system11

We don't have any weighing scales :/ Actually now I pick them up together (I finished the build at last, just waiting for the 16T pulleys), there's not a /huge/ difference there in weight. Doing the window border decals on the PIAA are a PITA

To be honest looking at the kit, it looks like they had planned a tensioner for these - there are mounting holes in exactly the right place on top of the crossover that covers the battery. Mine shimmies an awful lot (thankfully not enough to touch anything but it's **** close where the top deck joins the front gearbox), mostly at lower to mid RPM - take it right up and it's comparatively smooth. If anyone knows of an aftermarket tensioner set for these cars let me know. I've toyed around with a few ideas, but nothing that would stand up to the abuse properly. I'm running it with a Novak brushless setup, it sounds like it's going to explode every time you crank the speed up! One idea I did have was to find two slightly larger gears for the drive belt.. I think one with more teeth was available for the car - presumably it had a slightly larger diameter, two of those might do the trick. Other slight downside is I thought carbon fibre was supposed to be light? ;-) The car weighs slightly more than my standard TA03. Pictures of the car so far are in my showroom, the shell is halfway through being cut ready for wash + paint. It has several aluminium parts that are plastic as standard, and I dropped the wide axle kit with spacer in favour of actual wide wheels, and put some universals on the back instead.

I've got the same chassis - no tensioner seems a poor design... At some rpm the upper and lower parts of the belt shimmy madly up and down, can't be healthy. I've checked, replaced, checked again the pulleys and so on for potential defect, it just won't go away. I don't know if it does this under load so to speak - have only run the car up in the air.

Hi, I'm trying to find a new 53325 option set, aluminium steering knuckles for the TA03. Anyone got some they'd like to sell? cheers, james

Looks a bit like a Javelin with gold plate too.

The thing that caught me out doing a modern kit after not far off 20 years, was the softer plastic they're made from now is much easier to strip - seems to vary a lot too, there's not much resistance between tight and overtight, far less than you might think, and far less than there used to be!

Thought it might be fun to try and get together a few people who just like bashing, I had a look around for local clubs and the only thing I found was again touring cars. Proper touring racing isn't my thing, I do own one now, but it's purely for driving randomly around smooth surfaces and fishtailing Looks like around here at least, the art of finding some spare ground and just thrashing buggies about is dead. Willing to be proven wrong Shame I missed the Kent thing, was too ill and too budy with work to go.

Does anyone in or around Cambridge have any suggestions for good places to take cars? I found a couple myself - detailed below. 1) Industrial estate off the Tesco mini roundabout in Milton. Turn into the estate here and take the first right. Park up on this section of road. You've got two options here. On Sunday and much of Saturday the long road curving off to the left is locked, but you can walk around the barrier. This gives you access to a long stretch of rough tarmac with a few speedbumps to jump off. At the end of this section is a mixture of concrete and tarmac, and some gravel/dirt usually with puddles and potholes, so the area is great for buggies and trucks. 2) Same place above but right where you park is a loading bay area with some white shutters, this is SMOOTH concrete and well sized for touring cars, lots of sideways sliding action to be had here. There's a strip of rocky mess at the edge of it which may be good for crawling - I'll test that this weekend. 3) Science park, various carparks many of which are huge and utterly deserted at the weekends. Also the Napp (I think) building, has a secondary works entrance near the WorldPay one - there's a good mix of road/scrub/wavy grassland here. 4) Sainsburies car park. If you can avoid the screaming Nova WRX STI (they wish) sheds, which aren't often there anymore, their overflow carpark is a big oval, and lit all night despite the shop itself being closed. Mwuahahaha. Any more? If anyone wants to get together and pointlessly bash a few cars around at the weekends, let me know. james

