So, What Have You Done Today? (Vol 2 2025)

[WhteRbt]

@kevinb120, @GToddC5:

Thanks a lot for all the background information and the advices! After reading them and learning a lot about the TS paints, I think I will just let the shell the way it is… it really looks nice in person, the photos exaggerate a bit. After all, it is a homepage to my first RC car and will be run with care (as I try to see all my cars are runners) – and it still looks way better than unpainted. For the next white hardbody, I will try another paint or give it to my painter…  Honestly, I am not willing (and not able) to invest ten hours in body preparation alone…  

And I have to admit that I am REAL good in applying stickers, so maybe I should just throw them on, find a very nice place for this little car (after running it) and move on with other projects (a matte black Clod Buster BE, for example?  ).

Again – thanks a lot, I appreciate it! 👍

[Dante_R]

Took out my DT-03 for the first time with the RZ motor in high gear. Not bad at all.

 

Batman First Run

 

 

[kevinb120]

1 minute ago, WhteRbt said:

@kevinb120, @GToddC5:

Thanks a lot for all the background information and the advices! After reading them and learning a lot about the TS paints, I think I will just let the shell the way it is… it really looks nice in person, the photos exaggerate a bit. After all, it is a homepage to my first RC car and will be run with care (as I try to see all my cars are runners) – and it still looks way better than unpainted. For the next white hardbody, I will try another paint or give it to my painter…  Honestly, I am not willing (and not able) to invest ten hours in body preparation alone…  

And I have to admit that I am REAL good in applying stickers, so maybe I should just throw them on, find a very nice place for this little car (after running it) and move on with other projects (a matte black Clod Buster BE, for example?  ).

Again – thanks a lot, I appreciate it! 👍

I'd probably do that.  At some point your time is money, if you want to get to runnin' then break out the hair dryer and scissors and sticker up!  First time you figure out a way to slide down the street on it's roof and you won't freak out(as much) anyway.  Just consider it somewhat of a textured 'tuff coat'...

[Guest]

Fully rebuilt and good to go. A word of advice to anyone thinking about upgrading your MB/Blackfoot with aluminium parts..

Don't bother, keep it simple. 

[TurnipJF]

Today I made a little video about hill-climbing teapots.

 

[Thunder downunder]

Sandviper project nearer to completion. Aiming for a two tone retro/mod fusion, thanks in large part to Traxxas 2514 sponsor stickers set (Holley, NOS, Crane, etc), in place of Tamiya’s tribal tattoo decals for the SV. 

[JimBear]

1 hour ago, TurnipJF said:

Today I made a little video about hill-climbing teapots.

Certainly different. And crazy with a big C. Exceeds Tamiya level of craziness by country mile.  

(and I can't stop myself from thinking about flying teapots when seeing this - too much Gong, I suppose, sorry for the prog music reference!)

[F-150]

Can't post a photo! Says I can only upload 30KB...  That's not much data, the picture would be poor. 

[Nikko85]

Dakar tl01 took a big step forward.

 

[mtbkym01]

2 hours ago, F-150 said:

Can't post a photo! Says I can only upload 30KB...  That's not much data, the picture would be poor. 

Yeah there’s a limit on posting photos directly to the site. Most use a hosting service like Flickr or Imgur (or TCPhotos for subscribers)

[Thunder downunder]

8 minutes ago, mtbkym01 said:

Yeah there’s a limit on posting photos directly to the site. Most use a hosting service like Flickr or Imgur (or TCPhotos for subscribers)

In Apple iOS, (no doubt similar in Android) when you are selecting photo/s to post, go to the menu tab bottom right of screen where you can select a custom upload size. Total upload has to be under 4.88MB which is plenty.

[mtbkym01]

1 minute ago, Thunder downunder said:

In Apple iOS, (no doubt similar in Android) when you are selecting photo/s to post, go to the menu tab bottom right of screen where you can select a custom upload size. Total upload has to be under 4.88MB which is plenty.

Pretty sure that 4.88MB is total your you, not per post. It soon runs out for active posters who have been around a while

[Pylon80]

I'm still making friends with my XV-01 but the first off-road attempt is setting the tone for what will probably be a love/hate relationship. The car does absolutely everything just a bit better than my heavily modified, 60/40 weight bias TT-02 rally. Drifts better, glides over rocks better even though it's the same height, etc etc. It's amazing alright. I love it.

