ALEXKYRIAK

So I got hold of some Losi 314005 rear aluminium shocks to use on the front of a Hornet. Main issue I have right now is finding a way to fit the 1mm diameter bottom ball socket of the Losi shock with a standard lower arm 3mm diameter hinge pin hole. My current theories are: a) find a lower socket eye with a 3mm hole but a 1mm thread to replace the existing one on the shock, or, b) find some way to thread 1mm bar into a 3mm diameter threaded spacer, to use the current shock eye with the a standard tamiya lower arm (am using Ampro 20mm offset arm) This is the Losi shock, note the tiny 1mm diameter ball stud located in the hole in the lower shock eye. I can’t get a 3mm screw or shaft through this, so I need a different shock eye that uses a 1mm thread to accept the 1mm diameter Losi piston rod, or, some way to use a 1mm threaded screw or shaft through the shock eye that will connect into the 3mm holes of the hornet suspension arm. It’s a tricky one! (how do I get myself into these situations...?)

Thanks both, if possible to see your respective comparisons would be most interested to see. I am not especially enamoured with the look of the comical series, but something about the chassis piques my curiosity.

double post please delete

Thanks @ThunderDragonCy and @Grastens . So managed to get some RC building time in this evening, but it was spent more scratching my head rather than doing any actual building. So the current issue is in trying to fit the body to the brat/frog chassis. Remembering that this is not an original Lancia shell, the existing body mount hole positions need to be reconciled with the available chassis mounting positions. At the front, the Brat/Frog has a central front mounting hole whereas the Lancia shell has a double hole mounting configuration. Chassis shown here with the central mounting piece with the threaded rod: Compared to the Lancia front double holes: So my options here are to either drill a single hole in the body on the front of the bonnet, or to (somehow) find a way to create a body mounting strut that connects via two mounting struts to the existing two holes in the shell (not likely). Considering the rear mounting holes, in connecting the two side body mount positions, I need to find a suitable position to mount from. I am wondering if I should use the two battery mount holes below the shock somehow. Or, to fit some sort of additional bracket onto these holes to allow the battery restraint piece and a body mount. I got hold of some threaded body mount pieces from an F103 chassis but these are probably too long, and I think if connected to the battery holder positions they will be a) too low for the body and b) too wide to fit inside the width of the inside of the body shell : So my main issue is that I know the position I want to fit the shell in, but I can’t yet determine a way to a) fit the shell via mounting hole struts method, and b) determine exactly how to position the shell in terms of specific dimensions in the forward/backwards dimension, and to some degree the lateral left/right position, to the point where I know exactly where to drill the holes. I can hold it in the right position, but I need a way to imprint the mounting position onto the shell to be able to fix the holes for drilling. Am super nervous on this stage, as if I get the positions wrong, it’ll really mess up the body. I have been here before on another project, where I’ve over drilled holes in a lexan body because of trying to hold a shell on a body in what I suspected to be the right position (front/back, left/right, and vertically), only to find that for various reasons it wasn’t as obvious as originally thought and I totally messed it up... If anyone had been here before, can you share any tips? Much appreciated...! In the meantime I’ll keep plugging away at methods for the best mounting and positioning technique.

Hi all, no, not a post about a man with hilarious 8ft long upper torso primary appendages.... I’ve read quite a few references on TC about people using comical series longer buggy suspension arms on other chassis builds I was wondering if anyone could post a few pics showing comparisons, and explain the possible uses of using the longer comical suspension arms on buggies and / or other applications. Sounds like a perfect component for custom buggy builds... Cheers

My wife would find a way to hunt me down if she found out how much l’d spent...

