Juls1

Yes the TRF springs work fine. External body measurement on the standard TRF aeration dampers is the same.

19805901 suits TA02 chassis, TA01 chassis uses the same chassis as DF01 (top force etc) which is longer than the Ta02. Which is why ta02 arms are different to ta01 arms, and the prop shafts are different lengths. The equivalent TA01 prop shaft is 13485025 in short, a aftermarket prop shaft for TA01 will fit TA01 and DF01 but it won’t fit TA02.

No i don’t think it will, different length chassis on ta01. you need https://www.rcmart.com/yeah-racing-aluminum-main-drive-shaft-set-bu-for-tamiya-ta02-ta02s-ta02sw-ta02-134bu-00032408?search=Ta02 yeah racing rcjaz also sells a similar looking one made by integy (rebranded to rcjaz)

I’m running 15.5T tamiya tblm-02s. Geared properly it’s more than enough for rally use. It’s around the 2800kv mark at 0 timing but adding timing increases that quite a bit, I run around the 6.5-7 gear ratio wise. (26-28t pinion on the xv-02) if you advance the timing further than the stock adjustability (using the esc timing adjustability if you have it) then you’d need to start gearing a bit higher if things are getting hot.

Unless you really want the adjustability (and understand what it all does) the non adjustable units will likely be a more reliable and easier to deal with option. The plastic separate mounts tend to be pretty tough it’s the XJ one piece that is easily broken as it’s the one that cops it when you go head first into something, slide backwards into something or cartwheel the car. I’m yet to decide if the adjustable mounts will be more reliable, they do away with the balls, which are annoying, but they also give another rotation point to keep the suspension smooth. The adjustable mounts prevent the shaft rotating (at least I hope they do or they’ll wear and go crappy quickly) meaning only the arm holes will rotate rather than the pin. I think the main upgrade I’d go for is either the slipper clutch or the centre diff, tamiya writes in the manual these are suggested if you intend to use the 40t diff gear. if you want to run softer suspension or grippier tyres than stock then sway bars will most likely be needed. A steel pinion or a coated aluminum pinion isn’t a bad idea. Also steel diff cross pins are a good idea as well, the stock plastic parts fit poorly. Other than those few things, honestly the car doesn’t “need” more than that. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t want more than just that…

Yeah I had done pretty much exactly that but with some wet and dry sandpaper. I’ve eliminated the slop as you have with the bearings now locked in place, but of course with the center diff, the diff drives have a small amount of movement through the diff case into the differential. I think the stock bearings still have a small amount of slop too. But I can see the outer race is no longer contributing to the movement.

onto the sway bars, the kit uses the XV-01 Sway bar kit but with slight variance in assembly, Frustratingly they do not come with 53827 Rod stoppers which are required for assembly. I don't know why.. silly really. The kit calls to cut the back out of the supplied ball end, this is kinda dodgy, so i just grabbed a open end turnbuckle end from my parts tray instead. Sway bars assembled, I've gone with the hard sway bars initially, but they feel pretty aggressive, I'll wait and see what springs i'm using, If your using the stock kit included springs, they are probably hard enough you'll get away with softer sway bars (or none) but when you go with longer and softer suspension then the sway bars become more necessary. On my Heavily modded XV01 with GF01 alloy dampers and soft springs from a TRF501/201 the car was hopeless without them. Sway bars fitted up, it's a fairly tight squeeze actually, so little bit of tweeking needed to keep them clear of the dogbone etc. On a side here is the little battery bracket that is on a slide for longer/shorter batterys, There doesn't appear to be anything included to allow you to run a shorty pack. I'll be interested to see what the access is like for different connections, I generally like to use hard case packs with banana plugs built in, but i'm not sure if thats gonna work here.

@toyolienI just checked mine, yep there is a little play there. it's almost like there should be a bigger bearing but what I'm wondering is how much of that slop is in the bearing. after the steering issue, I'm wondering about the quality of all the bearings included in the kit. If you noted a difference changing the bearing that suggest part of the play is in the bearing. I might try making a shim out of thin alloy or something.

