lukej

A TRF 417X Reedy Edition 😁

As per the title, looking for a new Protoform LTC-R shell for one of my Marc Rheinard replicas, U.K. based if possible. Thanks, Luke

Seconded, it’s nice to remember how I fell in love with this hobby and it makes me appreciate the opportunity to now own so many special cars I dreamed of owning when I started out. Luke

One of the things I’m fortunate for, is that I had the foresight to retain the boxes and assembly instructions for both cars. Whilst the boxes are a little worse for wear now, I thank 12 year old Luke for his obsessive completionist nature as it allows me to restore them to their former if brief glories! Luke

Mine was a Kyosho Ultima RB buggy, back in 2002 which lasted about 10 days before I bent the conrod, seized the engine & watched it barrel roll into a grass bank which did for the body. Not long after my misadventures with the Kyosho, I bought Castrol Toms Supra 2000 TL-01 (58264) which I gradually hopped up and played with on the street until maybe 2006. When I can get a replacement shell & engine for the Ultima it’ll be rebuilt and looked after better. The TL-01 needs an overhaul and a new shell too, so those are on the refurb list. Luke

This. Unfortunately those kits are now quite pricey so picking an older model up isn’t cost effective, but I guess the TA08 Pro slots in well here & it’s not stupidly priced at €220 (Tamico), which is €20 cheaper than the new TT-02 SRX and it includes proper dampers. What makes it good? CFRP chassis, SSBB dampers, central spur placement & a bunch of TRF420 parts. What might put you off? No body, no tyres & belt drive (not ideal for the OP). What might you be indifferent about? It’s not “Full Option”, because Tamiya, needs all the electrics including a motor and ESC unlike a base TT-02. The TB Evo8 is a much bigger step here, even more race focussed so probably not worth considering. Luke

Honestly, some variant of the TT-02 is probably the best start point. I don’t have the newest releases but the collection currently includes: 2x box stock versions for car park bashing. 2x heavily hopped up versions for a stock indoor race class. 1x SR with many extra parts for a stock outdoor race class built following @qatmix’s advice. 1x KRv4 because @wtcc5 is a genius. 2x KRv4 being built to a hybrid “KRF” spec with blue parts. The M Chassis are great too, mostly for the same reasons as the TT-02 in that you can build them from car park bashers into full race spec cars. Separately, I love the TRF line and have a 415 MSXX MRE, a 417X Reedy Edition, a 420 & a 420X. That whole post could have been shortened by saying hi, my name is Luke and I have a Tamiya addiction. Luke

What’s possibly being missed here are 3 things: 1) The American brands are very speed/race focussed and the language they use reflects both that and their home market (bigger is better, more is more, AMERICA!). 2) The Japanese brands seem to push the value/inherent goodness of modelling/crafting which is reflective of their culture. 3) The way a kit is designed, made and supplied will be entirely dependent on how the end user will interact with it. An RTR is a cheaper thing to produce than a kit to be built. With all that said, there are definitely kit brands which shade Tamiya for quality vs price at the performance end of the spectrum. I hear great things about the new Ruddog Iris TC, XRAY make beautiful high performance kits, Mugen the same & there are more besides, but are any of those brands as notable across the hobby as Tamiya? I’d argue not. Luke

Nice to get the autograph! I’m trying to arrange something similar with my 415 MSXX MRE which I’m trying to build to his exact specs! Luke

So a brief update post spree, the photo above shows some of this anyway, in that the shell has been trimmed & body holes cut. I tried the horizontal rear posts, but in both configurations I failed and the holes weren't aligned well, this it transpires is because I took a level from the wrong component and despite measuring many times I still cocked it up. Vertical posts it is then! Mounted and shot from the all important 3/4 angle A few parts arrived today for me to sort the wheel situation out, but despite my best efforts to match the kit tyres I came up short. TTP have come to the rescue on this one and will ship me another pair shortly so that they're all the same rolling radius. RM delivered this assortment in 24 hours, so not bad. The shell has now been washed, and weather permitting it'll be painted tomorrow to finish this initial build off. There are a few niggles however that I'll need to resolve with some blue hop-ups, you didn't think I'd leave this stock did you? Obviously the use of blue aluminium screws and ball joints is pure necessity The new adjustable servo saver was bought to resolve a tracking problem, and it has absolutely not done that, so I'll get the turnbuckle steering rod (54195) ordered and hopefully I can remedy the problem that way. Obviously it's box stock bar some colourful hex heads just now, so there's a certain amount of play in things, but I'll shim what I can and play with it in the car park. I must remember - THIS WAS NEVER MEANT TO BE A RACE CAR. Luke