After going flat out to get the mad bull, twin det, mod clod and monster beetle all 100% and ready to go, a combination of the flu and my work mobile (on call rota....) made the weekend an absolute misery and stopped me going. Better luck next time I suppose :/

quote:Originally posted by BlazingDragonGlad to see you liked it; I'm still looking for a NIB Mad Bull for a sensilbe price (in the USA). How's your Twin Detontor coming along? id="quote">id="quote">I ran it once so far, about 20 yards up the street. Then I took it apart again for more tweaking The paint is currently drying on the wheels, there's a pic just after build 1 in my showroom, and a pic of how the chassis looks now - there's now an ESC and two Peak Dragon 19T motors. They've been dynod so that the normal rotation motor is stock timing, and the reverse motor has been timed to match it for RPM while running backwards. I made a new motor wiring loom because the Tamiya one really isn't long enough. When the paint is dry on the wheels, and some spacers or stronger springs put on the shocks, it should be ready to roll. Advice for any Twin Det owners looking for shock upgrades - the low friction damper set listed on the back of the manual is a a VERY borderline hopup application. It reduces the height and travel, and under hard acceleration it'll essentially bottom out at the back. Much better (and I will be doing this soon) is to get hold of some of the extended shock mounts, and put a set of 4" on there instead. It should be pretty fast, I'm measuring just over 23500 RPM at the motors when both running, the motors can be timed up to just under 28000, but of course the torque vanishes there. While the paint is drying, I'm stripping down a 2nd hand Monster Beetle for a rebuild with bearings and a few better electronics A mod clod is soon to be in the post, and hopefully a Kyosho Optima too. Looks like the bug is back..

(for the benefit of anyone searching for info on Mad Bulls) Well I ended up with a Twin Detonator and a second hand Mad Bull. The MB is hopped up with bearings, and a Vega ESC and 21T motor. Absolutely brilliant little car and the rumours of near indestructability are true - 4 corner cartwheel today for several meters with no breakage.

Well, wanted to put my Twin Detonator together this weekend, so while I was in Stevenage I saw the Peak branded version of the Much-More dyno - £150 but reduced to £135. Very happy with it, does what it says on the tin, and I now have a pair of Dragon 19T motors that run the same speed, one in reverse. If anyone is interested - 19T Dragon at factory timing is approximately 150% as fast as the stock 540, but draws almost 3 times the power to do it. So there you go

I might be able to go to this too - Cambridge is not a million miles away... Be a good way to truly christen my Twin Det, if I can get hold of a basic dyno before then and match the timing on the new motors! Might be able to bring a Mad Bull with a silly motor, and a Monster Beetle along too. I haven't been to any kind of RC meeting since the 80s. Back then, our local group was so small we never had problems with being on the same channel - how do you guys organise that these days (or is it still usual to only actually see 6 people wanting to drive at once? I miss my Frog... It was so truly knackered, but still fun! It had suffered heavily in an accident with a BMX, and never quite recovered.

Hi, does anyone have any recommendations for a budget dyno? I don't want anything fancy - just something that will measure the RPM at a set voltage, for balancing twin motors cheers, james

I found a good place for the receiver battery pack by the way The receiver block doesn't use much of that double sided sticky pad, use the other half to stick the pack sideways to the top of the chassis, between the two front bodyshell mounts. Then get a pair of long cable ties, and loop them through the lower chassis crossbars, do them up relatively tightly around the battery pack (with batteries installed), but so they can still be slid side to side. End result is that you can slide them across, put batteries in, then slide them back into place as an extra restraint. It looks ok, but of course adds a little weight to the front. Fitting them to the back would be much harder due to the radio mast! After lots of googling and asking a forum member here (Coolhands), the first few coats of the iridescent paint are drying [8D]. I'm using a halogen garage light to hold it up against and judge whether the paint is going on evenly. It seems to do the trick, although it's like staring at the sun. Do you sell alloy wheels that will fit the Twin Detonator (hopefully retaining the standard tyres)? Does anyone? The standard white looks a bit out of place against the colour I'm putting on! Also trying to find places that sell more generic decals, as orange against pink/gold is a bit of an eyesore too.