Ok so an update to the project. This is the current status of this build: The parts for the front suspension finally arrived from HK and China (my thoughts and respect are with those affected there) and I could continue the next part of the build. First things first though, I had to remove a little bit of slop in the front wheel assemblies. It was bugging me. Slop is like an itch. I installed a 0.2mm and 0.1mm 5mm shim per axle to stop the wheel moving laterally. Then next up was fitting the front shock mounts. Here I am experimenting with an aluminium shock mount: I decided to try a somewhat crazy idea and fit Hornet rear shocks to the front of this Lancia build, so one delivery later from the magnificent Tamico and I had this lot sitting on my table: almost all of the parts required for rear hornet shocks. I am building these without the Hornet ball socket at the bottom of the piston, and will use a standard CVA shock short base eyelet piece: So with the aluminium shock mounts and the front shocks fitted, the chassis looks like this. Front shock length is unadjusted apart from the fact that there is a CVA eyelet on the base of the shock. I mounted the shocks themselves using an 8mm or 10mm spacer, one at top and one at bottom of shock: I then tentatively rested the body onto the chassis. I will need to work out how to fit the body posts to the shell, which I will look into next. A few things about the build at this juncture make me nervous 1) it feels like the wheels of the Honda City Turbo appears that they may be slightly small than the original Rally Lancia ones, in terms of diameter. When I rest the shell in the chassis something doesn’t look the same as the photos of the lancia original. And 2) I will need to play with these Hornet Rear shocks slightly as the spring appears to not be stiff enough to return the nose of the car back up to full ride height. I also need to check the fixing method to ensure the screws and spacers are not too tight so as to create a restrictive friction on the free rotation of the shock base and head to the arms and damper mounts. It’s been a tricky build so far but well worth it, especially now the shocks and body are fitted and I can see how it might be shaping up...! More to follow

Ah awesome mate thanks a lot, much appreciated. Am looking at these Losi 314004. A lot of the shocks mentioned above seem to be out of stock. Do you run 18 scale? Or did you fit something similar to a 10th scale? Thanks again 👍

Hi all, I am looking out for shocks that are essentially the same size / type as the Hornet rear shocks, just not as long. I need shocks at about 60-70mm length eye to eye but a smaller outer diameter on the shock itself. Basically I am looking for a ‘small’ short shock to fit on 1/10 scale cars like Hornets, Grasshoppers, etc. I read in one or two places on the web that 1/ 18 scale shocks might be a good solution, but I don’t really know what to look for in the world of 1 / 18 scale cars. Can anyone recommend a possible solution or advice on what to go for? Basically I need a ‘short, Hornet rear shock’ to fit to the front of a Hornet and similar type cars. I want to mod the front of my hornet but don’t want to use a standard CVA shock at 60-65 mm, I want an oil shock, but want it to look similar scale to the Hornet front shock, if that makes sense! Thanks.

Wow LOL this is sooo true. 😆 I’ve actually forgotten to buy the thing I went there in the first place for because of this... ‘condition’.

They saved the day in the installation of the baby gate at the top of my stairs. Victorian funny-shaped staircases made child-gate friendly thanks to Tamiya Spacers (otherwise know as plastic bearings... 🤔)

Looks really cool @Problemchild, are there any other photos to be seen? Love the bold stripe down the centre.

Lovely car mate, very nice. Really good restore!

Ok time for an update. Have been working on the wheels, suspension and geometry, and getting the body sorted. Current status is as per photo above. In terms of the approach I took to this phase of the project I decided to do this slightly differently, which I’ll describe below, but it essentially involved fitting wheels first, then loose fitting unfilled oil shocks, then measuring the desired lengths of shocks and deciding shock hole positions, to determine the resultant stance of the car. This is the reverse of how I’ve normally built kits in the past, which normally installs shocks first then fit them to car and select the mounting hole positions to affect the ride height. But first, fitting the wheels. This car had always intended to be using the Egress wheel and tyre combo, they’re simply amazing looking in my eyes First step in fitting these is to adapt the front axle to accept the hex socket type of the front wheel. The madcap was a slightly unique car in that rear hex block was a sort of interlocked threaded connection rather than a pin connection. The front is a standard free rotating axle and here I fitted a DT03 Hex Adaptor from GPM These simply slot over the front axle: I then fitted the wheels to the chassis with no shocks, so the whole car was ‘loose’ and the chassis base sat on the floor . This would then allow me to prop the car with spacers underneath the chassis tub to assess and determine a target ride height. At this point I also needed to test fit the Madcap body as this is essentially required as part of the overall assessment, so I cut it out and loose fitted it. This is a replica body from TBG I had some DF03 aluminium dampers in the parts cupboard that I’d bought ages ago so I thought I’d give them a go on this car So I propped the car up on a plastic block and a screwdriver handle, and had a go at setting a ride height position, setting a slightly higher dimension on the rear than as on the front: The once happy with a proposed height to try, I measured the distances between the holes on the arms and damper mounts bottom and top respectively and noted these down, but essentially this was aiming to be about 65-70mm from and 75mm-80mm rear. Whilst building shocks I then used black o-ring spacers to reduce the overall shock length to attain the target lengths. essentially the spacer limit the overall travel length of the shock and the length itself. This is a technique I’ve used once or twice before, but I’ve never done it quite so ‘scientifically’ with so much pre-measurement (not that I’d call this process that scientific...! ) Each spacer is just about 2mm. So if I wanted to take out 10mm of length I’d put 5 spacers on. At this juncture the shocks have no oil in them, it’s just testing different combos of spacer, loose fitting to chassis and measuring. In the end I think I’ve put 8 spacers rear, and 5 front . I also had to factor for the natural weight and droop of the car when resting, as this would naturally drop the car down. So this is where it’s at. Probably needs a fair bit more adjustment but it’s been entertaining and interesting getting this far More to follow hopefully in next few days . (note on the photos... I dialled out the yellow ness due to shooting these photos in the evening under halogen lights, I needed to remove the yellowness these give to the photos, making the blues quite strong, but it’s quite cool looking, so I left as is....)