So when the steering jammed after only 3min due to a very small pebble in the bell crank (it was literally 5mm in diameter), I thought, ok, they're even. Just as bad both of them. I still have a plan to make the cover completely impervious to pebbles on the TT... but I digress.

But then after 10min, a loud "tak tak tak" came from the belt cover. It really sounded like something was getting chewed up really bad. Disappointed I went home to find a pebble jammed in the front pulley:

Well, that, never happens on the TT!

So I will try again just to see if that was a huge bad luck or just a flaw that makes it unusable off-road (to me, for my trails). If so it'll become just another on-road car, just a particularly nice one to drive and one that is particularly well suited to unprepared rough surfaces.

Edit: the pebble in the pulley was embedded into the plastic due to the softness of the material and then wouldn't come off by itself. Perhaps an aluminum pulley would have prevented that? 

[ImALlama]

Today I put the carbon rear shaft in the F1, still waiting on the pinion adapter though. Soldered some new connectors on a few new batteries and esc because I don’t like the shade of yellow the XT ones are, I know it’s a stupid reason and the orange isn’t much better but that yellow bothers me .

Then I did what is surely a pointless endeavor, I started modifying my bt01. As usual I had planned to keep it stock, and as usual that plan failed rather quickly. I noticed the majority of slop was in the turnbuckles and axles, luckily I had plenty of turnbuckles laying around and after removing the wheels I saw plastic bushings, quick swap to bearings fixed that right up and some clamping aluminum hexes helped keep them in place. With prob 90%ish of the slop now gone I gave it some nice TRF shocks, yes they’re probably worth as much as the car but why not, if I’m going to do something stupid might as well go all out. I put smooth shiny balls in the arms and finished it off with aluminum servo and motor fan mounts. Just have to shim up the arms a little bit and the steering, and then it’ll be slop free and hopefully a bit faster and predictable for RBP. 

[Thunder downunder]

DT-02 just completed. Flagged the Sand Viper tribal tattoo look and was planning to roll with vintage sponsor stickers, but wasn’t feeling it so only chucked on a few. Stock bearings and oil cva’s per earlier post, 540 Sport Tuned, 20kg stainless steel gear servo, Dumbo receiver w/gyro, 17t steel pinion. This thing is mental enough for an old coot like me on 2s haha

[skom25]

5 hours ago, Pylon80 said:

I'm still making friends with my XV-01 but the first off-road attempt is setting the tone for what will probably be a love/hate relationship. The car does absolutely everything just a bit better than my heavily modified, 60/40 weight bias TT-02 rally. Drifts better, glides over rocks better even though it's the same height, etc etc. It's amazing alright. I love it.

So when the steering jammed after only 3min due to a very small pebble in the bell crank (it was literally 5mm in diameter), I thought, ok, they're even. Just as bad both of them. I still have a plan to make the cover completely impervious to pebbles on the TT... but I digress.

But then after 10min, a loud "tak tak tak" came from the belt cover. It really sounded like something was getting chewed up really bad. Disappointed I went home to find a pebble jammed in the front pulley:

Well, that, never happens on the TT!

So I will try again just to see if that was a huge bad luck or just a flaw that makes it unusable off-road (to me, for my trails). If so it'll become just another on-road car, just a particularly nice one to drive and one that is particularly well suited to unprepared rough surfaces.

Edit: the pebble in the pulley was embedded into the plastic due to the softness of the material and then wouldn't come off by itself. Perhaps an aluminum pulley would have prevented that? 

This is another "feature" of XV-01: everything is covered, except of front part with pulley and belt 

I run my XV-01 on asphalt, but it is covered with A LOT of small stones around 1-2 mm. I even consider to buy TT-02 chassis cover, because at the end of the run it is like box with stones everywhere.

However, I know that you run your cars just on gravel and I have feeling, that it will happen from time to time that something will stuck there.

Maybe aluminium pulleys as you wrote + reinforced belt?

 

[Andreas W]

@Pylon80. That is a bad start. I have seen what Skom25 points out  - it became even more visible after I fitted alu pulleys to my first one - but I have (knock on wood) yet to experience something like this. Dust, yes, but never anything of that size. As I have mentioned in other threads for me it's a bigger problem with pebbles jamming the rear arms and drivecups. After I did the vertical servo mod the problem with jamming steering is better, but not completely gone. 

