Tbird232ci

I was just thinking about this the other day. In the early 2000's, I was racing a TA03 when everyone had moved onto xRay, Losi XXS, TC3, RS42 etc. I was the only person running a Tamiya at the point. Everyone knew my car because it was loud. I can't remember how, but I got my hands on a set of Eagle Racing gears which were much more narrow and had a finer tooth pitch. Everyone thought I had bought a new car as it was significantly quieter.

I just picked one of these up from Japan. I didn't know anything about it until I came across it on the auction page. I had to have it. It doesn't seem to be missing much as far as hard parts. I am missing the little body mount "bobbin" on the side, and the servo arms. Along with that, this poor body took a beating in shipping. One head broke off. The other pulled out and stretched the spring. The body is also cracked really bad. But, the main reason I wanted to start a thread was to get whoever owns these to post pictures, talk about things to look out for and whatnot. With these being so old, you don't get to see many of them in the wild nor are many people talking about them. My buddy who owns a hobby shop has never seen one. These things are totally cool and deserve some love.

Today was workspace day. Over my workspace, I have a 24ish inch magnetic strip. I ended up filling the thing with tools, and I have plans to buy more fairly soon. So, I took to Amazon. I found a 6 pack of 18" magnetic strips.They came with couplers to join the strips together, but they would space the strips away from the wall, and looked terrible. I put my primitive 3d print skills to work and designed a coupler that would also make it look a little cleaner than just mounting them side by side. The fun thing is the magnet insert in the center strip was offset to one side a bit. I had to make two separate insets to make it work. Overall, I'm pretty happy with it. Also, hard to see but I mounted two magnetic strips on the shelving units on the left. I have an excessive amount of binder clips from 3d printing. I can put the clips on parts bags and then stick them to the strip for the builds that are in progress. Also, the mini Kobalt boxes are great for some RC stuff. The quality is mediocre, but they are pretty cheap.

I was looking into getting the Noble myself. The biggest downfall for me is it doesn't use the GR3E receivers that the GT3C uses. It would require replacing all of the receivers, and they are a bit more expensive. YouTube has a few decent tutorials on doing the hack. Just be sure to pay attention to the pinout of the programmer you have versus the one in the videos or forum tutorials.

This has been over the past few days, I'm very partial to the Dynamite tools. The first tool I bought specifically was a Dynamite 2mm back in 2001ish when I got my Yokomo MR4TC Pro. I really didn't want to build that with an allen key. I'll be building some RC10's and needed SAE drivers. I've come to realize that people sell completed bodies at a fairly reasonable price on ebay. My paint and body skills are not great, and this is a good way to get some of my projects completed.

I finally got around to doing the GT3C firmware hack, I had been dragging my feet for years on this. What it's showing at the moment is it's on model #62. It can now save up to 62 cars. I have two more to flash. Part of the push to finish this project is I have decided to take any RTR style RX/TX or other inexpensive 2.4g setup out of my fleet and donate them to the local hobby shop. So far, they will be getting 10 combos. They use them a lot during the holiday season.

I have a Vevor 6L ultrasonic cleaner I got off of Amazon. I love it. I usually use a mixture of water, Simple Green and Dawn dish detergent. I set the temp to 40c and usually run it for an hour to an hour and a half. Something I do is I will mostly fill the cleaner with water. I then fill jars with water and detergents, and then the parts to be cleaned. Then I drop the jars into the cleaner. Sometimes I will use something like Seafoam in a jar with all of the hardware and drop that in as well.

Finally finished the electronics. I was not looking forward to shortening the ESC and steering servo leads, but it makes the install much cleaner. The yellow antenna tube just adds a little touch as well.

Reassembled the DF02 and soldered some new wire onto the ESC. Also eliminated the power switch. Next will be shortening the servo and ESC leads, final soldering of the ESC and shock building.

This was an exciting grab for me. It looks barely run and well kept. I'm almost scared to put batteries in it.

I nabbed this DF02 as part of a big lot on Buyee a while back. It was mostly clean and mostly complete. My main target was the electronics. I was going to swap the receiver and do a wire tuck. And then it exploded. Now it's in the ultrasonic cleaner.

On race weekends, I would charge my batteries at 5 amps and they would finish around 9.1 volts. I'd try to get the battery to peak as close to race time so the battery would stay that high at the start of the race. You're totally fine.

My LHS stopped dealing with Traxxas and went over to Arrma. I've heard of a few other shops doing the same thing. A lot of Arrma cars will share parts, or have parts interchange. In some cases, the chassis itself is different, but the gear cases are the same. Or, they will be mostly the same chassis, but with different arms and bumpers. You can use various parts to widen and narrow, or lengthen, or grab parts from the brushless models to upgrade your brushed models. I have a few Traxxas products, and wish I got Arrma sooner.

I was looking into the Gorgon myself. It looks like it shares most of its suspension with the Granite. Arrma is good with using interchangeable parts across platforms. It's likely control arms could be swapped with the Typhon and widen track width pretty cheaply.

This is the majority of what I use regularly. In another tool box is the hobby knife, ball cup tools, body reamer etc. A lot of those weren't magnetic. I've also misplaced my body scissors somehow.