Chad1376

More sludge.

Rusty truck stage 1. More patina to follow.

Scratch-built toolbox. It'll be a good place to mount switches for lights, 'n stuff.

Interior painted + Wink mirror and headliner.

Dashboard and door details. Now I need to add some stuff for the center console.

Right now, they have soft springs and no oil. I want to get the car built, with all the added weight, before I juggle springs and fill them up.

Some more progress. Added a servo for the steering wheel, used some glass for lighted gauges on the dash and added elevated floorboards.

Learning how to fabricate pieces with styrene. It's a learning curve, but a lot of fun. So far I have a center console over the battery and a dash board. I'll need a false floor over the chassis floorboards to get the seats up higher. That'll be OK, since it'll give me lots of room for electronics. Shocks upgraded too. Also, I bought a cheapo micro-servo. I'm going to try to have a working steering wheel tied to the steering input and modify Ralphie so his arms move.

I'm tackling my first crawler. I'm starting with a Redcat Gen8 chassis and a Jeep Comanche hard body. Here's where I'm at so far. I had to do a lot of trimming to the chassis and clear holes in the bed to get the body to sit down on the frame. I have a lot of detail and finish work ahead. Also, I'm going to attempt fabrication of an interior with styrene and some detail parts. Finding a driver that's not a ripped muscle-man was tough. That's Ralphy from Christmas Story. Luis from Ghost Busters is on the way. They might be a little small, but I think they'll look OK once in the truck. I've been reviewing all sorts of weathering techniques. I want this to look like a rusty beater when it's done.

A quick edit with some "on-car" video. The car really boots the cones when it whacks them. That run was with a 17.5 turn motor. I tried out my new 9.5 turn today. It lays "11's" until I run out of parking lot. Here's my poor tires after 1-battery.

So, it's kind of ugly, but it works. I used one of the extra base-model battery retainers, flipped it upside down, and did a little bit of hacking with a Dremel tool. I wanted to get the camera as low and centered on the car as possible. The weight of the camera does negatively affect handling, but not too bad. Bonus, it fits under the body. My body has hazy window tint paint, but I think I can get decent "in-car" footage with an unpainted window. No good footage yet. I ran the car (sans body) but forgot to charge the GoPro battery first (argh!!!).

Something to think about. Most cheaper GPS receivers only sample at 1-hz, meaning they will only collect positional data every second. Unless you hold your peak speed for over a second (probably 2 seconds) and get two data points at that speed, I believe it will calculate a speed less than your real peak. I noticed even the SkyRC only has a 1hz sample rate. There's 10hz and faster receivers, but they'll obviously be more expensive.

oops - I almost forgot about my own topic I really like the ideas here. The 1/2 tennis balls are my favorite - I could even get orange balls. There is one fatal flaw. My dogs live-and-die by the tennis ball. If I were to buy a bag, cut them in half, and not throw them, it would cause doggie PTSD. I got my car running, and the pods painted orange. I haven't tried them yet for two reasons: 1) It's been very windy the last few days. 2) I need to sharpen my driving skills more before setting up a complex course. I've been practicing slalom on the tips of parking stripes, but need more "seat time." There's a few other local Autocrossers that have RC cars too. Maybe this weekend I'll organize a small race. It'll be tough to create a course that suits the varied types of vehicles that everyone has though. I'll post up some pictures if I get something cool set up.

I can't speak to pre-corona availability. The need to find an at-home hobby is the whole reason I'm re-entering RC in the first place. I have had some frustration with a lot of products being listed "out of stock", but wasn't sure if that was the norm or not. I've been able to use my Google-foo to source most parts I want and get reasonably fast shipping. It usually requires a little more effort looking at multiple sources. Please clarify on your experience with Hong Kong shipping. I'm seeing a lot of cool stuff (M chassis bodies, etc.) that I haven't been able to find elsewhere. I was afraid to order, since I assumed it would be 6-months before I saw a package. If you've seen reasonable shipping time frames, I might look at some of those sites more closely.

First Drive: It's FWD (duh) - with all the FWD handling quirks. Need to modulate throttle gingerly to get it to turn. Need to back off the throttle, not "nail it" when understeer occurs. Power-off to induce oversteer and get the car to rotate. All the reasons I chose the M07 and not the M08. I think it makes for a more realistic driving experience, since it requires more finesse, rather than brute-force RWD drifting. That being said, I do want to stiffen the rear end and play with the alignment to get more power-off rotation. I'm also going to want a hotter motor pretty quickly.