Looks pretty cool on four wheels....!

Next up was to do some work on the gearbox. I had agonised over whether I should get all the parts from a super astute to do this gearbox, and rightly or wrongly worked out that to get all the super astute bits would cost 63.2% of an actual super astute kit. So I thought perhaps I’d get that and do that one as a full beans hop yo Madcap, and keep this relatively tame with as much original kit as possible but with some upgrades. That plan didn’t work out so well. Watch out for other thread on this soon... So opened the gearbox and the differential , and this dirty thing presented itself. Tried to clean it up quite a bit, not sure how well I did but cleaned out as much of the old diff grease as possible and added new diff grease: Assembled. I suspect I’ll be revisiting this piece quite soon as I’m not sure it’s moving as smooth as I think it’s supposed to I have some reservations about how well this diff is operating, feels like something is not quite right. Will wait till all the axles and wheels are on for a final test, but will happily strip it out if it’s not right. So gearbox unit with motor is now fitted. Currently just a Tamiya sport tuned brushed. Will perhaps give it a more fulsome power unit later. Next move is to fit the damper mounts to the gearbox. Here I again designed a couple of stay pieces and had them cut at Fibre-lyte. I made two to test slightly different geometries, a taller and a shorter, this being the taller in the photo below. Here is one of the rear damper stay elements as compared to the stock plastic part: and fitted to chassis / gearbox: So this is where the project stands at this juncture, front and rear arms and damper stays fitted: Time to fit some suspension rods and steering rods. Above shows DT03 front steering knuckles and hubs from GPM racing and some custom built upper arms with turnbuckles from a TT02B turnbuckle kit 51000 I used some old school brass metal bearings as spacers, with an assortment of shims to reduce play, to fit the front knuckles and hubs: To create the upper arms front and rear, I measure the eye to eye of the plastic arms of the stock kit (by measuring the parts prior to disassembly and also against the manual), and recreated these using tamiya ball cups and turnbuckles from the TT02B turnbuckle kit. On madcap the rear arms are shorter than front arms. Starting to come together: Then I went through same process for the steering arms, and the steering connector arm itself, for which I shipped out the adrenal stains cut a short section of 3mm threaded rod and connected to the ball eyelets (at this juncture I also ordered some protective eyewear - using the wife’s sunglasses for cutting bits of metal is not recommended... 😎 ) Here fixed to the steering subassembly: and then installed in chassis and fitted with servo and all linked up to front arms and steering. I used a small turnbuckle to connect the servo to the steering elements. So far so good. The steering and servo all move nice and freely when tested with a powered servo saver and also allowed me to adjust the geometry a bit given that some of these elements have been made by me measuring and cutting things, which may have led to small deviations from the stock parts. Next up should be shocks I think

Ok so time for the next update. Starting with the base chassis tub piece. Time to fit a bunch of the bits back together. Gave this tub as good a clean as I could. The first challenge is to install the front shocks mount. I’d decided to design a custom carbon fibre front damper mount in 3mm carbon, a home made hop-up. This was to be fitted to the front chassis piece With the front arm pivots and locking piece, uninstalled pieces seen below Test fit of the front chassis lower piece, showing the geometry of the front arm pivot axes: This is the original plastic front damper mount with the locking piece attached and the blue pogo shocks mounted (one of the ‘deconstruction’ photos): And this is the damper mount piece (still with body clip plastic fitted to it:) Here is the 3mm front carbon damper mount. To create this, I essentially measured the spacings between all the holes, and then traced the mount outline around them, to resemble a super astute mount piece with a few custom modifications for hole positions: I used Fibre-lyte as usual for the custom carbon pieces, top service. I had test fitted this component prior to completing the front install, trying hard to use the spacers and washers to ensure the damper plate was aligned in the correct position and orientation so as to be as flat as possible to it’s contact points with the chassis, this showing the test fit prior to the servo installation: I had to do this to ensure a tight fit of the relatively thinner carbon damper mount with the stock plastic pieces of the Madcap front assembly. This took a while with various combinations of spacers and washers to get the correct offsets / spacings and to ensure a tight fit. Once I had experimented with various washers and shim spacings, I installed the damper mount without the top piece, now safe-ish in the knowledge that the plate will be in the correct position: Next up is the installation of the front arms. Seeing the photos now I realise I could have done a better job on cleaning the plastic parts...! For mounting the arms, I used shafts, shims and e-clips to replace the step screw normally used in the stock arm pivot (shown below minus one e-clip), removing a little play in the arm’s pivot axis on the shaft: So that completes the front arms. Next up will be the rear arms and rear gearbox and motor mount .... including the diff... which was an ‘interesting’ restoration, I can tell you...

