at fault. Luckily it was my fault. I drove a 10.0s fastest lap, about a tenth faster. Overall the car was very good on the front axle. Balancewise it is ok, but the rear is not still there. What I still look for, is the smooth rotation of the rear to allow for faster direction changes. Right now it depends a little too much on the front. It is the off throttle rotation I am still missing. The overall grip is impressive. Touching or riding the curbs doesn't bother the car at all, grip roll is no topic. Unfortunately I miss practice, as if some of my skill vanished in the Corona time. I somehow seem to have my old habit back: Having one larger hiccup/stupid move per run. I was also easily disturbed by others yesterday. Not cool. In the afternoon then, it was one hiccup too much, I banged the car into the board and broke the rear left shockmount... just stupid... Of course it wasn't repairable and my day was over. That killed the fun I had until then. Every run is a test drive with the car and the parts are sturdier than they look. One guest driver yesterday saw the car and was wondering if these thin carbon arm will widthstand a crash. They do. The rear shockmount was on my list already. It was flexing too much for my liking and maybe causes the rear indoor to behave like it does (outdoor it was nice). With the broken part, I was now forced to do something. As I also had a friend of mine testing a new touring car prototype for a large R/C manufacturer, we could "talk shop", which strengthened some of my ideas for improvement. In the end, I changed a lot parts on the v4.1. In fact so much, that I should call it v5 right away So, that is how it looks now: I changed the bumper, the lower and upper arms, the upper plates, the droop plates, the front lower shock mounts and the rear upper shock mounts. The bumper wants to break at the same place and got more "branches" to direct the forces into the chassis. Quite obvious are also the solid, closed lower arms. Even though, I moved the shock much closer to the centerline, it still flexed the arm more than I liked. With so much surface on the arm, it invited me to move the droop screw in the droop plate rearward, to reduce scrubbing and have it more protected. I also changed the lower shock mount. The idea for the 4.1 was to have the possiblity to move the shock even closer to the axle if I use the standard front hub. But I never do, so I removed that freedom and have now more strength in the lower mount. This also had an influence on the upper arm. The front strut now can be more straight. At the rear of the upper arm I also had overlooked a collision with the rear mounting point. The steering turnbuckle could touch it at full throw. You can see on the first picture, that I had to take material away. The rear mount was moved 2.5mm to the front to prevent that. You can also see the spool: I did the same changes for the rear regarding the lower arms and droopplate: And finally the rear shockmount got a new design. My dream would be to have it made of aluminum. It is now separated from the rest of the plastic part underneath the upper plate: Another thing I am never happy with, are the rear body posts. Horizontal or vertical, I cannot decide. So they change with every version. It is now the third revision and the best in my opinion so far. It also sports a brace to reduce the flex for indoor use. With the race coming up in several weeks and my bad driving, I want to have the car rtr at all time. So I made a version of the rear shockmount for my old fdm printer and installed it. The upper carbon plate needed a little modification and I cut off the old mounts of the plastic part underneath: This design just needs comparatively short body posts The location fits very good to the Zooracing BWOH body: I printed two more mounts just in case I have my stupid hiccups again. This is how the car looks now:

So did Tamiya add this hole intentionally for this or is that a @TwistedxSlayer special? Where can I find more of your car here?

I finally found the time to finish the rear wing. I roughened up the surface a bit before it got two layers of Tamiya fine surface primer. Then three coats of TS white color: The sticker work and installation was fast done: Did I already mention, that I absolutely love this body

Thanks guys! @Alangt4: Good argument! If I will run it, will depend on what my friends want to run next summer. I would think, it will have its fair time on the shelf before it runs again. @svenb: Then we are enough to found our Surikarn club I had to sort out a lot of the titanium screws. More than I could get now, so it will get red screws, too. The screws in good condition went in a little plastic bag for now. I think, I will prepare both, the red parts and the original ones to see what I like more. What is the front racing hub carrier? The problem I have with anodizing (all) parts, is: 1. There are different red color tones and the source for this work that I have will probably have the wrong tone (more saturation). Which would be a minor problem. More problematic is... 2. ... that the Tamiya lettering would be gone on the suspension blocks and upper deck mounts. And that would be too sad (my opinion).

I finally became a member of the imaginary "TBevo3 Surikarn owner club" Motivated by @Quincy recent purchase, I bought a used chassis, that didn't look to bad on the pictures. The delivery was blistering fast and I could finally see the well known box art with my own eyes: The car looks good on pictures: Seeing the standard TBevo3 stickers on the carbon plates made me a bit nervous, additionally to the unfortunately missing servo mounts and wrong bumper foam: So I had to take a look into the front diff housing fast: The red one-way is there, what a relief! The car definitely has more wear, than I could see it from the pictures. My "ocd" couldn't stand having a dirty imperfect chassis on the table for long. So on the next day I started taking it apart: Most of the titanium screws are in a bad condition. Two of the hex heads were round and I had to work on the button heads to get them out. The whole car was very dirty. Soon after my hands looked like this: I was happy when I finished the disassembly: Good things first: Not one thread was stripped. Nearly all rare parts are in good condition, used, but not broken or bend. The defective parts found were: - one bend suspension pin - one bend screw - all four wheel hubs are broken next to the screw - the chassis plate looks like "insert badword" The previous owner didn't protect it. The front and the rear are badly worn. He also dremeled the battery cut out edges like 3 year old would do. To make it worse he tried to seal all chassis edges with crazy glue, but again worked in a sloppy way and spilled a lot on the chassis plate. After my cleaning, the plate looked like this: I make it short: I bought a new one right away... The disassembly and cleaning also revealed a lot of dirt. I think the number of total disassemblies of this Surikarn including mine is now counting 1. I had a hard time getting the wheel hubs off, as half of the carpet slung around the opening between hub and bearing. Dirt was everywhere in and around the suspension. Positive to mention are the drivetrain gears. These look good and the drivetrain was pretty smooth. Another nice thing are the original Tamiya ball bearing. Some of them were still working smoothly. The exemption were the ones on the suspension. Here I found the other half of the carpet ...and sand: With a mix of cleaning methods (brake cleaner, water rinse and oil bath) I could bring them to life again. The seals of these old bearings are very good to open and close. So these were all saved: I forgot to make a picture of the clean plastic and carbon parts, but these got back a lot of their "youth". Again, that was really good to see. The aluminum parts came out like this: At the moment I am not unhappy with the car, maybe even glad, that it ended up in my hands to gain back its legendary status. Of course, I ordered a lot of parts, including screws, servo mounts, wheel hubs, pinion, ballnuts, suspension pins, one way outdrives, front body posts and more... The plan is to rebuild the car from scratch and then decide for further beauty actions like anodizing worn parts. I also have to ask what you would do: I have a lot of red (Tamiya) parts like shocks, turnbuckles, screws, ballnuts 6mm and 5mm. Should I use them or keep the titanium parts. What would be your decision?

I couldn't resist to get another TB-03 body set: This time the body came already finished. Unfortunately without the lexan body parts and light buckets. So I had to buy these plus the whole sticker set

Sorry, I didn't see your post earlier. I hope you found an answer already as I don't know... With the upcoming rererelease of the Thunder Shot, I was browsing my favorite online shop for this buggy-family-parts and stumbled over this : A little research showed, that there is another way to attach this wing, not on the body, but on the chassis. I found some pictures on Tamiyabase. The parts seem hard to get...