ewant81

I recently got some used packs and the IR values at storage charge looked bad in terms of balance (they were 2S packs). However, I thought I would try charge them *carefully* to see how well they worked. THe IR inbalance was vastly reduced when the packs were fully charged with a good charger. I'm really new to the Lipo stuff, but it has already made me slightly wary of using IR values as a determination of a battery quality. Unless you had monitored the values on the pack from brand new, and had a reliable IR measurement.

Bit of a jump in progress, but have the chassis fully built now. Receiver hasn’t been stuck down yet, and I can’t test as the front uprights are broke! Otherwise, the final bits came together easily enough. I really like the Yeah Racing alloy motor mount, its a much neater fit and might actually seal the gearbox. The original plastic one didn’t close the gap well so dirt would always find its way into the rear gearbox. And yes, I did put the plastic bushes in the front uprights as it’ll make my life easier when the new uprights eventually arrive. Last stage is to sort out the body shell and driver interior. I should strip the paint off the shell and respray. The interior I painted with some help of my dad and I really want to preserve it as it stands. However the paint has started flaking, so need to find a solution. I’m in two minds to leave it all as it is because of the memories, and that the shell shows my enjoyment with the car. Will give the shell a good wash and make a decision then.

Thanks everyone for the replies! It's nothing too exciting, just another re-build of a 'vintage' rally rc car. Will create a new thread in the Other Makes section 😃

Just wondering what the rules are you on starting a build thread for a non-Tamiya model? I’ve seen threads for other manufacturers, but before I start one I wanted to make sure it wasn’t going to get pulled.

Decided to plough on with the build, so now have the front/rear gearboxes fully built up with hubs and suspension. Of course I forgot to take a picture of this, so you will have to use your imagination. Next step in the manual is sorting out the servo's, and as I have an ESC only need to sort out the steering servo. As I mentioned at the start of this build, my steering servo had a lot of slop that I realised was due to the servo-saver splines being heavily worn. My original plan was to switch out the servo with another that I seemed to have acquired at some point that was brand new. Before installing the servo, I though it would be a good idea to strip it down and clean/regrease the gears. God know how long it had been sitting around for! For amusement I stripped down both servos and found something a bit surprising. It seems that the 'newer' Acoms AS-15 servo uses solid plastic bushes internally and the older AS-11 at least had a brass bushing. So the decision was made. Even if the difference is tiny between the bushing, the older servo looked to be in perfect condition internally and just needed a good clean and regrease. I've replaced the original servo saver with a Tamiya Hi-Torque hop-up and it does seem a whole lot more rigid. Also has the advantage of having decent splines. Hopefully this will mean that I have better steering than I had before, it really didn't self-centre properly and driving in a straight line would've been a proper challenge.

I will enjoy following your progress here! My TA01 chassis rally car is a very distant cousin to the Top Force Evo, and I do remember drooling over all the hop-up goodies it came with as standard.

Thats a nice idea on the undertray. How easy is it to pick up lexan sheets?

Had some fun over the weekend and managed to make some progress on the build. Decided that as I had a new rear gearbox case I might as well use it. Was fun to cut the parts off the sprue, it has been a long time since this kit was built! Excuse the red parts on a red background, I'm using an old chopping board as a craft mat! After some fun building the front and rear diffs, assembled the gearboxes as far as I can at the moment., I'm still waiting on the front uprights to arrive, so I think I'm just going to re-assemble with the damaged uprights for the moment. My thinking is that I can at least get the kit back together, and swapping over the front uprights later is relatively easy to do with only a few bolts. I'm enjoying myself far more than I though I would with this rebuild, so I've taken the plunge and bought another well-used electric RC car. I had originally intended on getting an XV01 kit but they are quite pricey and hard to come by at the moment. (Not ruling out an XV01, but am now in the market for a good deal only!). When I get this kit together I'll start another thread, but it'll have to be buried in the non-Tamiya section

Found a spare half hour and decided to rebuild the suspension units. Went together well and used a trick I use when working with brake fluid. Basically fill a syringe with damper oil, and use negative pressure effect to pull out all the air in the fluid. Works pretty well, no idea if I will ever notice any effect!

I take it that they no longer make/release Tamtech kits? I’m quite keen on the much smaller scale cars that can be used in smaller areas.