I'm in the same boat as you - decided to revisit the hobby and ended up with a Twin Detonator! Bought it yesterday, it's now in running order (with ballrace and low friction alloy damper sets on), but I haven't run it yet aside from screaming across the kitchen and knocking the bin over. Shell is unpainted you see, so I don't want to cover it with grime before painting. I got bitten by exactly the same issue described with the servo screw, other things I noticed with the kit is that due to the not-quite-rigid plastic it's very easy to overtighten screws, but seemingly with little damage - one to watch for.. Only other assembly issue was the speed controller wires really not wanting to follow their suggested cableruns, and a short power switch connector forcing reversal of the receiver. Back to the original question, I got a 24 bearing set but was told that people have said it contains spares. I think some people have failed to replace the brass(?) solid bearings on one of the gears in the gearboxes, you do definitely need the 24. I was asking the guy in Time Tunnel about higher speed motors and ESC kits, he said that ideally you need to be using one of the high end ESCs to cope with slightly 'special' motors, but you can get away with running a pair of 21s on the standard speed controller as long as you don't taxi it everywhere at low speed. Reading another thread, I'm wondering if the two 21 turn motors I bought (cheap) would be better replaced with a couple of Trinity 'Revenge Of Monster' motors. Anyone know how the Monster motor would stack up against the Vega Volt 21t ones I have? I've not actually fitted those yet - one bit of advice I was given in the shop was to run the stock motors a few times first to let the gearbox wear in, before putting more power through it. He said I should actually run it without the bearings too, but I decided not to take that advice reading the manual and seeing just how much would need to be taken apart to put them in later ;-) Final note - if you decide to go for the shocks upgrade too, the low friction set comes with some instructions - follow them to a point but look at the note in the TD manual, as the rubber rings go on in a different order, and the stock TD springs must be used. I put in some soft oil - was advised this is better for a rough terrain car as the suspension returns more quickly after a shock.

Went to Time Tunnel today, saw a Mad Bull run - great looking car but I can see what people mean when they refer to the steering and front suspension. After seeing a Twin Detonator run too, I decided that was probably going to be a better bet. Sitting here next to me is the kit, the radio gear, a nice big 3000mah battery, some iridescent pink/gold paint and some black overcoat, a ballrace set, two Vega Volt 21 turn motors, and two pairs of aluminium dampers (also met. pink). I'll put pictures on the showroom when it's finished, before I take it to the quarry/sandpit type place locally and thoroughly 'test' it If it's still not quick enough I'll get some 19/18 turn motors and a twin motor ESC. I've been advised to assemble it stock first and bed it in with a few runs before fitting the motors I have now, so that's a little bit in the future Now to test that paint on some spare clear plastic I have lying around...

I was going to London tomorrow, but I think I'll go via Stevenage and visit one or both of the shops there, see what they can hook me up with I couldn't decide between a truck or buggy to be honest, hence looking at the Mad Bull to start with! I visited a small local (Cambridge) model shop to see what they had, times certainly have changed - it used to be that you could go into even a borderline hobby shop and see 10+ different kits to choose from, all I found this time was a Wild Willy 2, the Baja cars (they look identical?) and a slightly more interesting Blackfoot Extreme (is that any good?) Aside from that, it was RTR city, which takes away a large part of the fun in my opinion, lots of touring cars (ditto), and nitro powered - which are just too fast and noisy for what I wanted.

Hi all, many years ago I used to enjoy thrashing a Kyosho Raider, a friends held-together-with-superglue Frog, and later my Vanquish around the local BMX track (whatever happened to those...?). I've decided it's time to have a little fun again with RC cars, so I'm looking for a fun lowish cost basher (right word?) to throw around the garden, local park+ride car park, rough scrubland and the like - possibly even the Portland Bill rocky scrub on holiday. I tried to do as much homework as possible before pestering people for help, things have changed a lot (and yet we're still using 7.2v packs!?), but I've got a suggested car setup in mind. If it looks like a really bad idea, or if there's something far better to pick, please correct me I'm looking at picking up a Mad Bull, and adding a ball race kit, a 19x2 Orion Dragon motor, some ESC (as advised hopefully by a friendly shopkeeper) that can cope with it, and a good old fashioned twin stick Acoms. Few questions though - I like cars to be slightly tricked out, even if they're never going to be competitive. Can the shocks be replaced with decent aluminium dampers, are they common sizes or do I need specific parts? Will the gearbox when fitted with bearings cope with the motor? Should I go for something with a few more turns instead, if so which? Will the differential cope, and if not - can it be upgraded at all? Apologies if this is the wrong place to ask! Opinions welcome! I was about to just find a 2nd hand Frog, but then I read about parts availability being a bit of an issue with older cars, and also read that Mad Bulls are almost indestructable. Looks cool too. cheers, james