Annoyingly I havnt painted the db01 body (or even cut it out) so I can’t tell you if it’ll drop over the db02. I’ll have to try remember to compare on the weekend.

CVA v2 you can generally torque the cap down by hand till it stops (not more than hand torque though, don’t use a tool and overdo it) There is shocks like you describe that the bladder falls inside. The new hicap dampers come to mind.

DT03 is huge fun with a 4000kv sensorless brushless and some sand paddles at the beach, just make sure you get a tamiya steel pinion gear, will save your gearbox. If you want a bit more ground clearance the TT02b/df03 damper kits help lift the car another 5-10mm.

https://www.tamiyaclub.com/showroom_model.asp?cid=49962 hopefully something there is useful

Now that we’ve got the basic suspension installed we can see what max droop looks like, I’m a bit disappointed that the universals are not 38mm instead of 37mm as it seems this will be the limiting factor for modding to get that long droop look over crests. On bottom out the end of the shaft is probably 5mm away from bottoming out on the inner of the diff cup. The front seems to suffer the same but to a lesser extent. the limit on the front assuming you overcome the short shaft is also the shaft hitting the c hub. Of course this could be grinded away a bit, which has been done on my xv01. the steering arms just touch the chassis at the max droop, actually this is not really a issue, and is thousands of times better than the xv01 on this particular issue. On the xv01 you have to remove large amounts of the suspension mount weakening it to get more droop without effecting the steering in the case of the xv02 this can be achieved by raising the ball joint or removing a little bit of the chassis. but I actually think neither is going to be needed. Unless your trying to build a scale crawler of a car that in real life is fully independent suspension.. On a separate note, at this point tamiya asks us to fit this adjustable battery mount. The slide all the way in fits my standard length square packs. I’m not sure how and what battery I’ll use here as my preference for direct plug packs I’m not certain is going to work at the moment. We will see.

getting onto stages 24 to 30, I’ve got a few hopups here, some carbon reinforced front uprights. All the bits to run front double cardan driveshafts and sway bars to round out the suspension. For the uninitiated here is the regular cv shaft and the double cardan’s. The double cardan shafts allow for wider angles of movement without chatter, in fact they can operate at their limit without binding. Same can not be said if single cardan shafts. I decided to assemble all the shafts even though I don’t plan to run a pair of the stock shafts. Which is a good thing I built them all because I forgot to order a 10 x 5 x 3mm bearing so the double cardan driveshaft doesn’t fit…. ******. Anyway I’ll put the stock shafts in and keep building because a pair of those bearings is going to take about 2 weeks to mail order in.. notice in the picture the drive pin hole is currently partially covered by the bearing. One of the bearings needs to be 1mm narrower for double cardan shafts to fit. Tamiya part 42220 or 42379. When fitting the alloy hex hopup parts I found some backlash between the bearing and hex, so I added a 0.3mm shim. Perfect. Onto the rear hubs, I don’t fully understand why tamiya made a totally new part here, not sure what was wrong with the xv01 rear hub. All 4 corners ready to go on. It’s always nice to have captured hinge pins. And these have carried over with the xv01 arms. Starting to take shape now.

That thing is bonkers, love it. Hope to see more of it soon!

Have a look at my buggy damper thread all the specs and measurements are there. cheers Juls. https://www.tamiyaclub.com/forum/index.php?/topic/89072-the-buggy-damper-thread/

onto Step 20 to 23 we open up bag C, lots of good quality parts inside, including front and rear CV's, adjustable turnbuckles and more. Time to install the shock towers, I've gone with the optional carbon towers, these are nice and thick, I reckon probably 1mm thicker than the usual touring car tower, probably the same thickness as on my DB01/02's. Also going with titanium turnbuckles, not because the stock steel adjustable units are not strong... they are just not blue..... The manual calls to install alot of the shock hardware, however since I'm not using the stock shocks I've omitted that step for the time being. Towers installed, the car is starting to take shape.

