•Axle

So... I have been speaking to Rachid, and he’s assured me that the GF01 platform is very strong indeed, and not to worry about it, he currently has a thunder tiger 5300kv with a Hobbywing esc. He’s filled the diff with 100000cps oil which is sticky and better for drifting. Before he turned it into a drifter he ran a 6900kv castle motor in it and assured me that the chassis and gears are strong enough! I can only presume that with the same gears in the WR02 it will be strong enough, and what is it going to cost if it isn’t? New gears and a motor... Here’s some photos of his car and a video he kindly let me have to show.

Seems to work alright, please ignore my daughters little knick-knacks everywhere. 3C8B1B57-E6D2-4D1C-967B-4A8731C84F3B.mov

Ahhhhhhh! – I don’t know what to say, the drifting setup works because everything is moving pretty much freely without grip, meticulously well oiled gears and bearings, no grip on small tires on a smooth slippery surface. I would hate for you to go and spend a lot of money on something only to have a few minutes fun and then have something go on it, with the setup my chassis is see-though and I’m checking the pinion and gears for damage every now and again, looking at the drive shafts and the shaft pins as they keep flying out. You can with the Hobbywing esc dial everything right down, punch and brake force. You can on the transmitter reduce the top end. It sounds a lot of fun indeed if you can get it working right, I’m actually short of breath thinking about it as they’re only plastic gears. Im only going to 4000kv with double the gears that the WR02 has to move.

Another thing for me on this is that I do not know the characteristics of your kit with what you’ve done, I know the VW bus WR02, and it was very much a wheelie machine compared to the Gf-01, position of battery is different. I don’t want to recommend you something that won’t be right. With the slicks you’ve got on you’d probably be getting a bit of wheel spin. 😃 I think you’re going to need a program card for any esc you choose, there’s quite a few settings you can change with the Hobbywing.

Connections type, me personally I’ve gone from Tamiya to deans and now have two 6 cell NiMH batteries and the 2s lipo with a deans as well, GF01 with a 20t on NiMH with the 3300kv is very pleasant and definitely a huge upgrade to stock esc with sport tuned, trying out the lipo today for the first time – the car is rapid acceleration wise, plus top end has changed too! I’m happy keeping 1 lipo in circulation for now. I think this is what was meant; 1) Go with the spur gear upgrade, you’ll get less wheelie and more top end, the motor wouldn’t whine as much either. 2) Go for a brushless combo and drop the standard esc, between 3300kv > 4000kv, I could now say, after using a 2s lipo I really like the way my car is and will not change anything, but would build the same in the future with a higher kv motor. 4000kv and the spur I would be scared of, not too sure what that would do to gears and drive shafts. I know of someone running 5000kv + in a GF01 but he’s done a drifting setup with no grip wheels that are smaller.

This the one I’ve seen ‘plastic welding’ using a soldering iron and plastic ties, I wonder if it’s the same type of plastic / rc body is thick enough.

My first run with a lipo, all hail the lipo!.. ...And everything is still in one piece 😃👍

These really take me back to my childhood, I specifically remember clawing out pebbles from a dry dusty unmade road trying to make up a course.

My first lipo battery, a 2s 3325mah pack, slightly longer than a standard NiMH, charged it up and changed settings on my esc to accommodate it. Cannot wait for tomorrows drive!

Took Boris out for a run today, I have no idea why my daughter named the truck Boris, must have heard it somewhere 😂

Yep, what you see here are the big bore springs on a standard off road shock set they do, so here I get full movement which is great and there’s resistance when I push down with my hand, only thing I notice is that it will bounce back up again slightly. You would just think that with the long arm kit and the shocks they do with it everything would work well, it’s got to be user error, might nip into a LHS to see what they think.

I tried to get more movement out of them, buying the 80mm shocks but it interferes with the drive shafts as the angle is too much, perhaps I should try 70mm...

GF01 uprated a little, please don’t laugh too much 😃.

Yep, I had them set all the way down to the bottom, the hard 60mm springs had enough in them to lift about 70% of the arms movement, but the shocks provided no cushioning on a small landing or ramp impact.