No worries, the build has progressed a bit but I was somewhat distracted by the arrival of the other M Chassis I mentioned… Did someone say shopping spree? 😂 Luke

Evening all! After last night’s unsuccessful attempt to route the ESC and servo wires through the main chassis, something I chalked up to a combination of tiredness and frustration, I woke up this morning thinking that today might be more fruitful and to an extent that has proven to be the case. Having removed the mounting plate for the ESC and receiver, something that I love the M-05 for as it makes servicing easier, I had access to the openings in the chassis either side of the servo housing and could now easily pass the wiring through to the receiver side. The proposed solution. As you can see in the picture below however, with a full size servo in place, the remaining space is limited and a tidy wiring path is hard to come by. Yes, I could have made it work by fiddling around endlessly, but this would not do well for my stress levels, something this hobby is supposed to reduce. The problem. It's a happy accident then that I also have a TT-02 for bashing, and that this had a cheap low-profile servo on it! The solution! We can almost consider each of these as the donor car for the other, with the servo swap being rather easy, and the TT-02 high torque servo saver that went unused last night finding a home on the appropriate car. I must confess that was the original idea but so not exactly a happy accident but instead just forward planning in action. Servo installed. As you can see, the wiring now exits the chassis in a much neater way, so I’ll curl the cables, reinstall the receiver mount and that should be that! Much better! When I drafted this update, I didn't have replacement wheels for the car, and as such progress was halted. On my way home from a medical appointment today I did get a chance to visit the LHS however, so whilst I still don't have THE wheels & tyres, I have some that will eventually make their way onto a future M chassis for racing. With the above in mind, I'll prep the body for paint, resolve the the mysterious absence of my soldering iron, and then set about completing the build! In a bit! Luke

Speed build as in build quickly, not built for speed 😉 Thanks though Luke

Last one of the night here, but it just shows a few details that I wanted to bring over from my normal builds. The first is blue wheel hexes, not because they're blue but because they make wheel changes less fiddly, which is always a win and I had these spare. The second is the the combination of TA-05 body supports on the front body posts, and a more racy rear body post orientation. What I like about the M-05 is the square locator peg for the posts which means you can rotate the post back 90 degrees from the instructions and have horizontal rear posts. I'll work this out more tomorrow but it looks like it should work. I also planned on using a blue Tamiya servo saver that I had spare, but it doesn't fit inside the chassis so I'm stuck with the dull beige plastic one included in the kit. Another thing for me to look into tomorrow! Anyway, it's not quite done today, but the new wheels and tyres should arrive later this week so I can hopefully send it around the car park outside my flat on Friday or Saturday. Cheers! Luke

With the electronics installation up next, I decided to rummage around in the electrical spares box and see what came up, and in this case it was a Futaba R203GF receiver that came bundled with my 3PX transmitter last year. With all my other cars run an R304 SBS-E or higher, this one has been sat unused and still had the protective film on. In this top down view, you can see that I've temporarily located the servo, and I'm about to plan my wiring routes for both the receiver and the Carson ESC that came bundled with the M-05. I like tidy wiring and have to make sure everything is where I want it to be before I stick it down. Hint - it wasn't. Receiver placed, the path the wires will take is now pretty fixed. In the background, you'll see that the battery and motor wires were originally coming over the top of the ESC & heatsink to reach the front of the car. I didn't like that. Progress. As you can see here, the servo has been removed so that I can see if there's any routes I can send the wires to hide them, the ESC has been rotated 180 degrees and the On/Off switch is due to be repositioned. Satisfied with the new placement, I stuck both the ESC and the receiver down, and set about correcting the motor orientation which in earlier pictures shows the green wire near the top. As it was, the green and yellow wires crossed each other and this created a less clean look, so I clocked the motor 180 degrees and that's tidied things up. Luke