Steps 16-19 calls to install the centre drivetrain and motor, in this case as you saw before i've gone with the optional centre differential instead of the stock fixed arrangement or the slipper clutch. The Centre diff installs nicely, just drops right in, the pink sponges eliminate any backlash in the drive system. So onto installing the motor, I run a Tamiya TBLM-02S 15.5T in my XV01 so decided I'd go this way with my XV02, I have run a 10.5T but found it a bit over the top for scale rallying. These are the only quality sensored motors you can buy these days that don't have venting holes, I've tried running these various vented motors in the past off road and constantly had them filled up with gravel and little pebbles, Not a issue on the TBLM-02S. I've opted at this stage for a 20T flourine coated pinion, it's likely I'll need to gear up further but this is just what I had on hand. Stock pinion is a Aluminium 19T. I don't love the pinion adjustment access, a ball type hex wrench is probably a necessity a L wrench could make it with alot of fiddling, somehow I managed to guess fit the motor perfectly to the mount before I put it on the car and the mesh was perfect.. I mean that'll never happen ever again right? or maybe thats what Tamiya expects to happen? A Cover over the top helps hold the centre drive in place, in addition to the motor mount holding the opposing bearing, It's a snug fit but i doubt it's dust proof, but it'll certainly keep little rocks out of there.

Steps 11-12 and 14-15 call for us to mount the diffs into the chassis and screw the lower diff covers on. In order to do that you need to make up the pinion portion of the differentials, for me this means building the option hop up universal prop shafts (what to do with the lovely normal blue dogbones!?!? lol). Usual assembly process for the universal prop shafts, few parts to deal with. Not entirely convinced there is a lot of performance value here over the stock parts. Although they are pretty blingy.... With the prop shafts built we can drop the diffs in.

Steps 8 to 9 and 12 to 13 have us build up the lower arms and mounts, I'm going with Adjustable mounts front and rear and carbon reinforced arms straight up. The Carbon reinforced arms (bottom) are slightly different color to the stock arms, the stock arms actually are not terribly flexy, but the carbon reinforced parts are noticeably stiffer, I weighted the carbon arms compared to the stock plastic arms, the carbon arms save about 1 gram per arm, I hadn't expected much difference but it's nice they are not heavier. Really adding the carbon arms is likely to reduce traction in low grip situations, but will make suspension adjustments a little bit more effective. I don't think you need them.. it's just that you can... At this point we also need to open bag B. we are greeted with a nice Alloy motor mount, and some nice blue dogbones, all the parts are top notch. I think really, for more people these adjustable mounts are probably more trouble than they are worth, just get the regular fixed alloy mounts, the kit includes steel balls as standard (a weak point on the XV01 that had plastic balls). So your set to go in that regard. So when would you want these mounts, well being able to adjust the rear toe is somewhat handy, but you can also adjust your rear anti squat and change the front kickup/caster using these mounts which are all useful when you know what they do and how to use them to tune in the driving character your looking for. Will they add more fun? for most probably not, for techy people there might be a bit of a kick here. the mounts are mounted upside down on the car, so you need to really really pay attention when your putting these adjustable mounts together that you don't do it backwards, or even different left to right. There is some included literature in the original manual for the separated mounts and more literature with the single piece mount hop part manuals. Once your got your head around it you can assemble the arm mounts to the lower diff casing.