Thanks Thunder, yes these extended socket bits came with the extenders I installed. The hole in the City Turbo wheel is too big for them so they wouldn’t have fitted, and I didn’t fancy having the nut stick out on this car (to keep the looks as original as possible). I previously used some extenders on my WT01 build and as you say I had to drill out the aperture in the plastic wheel to make them work. Quite a novel bit of kit actually. Small pause on this Lancia build while I’m awaiting a few parts. Hopefully they’ll turn up soon so I can get cracking on the suspension.

Hi all, this build thread is basically the story of how one man once saw a photo of an upgraded, hopped up car and fell in love with the aesthetic and just had to build one for himself. Only minor problem of conscience was that to build this I would have to take an almost ‘vintage’ car and turn it into the upgraded version of that vintage car. Essentially, I wanted to restore it, but also upgrade it up directly. Without first enjoying the original car. Apologies if this is a sin... So, for the purists amongst you, probably ignore this thread I will be taking an old Madcap and turning it into a restored and slightly modified Madcap. So, here is the original, obtained from a little known auction site: As you can see, it’s a fine example of the car in question. It was pretty dirty all over, dust and gunk in most places. It had some fairly jammed moving parts, such as all four of the shocks, and all of the arm pivots were pretty gunky. This car was pre-ESCs and had two sets of Servos, one for steering and one for the speed controller: This car is intended to be upgraded to a modern ESC and either brushed or brushless motor, but will be run on lipo. A careful analysis of the car had identified a bunch of areas where upgrades were to be done. Damper mounts, shocks, steering links, ball bearings, etc These pogo stick dampers are frankly awful... The front and rear hubs were pretty gunked up and not moving freely or smoothly: Luckily I had obtained an old Madcap manual which I found was actually a great thing to have, instead of relying on PDFs on the web. It’s nice to have a vintage paper manual alongside the vintage car I took a detailed ‘deconstruction’ set of photos to try to accurately record each step of the strip down, just so I had a decent record of the disassembly and a decent idea of each sub assembly and set of components. Much dirt and filth became apparent. Brief summary below as an example, just a couple, I took loads... And it all ended up in small red boxes! Felt quite nervous doing this, my first major restore / rebuild. Most of this lot made its way into a nice hot tub of soapy water and then a few sessions in a cheap ultrasonic cleaner. I aimed to keep most of the chassis and drivetrain and main plastic pieces, but replace or upgrade much of the shocks, dampers, motor, esc, suspension geometry, and steering. In the meantime I had also a) designed some custom damper mounts and b) realised the full history of Madcap, Astute and Super Astute and the implications for this build. Parts availability being one of the prime drivers.... This complicated plans slightly (In hopefully a good way) as I then considered various upgrades from either of the Madcap’s more accomplished siblings. @kontemax has a pretty amazing comparison thread here and in other enthusiast Tamiya websites, well worth a read. This was useful research. Anyway, will post further updates of this rebuild / upgrade as I find the time

So minor update: have now got the rears fitted...yay! The rear wheel inside profile is very deep. So I got hold of some rear 12mm x 15mm length aluminium hex extenders to fit it (in red of all colours... don’t ask...), also using a washer, and the K part washer plastic cap. This Brat/Frog rear axle is very long but the crosspin position is pretty tight to the hub. I tried to find other axle pieces but nothing came up. I also started out with a 20mm hex extender but realised petty quickly this extender was too long and the wheel nut did not have enough axle thread to engage with the wheel properly. Here is the 20mm in black for reference: So I think I have the rear wheels sorted for this car using the red 15mm extenders to accept the Honda City Turbo wheel set. This has probably been the most difficult car I’ve worked on for a while.. Now just awaiting the suspension parts, then it’s body fitting time....!