Spoke to Time Tunnel who I have the order in for the uprights and they didn’t get the shipment they expected from the importers. Will just have to wait it out for now. Reckon I can get on with the rebuild anyway, as the uprights aren’t so hard to swap over. In the interim have stripped and cleaned the damper units. They didn’t seem to have much return action, despite them being full of oil and it being fairly clean. Maybe on this rebuild I can get them working as they should. Funnily, when I was cleaning the dampers I had all the parts soaking in hot water in my garage. As I was gently cleaning one of the black o-rings it pinged away. Spent ages looking but couldn’t find it, so gave up and took all the cleaned parts back to my office to see the following on my desk. Sooo, seems the missing o-ring wasn’t missing! Just hadn’t taken it down with me. No idea how I managed this, but at least I didn’t lose it 😂 Also got all the bearings out the uprights, had to soak them in hot water for them to release. Cleaned the bearings in IPA and now they are soaking in oil. Looking forward to rebuilding the kit, will be able to start from scratch in the manual!

Had been soaking them in GT85, but they weren’t for shifting. So I thought I would try resting them in some hot water whilst I prepped an old piece of wood for tapping them out with screwdriver and light mallet (drilled a hole bigger than bearing, but smaller than upright). Got the upright on the wood, placed the screwdriver on the centre ready to tap, and the bearing just fell out! The hot water trick definitely worked and I got all 8 bearings out so easily. Thanks for the tip, worked wonders 😀

Yes, I did some googling and I was talking total nonsense. I didn’t know that you could get AM at such high frequency 😳

This is pretty much spot on, but I'm not sure about the early AM radio control stuff. I would say that AM at 27MHz is not possible, AM is typically in the kHz frequency spectrum. The GHz wireless isn't doing simple multiplexing of the radio signal onto a radio frequency, like FM was. With GHz radios you are essentially creating a mini network with digital packets much like your home wifi, but on a simpler scale. In fact the old WiFi systems were also in the 2.4GHz band, with more modern wifi now moving onto the 5GHz band. The big advantage of GHz radio is that, as Mad Ax said, the data sent out is 'coded' between transmitter and receiver so only those digital packets with the correct ID are decoded.

No updates on this as I'm waiting for the new front uprights to arrive. I really need to do something to keep the momentum going, so if I have some time I plan to strip, clean and rebuild the CVA units and make use of the new damper oil I have.

Out of curiosity, is your car running a full set of bearings, or the mix of plastic/metal bushes? If your running a more powerful motor, you really should switch to ball bearings everywhere. The additional friction of bushes will increase the motor temp.

I’m in the middle of rebuilding my TA01 chassis and I need to replace the front uprights as they have cracked at the steering balljoint. I have a new set of uprights on order, I’m replacing them with the standard set. The problem is that I can’t get the metal bearings out of the old uprights, and I don’t really want to force them out! Any tips for easing them out?

New rear gearbox turned up today, only needed the suspension mount but I suppose the spares are handy! Quite impressed that it comes with the necessary screws and nuts. Will save me trying to pull the sunken nuts out the old suspension mount.

I'm not sure if you are simplifying the picture here because it's easier to understand, or that you aren't aware that some receivers that have builtin BEC functionality? I have a car with an MSC and a receiver with BEC functionality. I don't need the 4AA box as the receriver can correctly cut-down the voltage to what it needs. If I wanted I could easily switch to using the 4AA pack to power the receiver, pull the power line from the MSC-> receiver and work it that way, but it's not the only solution. Here is the wiring guide for an old Acoms receiver with BEC

Yes, that's correct. You can also use a separate battery pack with 4AA batteries to power the Acoms 27MHz receiver, and in that case you would pull a pin from the MSC-> receiver cable (usually the red lead with Tamiya wiring) to not supply the 7.2V from tha main battery.

Yes, that would be very expected if there isn't something to cut down the voltage! If the receiver has BEC (battery eliminator circuitry) it's bound to tell you on the packaging. You might be able to find a 2.4GHZ receiver that has that built-in? This appears to have a BEC receiver but I would check with product manuals/supplier. (https://www.fusionhobbies.com/product/c500053-carson-reflex-pro-3-2-channel-2-4ghz-radio) From my bad memory, you can power the receiver with it's own battery pack and then to disable the power supply from the MSC it should be a case of removing a pin from the MSC->receiver connection. I'm sure someone with more definite knowledge will be along shortly!

Has this changed with modern receivers? I'm not yet up to speed with 2.4GHz systems, and on my old crystal receiver it had BEC circuitry built in.

If your receiver has at least 2 channels (I think 2 channels is the minimum), then you can run the two servos from the receiver no problem. One servo (channel 1) is your steering, and the other servo runs your MSC on channel 2. MSCs are pretty simple and robust, but they aren't infallible. If in the future you want to swap to an ESC then that also is realtively easy to do.

Looks good, and I agree with your tyre/wheel choices. If you were thinking where are you most likely to see a car with bright yellow wheels, then a trackday would be it 😂

Does anyone know the easiest way to remove bearings from the uprights? Mine seem to be well stuck in and the front uprights are getting replaced, so the bearings need to come out.