Onto Stage 6/7 and we build up the diffs Tamiya Includes gear diffs as standard, these diffs are pulled from the recent TT02SR While I'm at it I'll also be building up the optional Centre Differential (not included with the kit) You need the centre diff gear and case, plus a TT02 Oil Differential set to complete this. Tamiya includes both 39T and 40T Diff ring gears for a 3% drive bias, you can install the 40T gear in the front for more rear drive bias or in the rear for a more front drive bias (whichever has the 40T will drive slower) Tamiya says in the manual not to use the 40T gear unless you have a slipper or centre diff installed, Tamiya includes 2x 39T and 1 x 40T in the kit. The Pinion gears are also different if you opt for the 40T diff gear. Tamiya is nice to us this time round, they included a relief in the diff casing that makes it easier to install the gear drive pin internally. The guide parts on the gear for the gasket improve sealing but also aid assembly by holding the gasket in place. The included gears are made of a very very hard white plastic, I'm certain they are more than up to the job, in the TT02 Diff set they included the flourine coated diff cross pins, these are not included with the kit diffs and your expected to use the plastic cross pin but I found it was oversize and caused the diff gears to bind horribly, i had to do alot of work with wet and dry sandpaper to make them work nicely. The flourine coated cross pins included in the hopup TT02 Diff kit thats used to make the Centre diff for the XV02 are dramatically superior to the plastic cross pin setup, in my kit, day and night better. I don't know exactly what cross pins these are to buy for the other diffs and Tamiya makes them for TB04, TA06 and TRF419 all with different part numbers. I'm gonna try figure it out, I'm not really happy with my diffs with those plastic cross pins. Well all three diffs are together, you can tune these as you prefer, but I found I had so much friction in the system from the plastic cross pins i couldn't possibly run anything firmer than the stock oil, I don't know if these will wear in, but gauging how much work it was to try to sand them down, I very much doubt the material will wear enough to solve that issue.

I totally agree, I guess it depends how much you plan to use the car. As I have so many and most are used at best once a year, I’m happy with the stock esc’s brushless performance. On the other hand anything I use more often using better gear. if it was me and I was still on a budget I’d go for the hobbywing 10bl60 because it’s cheap but has all the necessary programmable features including adjustable timing, drag brake, starting force (punch), adjustable lipo cutoff point and a 6v 3A bec. With a 17.5 motor I wouldn’t bother going to the 10bl120 as it’s got a bigger footprint unless you think you might like to try something lower than a 10.5 later on. I would avoid the juststock xr10, unless you are racing fixed timing class there is little value here, the tamiya motor has very narrow timing adjustability so having esc adjustability out to about 26.25 deg is nice if you feel like you want a bit more performance and have run out of gearing options (which is common on tamiya cars) , then it’s just a push of a button away. the only thing the xr10 has going for it for a general basher is it does look nice.

Seems like a waste to use that motor without the sensor lead. You could have bought a equivalent motor for half the money if you wanted to run sensorless. You can just use a the basic tamiya tble-02s brushless esc if you need a cheap esc. Generally speaking if you need to be able to drive slowly, lots of stop then slow restart. You need sensored. If your just a full throttle guy, and you never use your vehicle at lower speed (under 10km/h) then sensorless is often a better choice.

Haha no I don’t, I do have about that many cars in my rc room. I’m more of a collect one of each guy, although there is a few I have 2-3 of. I bought a FF01 off a guy I was working with bnib when I was 17 (23 years ago now) I never thought that much of it at the time (apart from no brakes, no steering lol) I had a fairly hot 13x2 motor in it, it was the fastest car I’d ever seen at that stage of my life. While it wasn’t by a long shot my first car (probably about the 5th/6th by then) I did have a soft spot for it, it’s what got me back into tamiya again 8-9 years ago, wanting to restore that. Which instead I ended up replacing every part with either new or hopups. Ended up being an original full carbon chassis and drizzled in alloy bits. I went at it pretty full on and that bled into a fairly bombed FF03 then a really really really bombed FF02! (Which I think spawned from my love of the TL01LA).

This thread makes me wonder If, should just focus on one chassis……. hmmm but then I’d have like 60 or 70 of the same chassis… bravo with the work though, I have given up on the search for aftermarket ff01 hopups ages ago, no point competing with you!! I think you need them more than me anyway.