Tbird232ci

If you're racing in a stock class, every gram counts. I have been putting together a car to run in the 17.5T buggy class. The lengths people go through to shave weight is insane. Guys are grinding and narrowing gears, replacing hardware with aluminum and titanium, drilling holes, eliminating slipper clutches, using plastic pinion gears...it's insane. Just aluminum swing shafts will be negligible; likely impossible to measure. As part of a system, the weight reduction stacks.

I've seen people claim you can toss these into the dishwasher. Have you given it a try?

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.

I haven't been messing with RC stuff much lately. I've been preparing an aquarium and that has taken most of my focus lately. I have made some attempts to get my girlfriend into RC here and there, and one of her biggest issues is that she's left handed. I had bought her a Remo Hobby crawler, which is a knockoff of an Axial. It had a neat transmitter that could convert to left handed. The issue was the lack of receivers available. After a bunch of Google-Fu, I found a now-discontinued transmitter called the Ikonnik ET4, which can be converted to left handed. I found a used on with 4 receivers on eBay so I gave it a shot. It works surprisingly well! I had a 1060 esc kicking around that was missing the jumper for the brake mode which is exactly what I needed for a crawler. Next, I get to do this to her Traxxas rally.

Years back, I got into 3d printing. After much frustration, I finally got it figured out and had a decent bit of success. I had so much stuff I wanted to print that it was torture waiting for prints to finish to start the next. I did what many people do: I bought a second printer. That was great for a little while until I ended up with two printers that were down. That was the case until today. My CR10 had a wiring issue with the Z-axis limit switch. It's currently printing a stand for my Losi Mini-T's. My Ender 3 is still not working properly, but it's working well enough. That one is occupied by prints that I promised the significant other about a year ago. The dice tower and tray both came off of the printer today. The mug was a little while ago. Currently, the lid for the mug is bring printed.

I've wanted a boat for many years. It definitely scratched the itch. I'm not sure if I'll get more into them or not. If anything, I might get some cool scale looking stuff so if it sits for a few years, it's still a cool display item.

I have been living in my house for almost 7 years now. I live right by the water and my neighborhood has a beach. About 2 years ago, I bought a Banggood special boat but never ran the thing, until today.

Team BlueGroove also has a bunch of bodies with no wheel well markings so you can adjust the wheelbase to your liking. Check out their 1/12 section.

I have a Jumpshot V1 and a Stampede. Both are brushed and I run them both on a 2s lipo. All I've done is add bearings and a wheelie bar to the Stampede. The Jumpshot handles far better than the Stampede. It doesn't wheelie nearly as much, and doesn't roll over half as easily as the Stampede. If you were willing to go to a 4wd monster truck, I'd suggest an Arrma Granite Mega. I have one that's brushed. It was a little top heavy feeling but not nearly as bad as the Stampede. I ended up smoking the slipper clutch (didn't check the adjustment before running) so I did a slipper eliminator, used Jato gears, and the Granite BLX motor mount and heat sink. I widened it with Typhon arms and not it never rolls over. It's not crazy fast but it's perfect for my small yard.

I've been using the Flysky GT3C. They are mediocre as far as quality and latency, but they can be reflashed to have more channels, or something like 60 model memory. The reflash also fixes the wonky menus and controls. The main reason I stick with the GT3C is the cheap receivers and the rechargeable battery in the transmitter. I use mine for bashers and vintage runners. I wouldn't use it for any level of competitive racing.

I jumped on the Buyee bandwagon and in an RC lot, a wild Kyosho F-Ten proto appeared. This thing has had a rough life and a lot of parts are missing. I still have a bunch of misc parts in the box to go through so some parts may be in there. I would love to get this thing back together. Finding parts is already difficult, but what is more difficult is finding documentation. I have found some partial parts lists, but I can't find any manuals or exploded views of these things. Would any of you gents be able to help me find some resources on getting this thing back together?