SST Open Day, December 2021 - photos and review

[Mad Ax]

On 28th December, 2021, the gates to Binegar Quarry in deepest Somerset were opened once more to a crowd of RC enthusiasts and their off-road trucks.  A heavy storm overnight left the roads littered with fallen branches and half the quarry under a few inches of water, but even though it was still raining heavily at 10am, the die-hard scale crawler fans weren't deterred from working off some Christmas pounds with a brisk walk in the unwelcoming English winter weather.

The event is only 35 minutes from my home, so I had a lazy morning loading the van with my crawler collection before setting off in the rain for a quiet journey avoiding puddles and branches, stopping en route to grab some freshly-baked bread rolls for my bacon and egg sarnies at lunchtime.  The quarry was already busy when I arrived, so I stuck a 3S pack into the Gmade BOM and went off to pay my £10 entry fee and locate my friend Nick and his TRX-4 F150.

There's plenty of space at the quarry, so despite a fair number of people arriving, we could all space out well.

There were no gated courses or marked trails at this simple open day, but the event organisers had brought along some props that they hope to use in the big Southern Scale Trail event in April.

The BOM performed really well, first over the rocky section in the open bowl of the quarry, and then through the heavy mud of the woodland section.  We took a long stroll around the quarry cliffs, which were less interesting to crawl over but made for a nice walk, before heading back to the vans to change batteries.

[Mad Ax]

I swapped over to the CFW-X with the J45 body, and we attacked the tough, rocky section that caught us both out at the SST earlier this year.  Before long I'd broken another propshaft on the CFX-W, this time the drive pin popped out of the cheap metal propshaft from China.  I don't know if it's fixable or if an important part was lost when the shaft came out - I'll have to look later.  I have some more cheap shafts so the truck won't be out of operation for long.

So then it was back to the trusty old SCX10 G6 Edition with the Cherokee body.  This might be an ancient truck, but it still performs superbly.  Only the lack of steering lock on the 1st gen SCX10 axles lets it down.  The rain had stopped and the sun had come out around midday, but what little midwinter warmth it offered was soon gone when it sunk below the rim of the quarry, and by early afternoon we were hungry.  Not wanting to spread mud around the inside of my camper to make bacon sarnies, we decided to part ways early and I headed home to attack the last of the pigs in blankets, but not before putting the hosepipe over the trucks to get the worse of the mud off.  They're still drying out in the workshop and will want oil around the bearings later.

Here's some of the best photos from the event, but you can find more on my TCPhotos page here: http://tcphotos.net/album/R1Jt

[Frog Jumper]

 

4 hours ago, Mad Ax said:

 

 

 

 

This is a great pix!

Wow!

Terry

[Mad Ax]

1 hour ago, Frog Jumper said:

This is a great pix!

Thanks. I'm not a great photographer, sometimes the pics just come out good. I try to take a lot more pics so I have a better chance of getting some good ones, but I had my tx inside a mitt most of the day because of the rain, so it wasn't easy to get at the camera.

Shooting at that event was tricky - to start with it was raining hard so everything was grey and washed out, then the sun came out but everything was wet so there was harsh reflection everywhere, then the sun went under the quarry rim so everything was dark and lifeless. Still, some shots look better like that, like the one with the F150 on the concrete post by the puddle, kinda looks like it's parked on a jetty over a lake to me