So the bearings arrived and the good news is I have test fitted the front wheels, all looks good... progress As per @a.w.k. advice, I fitted the large bearing, with two bearings inside (luckily spacetime behaved itself). The large bearings are a) large and satisfyingly chunky feeling bit of kit and b) perfect fit for the wheels. Right to left: 8x22x7 bearing, two 5x8 flanged bearings, 5x8 bearing Here fitted, right wheel complete with cover plate screwed in, left without plate yet screwed in. The cover plate comes with the wheels parts. Fitted the wheel perfectly. I used the black plastic washer cap from the Honda city turbo K parts tree, you can see it just behind the wheel nut. The outside of the wheel has a larger than normal hole, this cap fills it in and closes up against the bearing. So here we are with front wheels fitted. The steering rod lengths required no adjustment, they were magically perfect first time round 👌 Next job is to fit the rears. Think there will be some fiddling here, potentially using hex extenders. Will post progress soon

@Frog Jumper - hilarious...! You should do a build around this concept using this as the main propulsion method. @ThunderDragonCy thanks a lot mate, great suggestion. I got hold of some flanged bearings at the size you mentioned - never seen these things before, they're brilliant - and almost made a solution work with the wheels in question. I can get a way to make the fixings sort of work, but it's not exactly robust due to the shape and profile of the inside of the wheel. I had wondered if this simply was an axle length problem for a while, and considered putting in a different knuckle and axle. @a.w.k. thank you so much for the detailed explanation this looks like the ticket! I was even drawing up so 22mm blocks to get cut - I didn't think you could get bearings at this size for RC cars, and definitely "bearing in bearing" is genius! Have ordered some and will give this a go. Interestingly the original Audi Quattro Rally manual just calls this a "large bearing", no indication of size as far as i can see. Here is the Wheeler wheel in more detail: This is the insert form the Honda City Kit K2 part. If I bored a hoel into this i think it would have split the plastic: K2 inserted to wheel: So I can't use this insert, as it's not compatible with the Brat/Frog front knuckles / axle. My current solution will be to follow @a.w.k. solution as posted above. Anyway, so here are some progress pics and comments. This is the current status of the build. Am having fun with this being my first time on an ORV chassis. Very interesting design solution on this one...! Very old school in every department. Love the shock design, fornt and rear, and the gear design and rhe rubber 'boots'. I decided to go with centred servo and steering - not vintage, I know, but was interested to try this mod. I used the AmPro components for the servo mount struts: To get the symmetric steering arms, I ordered some 1mm threaded rod, and cut the rod to size using the Dremel with steel cutter rotary disc. To get the measurements, I installed the servo and the hubs/knuckles, then measured the geometry. Servo ball stud to to steering knuckle ball stud was approx 75mm, so I cut the threaded rods to about 65mm lengths, so achieve a 47mm space between the ball cups. This has got the lengths into the right ball park, I can do the final adjust when the wheels are on. I may need to adjust the rod lengths once the suspension and shocks are fully complete and installed. Will fine tune this later if need be. As mentioned above, this is my first ORV. Loving the old school design. Front knuckles and hubs are very cool, as is the suspension arms. I am considering using an actual shock on the front arms, as opposed to the recessed spring and plunger. Also really like the gearbox with metal side plates. Have read about the problems with this design in the ORV lineup of cars/buggies, and I toyed with the idea of the MIP ball diff kit for this build, but its' expensive and have read it's not necessary for a Brat. I did order one anyway, just won't use it in this car. Also love the rubber 'boots' over the rear axles. Anyway, the next update will likely be Round 8 of Me vs The Wheels Installation.... It's taken a while to figure these out and with the advice from the guys above hopefully I will have solved the front wheel assembly. Hoping the rears are a bit more simple..! Then by that point the shock mods will be ready. For the shocks, I've ordered some damper mounts from the net that fit the Brat / Frog, but I also decided to make my own carbon fibre ones to variable geometry dimensions - these arrived super quick from Fiberlyte. Will post all this development in the near future...! In other news, I have a Brat build running concurrently with this one (on a black chassis), and it's all making my itchy to finally get the Frog at some point soon...!