I’ve had issues with a set of shocks from the beginning, rebuilt them and went as far as to buy a new set. Got all air out the new set, got rebound working correctly, one thing with these shocks is that with the stiffest springs still won’t fully extend the shock fully back out again (soggy bottom and non-existent front). To get them working I’ve squeezed in 80mm spring into 60mm shocks, and they now are slightly bouncy but at least fully extend and also take jumps well without bottoming out. Should shocks work straight out of the packet, are they built with underrated components so you have to buy hop-ups? Yeah Racing 60mm shock set with big bore soft 80mm springs, without any shocks involved everything is lubricated and moves freely. Cheers, Al

So I’ve been building up my GF01 for the past few months, found more and more titanium parts, the Yeah Racing kit, bling I know, but I really like how stable it is at speed, couldn’t buy a Thrust brushless system on Modelsport, so bought a Hobbywing Max10 3300kv combo, only running NiMH at the moment with deans connectors, I have to say it runs like a dream, there’s nothing comical about it apart from the looks, it’s a beast! Run times are longer than the stock TLBE02s with a sport tuned motor and so much more powerful / faster on NiMH, I’m sticking a 2s in it next week with all settings dialed down. Top end speed, it’s probably stable enough now to take a higher kv motor, but I’m not going over 4000kv due to space in my area, plus I don’t want to break anything just for the sake of adding more speed.

https://gearsolutions.com/features/polish-grinding-of-gears-for-higher-transmission-efficiency/ This is an interesting read, what I’m taking from it is they did a two step process, gear grinding and gear polishing, also somewhere in there they noted that keeping the lower parts of the gears pitted was beneficial as it kept the lubricant in the right place.

Thanks for this, I think this is what I’m asking, is there a certain sound you get from spinning the gears that tells you it’s done, or is it after inspecting the teeth that you’ll know not to push it any further? I’m presuming that after destroying a few diffs you end up with a sixth sense.

Hi all, So after tinkering many evenings during lock down I’ve decided to repeat my steps over and over, learning more and trying to achieve more with each time I build, looking at the finer details I’m interested in lapping differential gears and shimming the gearbox. At the moment I’m not worried too much about destroying something if I learn from what happened to it, and so I decided to add liquid diamond polish to the diff gears generously, do it up shove half a dog bone into a dremel and listen to see if the sound reduced over a few moments... It did and it also the metal parts got rather warm 😅 (I do not recommend spinning the diff with a dremel btw, it spins very fast and is dangerous). The outcome is that all the top surfaces of the gears are shiny and the side profile of the gear teeth are much more rounded compared to brand new gear teeth. What am I trying to achieve you might be asking? From my understanding if I get the gears running smoothly with new clean grease the diffs will last longer, they will be quieter and more efficient. I’m aiming to get everything running perfectly in the kit. Any thoughts from you all would be most welcome, I have different grades of diamond polish and could run from harsh the fine thinking I would achieve very smooth mirror like gears. Thanks for you time, Axle

I may have found and alternative to a step screw, and also have found a use for the polymorph thermoplastic I bought a few years ago. Just applied some around a screw with a washer and pushed it into the step screw hole, screwed it tight and pulled off the excess while it was still payable. I’ll update if it hasn’t worked out, testing tomorrow.

Removed, as there was better answer.

I think this is it, the WR-02 VW bus got my attention, then the 4WD variant came along and they had me hooked… I’ve just stuck a 3300kv brushless system in it and it’s everything I wanted from it.

Thanks for that @isomer1, I think I fall into the cheaper models category. I made a decision in my head to build up the best GF01 I could think of which I feel is almost complete, replacing all standard parts with a titanium version, within reason, if I could buy titanium dog bones and king pins at the correct length trust me, I would. So the step screws I have are from a Yeah Racing kit with a machine thread, so it looks like I’m going down the flanged tube route. I’m finding it fascinating finding exotic screws, and it’s a huge game finding the correct screw. As on previous threads I’ve mentioned I was bored, but now I’ve found my thing / hobby after a long hibernation period...

Has anyone got tricks for using standard screws in replacement of step screws? I was thinking about some sort of metal tubing cut to the right size to compensate, basically I want to use titanium screws throughout my build but cannot find titanium step screws. cheers, Al

Thanks for that!