Howards

I cut and painted a set of shells for someone on here. Somewhat stressful...to say the least. Then you have to ship them...

( as a side point, you can get fixated on the quality of you cut job if you cut then paint. If you are brave and paint then cut you get a better feel for the level of quality required for a 'good enough' cut job. )

For long straight lines I've found scoring then snapping then sanding flat with sandpaper around a wooden block (for the straightness) is effective. It's hard to get a straight finish with a Dremel - with a sanding wheel it tends to bounce and is very sensitive to variances in pressure and resistance. Still the forward and rear edges of wings especially Tamiya period ReRe wings are absolute sods to get right.

I don't think there's a magic bullet here - I find you need at minimum a curved pair of lexan scissors, a sharp scalpel blade and various grades of sandpaper. A Dremel with various attachments can be useful but it's the most disastrous if it gets away from you.

Oddly, it's not all that hard to get a decent approximation with a basic airbrush. The shapes are very forgiving and it doesn't need much really fine work. Here's one I did, excuse the hob.

Has it's own appreciation thread

I think you'd need to run the diffs tight and as above make sure all the 'consumable' parts are top quality, i.e. ceramic / tungsten carbide balls, smoothed plates, best grease you can buy, new springs. Then build them to the manual spec but make them...tighter. So when you spin them unloaded you get a quarter of a turn free rotation rather than half a turn. Might not give you the turning characteristics you want but they won't slip. If you were running on very high grip surfaces and you are jumping the car a lot you'd probably have issues fairly quickly so buy some spare diffs. If not on astro then it should be OK. People were running pretty hot motors in the Egress and that has the same issue regarding slipper compatibility. You might find you can fit a slipper pinion but I've never used one. Ultimately without a slipper clutch the transmission is exposed somewhere to shocks and stresses and if the diffs don't give a bit to handle that the stress moves up the drive train and you will wear out gears faster. Driven aggressively on high grip surfaces, buggies with no slipper, geared diffs and very hot motors will eat themselves fairly quickly unless heavily built with an emphasis on durability.

The outdrives are metal but the actual assembly is plastic, no? so get it hot enough and you won't melt the outdrives but you will melt the retainer inside the cog. The issue with the DB01 isn't so much the plastic outdrive, it's people not building the diffs right then running hot motors through them without the double or single slipper and it melts everything. On the 502 owners thread there are people who replace them with the TB04 gear diff.

You'd have to do a very good job of building the ball diffs. Then profile the acceleration on your controller to limit full punch until the wheels are rolling. Primary risk is the diffs slipping generating heat that then melts the assembly. I ran my DN01 with a fairly hot motor without a slipper for a bit and nobody died. But then again, it was on low grip surfaces. But all D series buggies have issues with diff wear and are prone to melting various bits of the transmission without slipper clutches.

TF evo is from a very different era where battery tech was quaint by today's standards. It's light and fragile compared to contemporary buggies. A fully hopped up DB02 would be more resilient on contemporary circuits and capable of handling hot brushless motors. But not as well as almost everything else including the DB02RRR. DB02 is the 'consumerised' version of the 502x but with an inexplicable centre gearbox layout compared to the simpler version in the 502. If I wanted a shaft drive Tamiya racing buggy that's pretty much all there is. Designed for saddle packs though and who is using them these days?

Universal propeller shafts and metal drive cups meant it didn't eat itself. Aluminium suspension mounts make it more durable. Machined gearbox meant better tolerances and less chance of it eating the centre gears. The DB02 out of the box is equivalent in spec to a DB01 out of the box; very plastic albeit glass reinforced. To get it to something like DB01RRR spec you'd be well into TRF money by the time it's done.

From reading around there were design flaws in the central gearbox that required accurate shimming out - without which it would eat itself. The drive propeller joints would regularly melt from friction with the dog bones. If that didn’t happen the gears would destroy themselves. fully hopped up it could be an interesting buggy but people using them would find it hard to get them round a lap out of the box.

DB01 had an eight year run of continual improvement up to the DB01rrr. DB02 was a failure. Out of the box it didn't work and the mistakes made in the design couldn't be rectified so they killed it off. DB01 can be used as intended and DB02 is only interesting to the curious and collectors.

Nice! Do you plan to race it?

Do it, you won't be disappointed.