Refuelled on katsu curry (the Japanese link was entirely unintentional), and with renewed enthusiasm for completing this today, I set about assembling the first two turnbuckles of this M-05 build. I'll take an accuracy of +0.09mm on most days, but with the challenges I'd met already on this build, I was even happier to leave it at that. Better still, I then discovered that the callipers were reading +0.1mm and that actually I was accurate to -0.01mm on each of these. Ecstatic! Front end finished, it was time to turn my attention to the rear of the car and follow the "L" instructions required for the GR Yaris body. In progress. And done. One thing that did stick out to me in this build, is that the order of certain things in the manual makes little sense, like the attachment of the rear hubs to the chassis prior to bearing installation and the installation of the outer bearings in the front hubs after that even. Anyway, by the time I'd twigged that this was the case, the car was assembled and I was now trying to press bearings home with less access than I'd like. No bother, challenges are meant to be overcome and in the moment I had two choices: 1. Disassemble the hub assemblies and fit the bearings as I would any other car. or 2. Utilise the cheap plastic bushings & a hex nut included in the kit to make a bearing press/stake set-up. I chose option 2, which I've recreated here for explanation, because my engineering degree needs to have some use right? To be clear, this only works on the fronts, where you can lock out the drive cup with a slotted screwdriver, but essentially the nut & bushes force the bearings into the hub with a nice even pressure and press them home. It's simple really, and the even pressure is almost certainly less of an issue on bearings this size than on the 1:1 race cars I'm used to, but its basic engineering principles and one of the reasons I advocate for race drives to build RC cars and learn about the way they work - it all scales! Luke

With little doubt in my mind that I am now the problem with this build, I decided to just follow the instructions instead and begin at the beginning, because it is definitely the most sensible place to start. Here's a quick rundown of my pre-dinner achievements: Bearings at the ready. This might be a car park basher but I'm going to allow myself the basic improvements. Main chassis together, front end being assembled. Front end complete except for the turnbuckles because I jumped ahead (I really hate turnbuckles) and installed the stock silver can to preserve some sanity. Luke

Thanks, I will try and not invest in this, definitely fail at not investing in it, and update this tread months from now with why I failed to finish another build Luke

Semi-frustrating as the early part of this build had been, it would all be plain sailing shortly I assured myself, and set about with the definitely simple task of mounting the tyres to the wheels. Exhibit A Exhibit B. Definitely not losing patience here. Long story short, the tyre glue I bought from the LHS was too thin and dried almost on contact, leaving the tyre seated improperly and destroying the rim. Debonder didn't work, removing the tyre didn't work, guess I'm buying new wheels, tyres and foams then. Oh and the glue is now in the bin... Luke

I expect that you already have questions about the items on that table, questions like “Why is there a hard case LiPo on the table?” and “ Did you not know that the M-05 takes a stick pack?”, to which I shall answer “Because I’m an idiot” and “No, I did not”. Anyway, in the land of Blue Crack & incredible forethought I actually had a spare stick pack & cheap servo which will now take residence in this M-05 that I intend to be a car park basher, and as such I can move ahead with the build unhindered by my previous error. Et voila! In another moment of clouded judgement, I'd also picked up the Hobbywing EZRUN brushless system as seen earlier, thinking that I could test it in the M-05 prior to its installation in another M chassis that's soon to be delivered (I couldn't help myself). This would have been a great idea, it turns out, had I checked the box and noted that it comes with XT-60 connectors and not Deans connectors as I normally use. F! Moving on. Luke

I’ll begin at the beginning, because it seems like the most sensible place to start, with a photo of my dining table and some fresh boxes. Of course I have to be grateful to those who gifted me money for RC cars this Christmas, without them I’d have spent even more of my own earnings on this addiction! Luke

Evening all, hope you have had a great Christmas and are suitably recovered from seasonal gluttony before the NYE festivities hit. As the title suggests, I’ve decided to try something new for once, and actually finish the build of one of my cars! If you hadn’t guessed, my aim is to build my new Tamiya M-05 speedily, with the original target of completing it in an afternoon. Obviously that hasn’t happened… Anyway, to the build! Luke

Why do I feel like the three of us are increasingly responsible for this forum’s purchasing of mad old Tamiya Tourers? Side note, I’m trying to resist the urge to buy 14 BNIB older cars from Japan (FF x2, TA02W x1, TA03R x1, TA04 x1, TA05 x2, TA05 ver.II x1, TA05-IFS x1, TB-02 x1, TB-03 x2, TL-01 x1, TT-01 x1). Save me? 😂 Luke

I’m away this weekend, can let you know on Monday. Luke

I don’t have this model, but I do have a similar one plus a couple of acorns receivers & servos. Luke