Ok so have been progressing with this build, am super excited about it. Quite liking the ORV build and design/details.... a bit odd, I have to say, but in a nice way! At least not what I'm used to in terms of the builds I've completed (DT03, TT02B, Hornet, WT01, to name a few) . I will post on this aspect of the build so far in the near future. However, the current issue is this: I cannot find the original Lancia Rally wheels....anywhere. Current problem is trying to find a way to mount front wheels and tyres. I obtained some Honda City Turbo wheels as a substitute to the Lancia Rally ones (sacrilege, I know), these apparently being the same part as on Opel Ascona / Audi Quattro Rally kits. MY basic issue is that I need to find a way to fix the front wheels to the the Brat/Subaru front axles. I have posted some extracts below from various manuals to add some explanation to the issue follow:. First is the Honda City Turbo front wheels installation manual extract. These show the primary parts I am working with, F1 and K2, and the tyres: By comparison, this is the Brat front axle parts below. These axles do not fit the part K2, as they're intended to be axle and ball bearing only, whilst the Honda City Turbo is a cross pin that passes through the axle and locks into K2 part. The Brat axle is too fat for the K2 part, i think being 4mm step screw trying to fit a 3mm aperture. By way of comparison with the original Lancia Rally, here is the front for the Lancia car: This is clearly a different piece of wheel to Asona / Honda, accepting a ball bearing in the wheel, and I do not know the axle shaft diameter, although this is somewhat academic as I don't have these wheels anyway. (Side comment / observation: Isn't it fun tracking down scans of obscure, old manuals, and using them to make new creations? Geeky, but love it ) Here are the wheel / tyres I am working with from the Honda City Turbo, wheels first. When looking at the bottom two wheels, the left is the inside of the rear (hex fitting), the right is the inside of the front, shown without the K2 part. The centre disc with holes is a potential key part of solving the problem, I just can't find a way to make it engage with any part of the axle or a ball bearing: Wheels: Fitted with tyres (just no way to fit to car currently I will keep persevering with finding a solution and post back soon, but if any one of you fine gentlemen/ladies have any experience with this issue, I'd appreciate if you could share Hopefully I'm just being stupid and the issue is easy to resolve. Thanks all.

We could all play ‘guess the car’ my friend is working with ..... could be one of several contenders....! He already does that.... He’s apparently going to build at least two cars out of this, and he’s vowed never again to buy a cheap little vintage restoration project from the internet, on account of it being financially ruinous!

Ok, so I’m almost too embarrassed to ask this but what the heck.... A friend of mine* got an old car from a well known auction site, and is half way through stripping it down and doing it up. A new replica body shell is already ordered as are some minor other hop ups. However, he is also considering some key replacement parts from a new re-re car that is not the same model as the vintage car, but is a family-related higher spec car that has many parts that are interchangeable, as the original vintage car has no parts available and no direct re-re version available. The considerations start sensibly enough, just with an absolutely required drive train upgrade. However to get that upgrade, it transpires it actually costs quite a bit when he considered a few of the associated parts and parts bags that need to come with it to install the drivetrain. This collection of parts comes to well over half the cost of a the re-re version of the car kit in question.... the seller of the parts has clearly just split up a kit and is charging exorbitant prices for the parts and parts bags. So now my friend is considering just buying the new re-re kit of the family related re-re to take those parts, with the big idea to sell off the remaining parts, which would hopefully make the whole endeavour a bit cheaper.... except now he’s thinking that he could just build the entire new car, and just mount the replica body shell of the vintage car onto it..... particularly because then this would give him a bunch of other ‘upgrades’ that came with the higher spec version of the same family of said car.... but this would then defeat the point of restoring the original.... !!!! He still needs the drive train upgrade... So apparently, in total he’s gone and bought the new re-re kit, in addition to the original old vintage car that started this whole process off in the first place, and a few upgrades and a body for said vintage car... crazy guy. So now he’s thinking perhaps just build the new re-re, stick the replica vintage shell on it... and then get the old vintage car up and running again but with perhaps just a few new parts....... but this would best be achieved again just by buying the re-re kit as when he considers just the exorbitant parts as sold individually by scrupulous kit dismantles...... so perhaps just get the new re-re kit and sell off the remaining parts.... aaarrrgghhhh...! Where does it all stop? Ad Infinitum what should I... I mean, what should my friend*, do....? Where does it all stop? It’s kind of like a grotesque reversal of Trigger’s Broom / Ship of Theseus..... Has anyone else faced this sort of agonising conundrum with cars, upgrades, hop ups, running versions vs shelf versions vs NIB box versions, etc...? Let my friend hear your stories so he can not feel so bad about all of this!