 

That's why I love running mine on frozen gravel. Then the surface is like a sandpaper. You have the grip you want, it's slidable, the car doesn't hook and roll and the pebbles stay "glued" to the ground for the most. The reason why the winter XV-01 only did 20 laps in the last RBP round was that it was impossible to make a full stint without the drivecups jamming at least once per stint (making the car handbrake turn to one side). So the XV-02 made 2 more laps because it could go in one movement without hickups, despite beeing less consistent. 

 

BTW my winter XV-01 has all plastic drivetrain and I used the old belt. I fitted new internals in the gearboxes (since I had a few sets already), metal NN4 and shimmed. Works like a charm with the Ruddog RP540 17,5 so far.

[Ray_ve]

More Marui Samurai progress.

All electrical done.
Installed dogbones.
Now I just need to modify one more rear wheel to accept the Hotshot tires, The 3D printer is making adapter rings as we speak.
When the rear wheels are on, it is finally complete after all these years!

[urban warrior]

Good evening!

17 years after its first release I started building a CR-01, just for curiosity reasons, but I will see where it leads me. Against the recommendation in the manual, I started with the transmission. Because this interested me the most.

Those are the largest ballbearings I've ever seen in a Tamiya model until this day. 24mm by 15mm. "Weird ... weird ..." (as an [in]famous actress stated recently):

 

Something I don't like with Tamiya kits is, when I cannot replace a screw with allen head ot torx. These screws have quite flat heads:

 

I decided to change some bearings in the kit for rubber sealed ones. Especially the bearings located at the outsides of the transmission:

 

"To grease or not to grease, this is the question!" I've seen lot of people not greasing the motor pinion / counter gear location. I am a bit torn:

 

The transmission is done so far. Looking interesting and was interesting to build:

I found setting the mesh between the motor pinion and the counter gear a bit tricky due to two slot holes. I prefer one normal hole as a pivot point and a circular slot hole for this task. Anyway, it's not impossible to do. I find the transmission quite bulky for a model that size. Axial showed even in 2007 how small a crawler transmission can be.

[Grumpy pants]

26 minutes ago, urban warrior said:

Good evening!

17 years after its first release I started building a CR-01, just for curiosity reasons, but I will see where it leads me. Against the recommendation in the manual, I started with the transmission. Because this interested me the most.

Those are the largest ballbearings I've ever seen in a Tamiya model until this day. 24mm by 15mm. "Weird ... weird ..." (as an [in]famous actress stated recently):

 

Something I don't like with Tamiya kits is, when I cannot replace a screw with allen head ot torx. These screws have quite flat heads:

 

I decided to change some bearings in the kit for rubber sealed ones. Especially the bearings located at the outsides of the transmission:

 

"To grease or not to grease, this is the question!" I've seen lot of people not greasing the motor pinion / counter gear location. I am a bit torn:

 

The transmission is done so far. Looking interesting and was interesting to build:

I found setting the mesh between the motor pinion and the counter gear a bit tricky due to two slot holes. I prefer one normal hole as a pivot point and a circular slot hole for this task. Anyway, it's not impossible to do. I find the transmission quite bulky for a model that size. Axial showed even in 2007 how small a crawler transmission can be.

You don’t grease the XV-01 and it is perfect.

 

[Frog Jumper]

Tried out some lexan covers I found on ebheyz.  Gorgeous…

 

[Frog Jumper]

Covers on those red wheels to cover the chipped paint.  Lovely!  Had to paint up a front set.  Now just waiting for paint to dry overnight.

[guggles]

Thought I would share my SCX24 crawler build, because I just got it done today (well 80% done there's always more to be done with scratch building) 

Also I don't really see any of these guys on the forum, which makes sense, but is a darn shame. I can say that honestly they are just as much fun as the bigger ones! (and easier to hoard too   )

 

Hope you all are having a pleasant weekend!

 

 

[Frog Jumper]

12 hours ago, Frog Jumper said:

Covers on those red wheels to cover the chipped paint.  Lovely!  Had to paint up a front set.  Now just waiting for paint to dry overnight.

 

[Superluminal]

Masked up and painted the Nissan GTR LM shell for my TA01.

Took nearly ten hours from start to finish to get to that point as the masking was nerve wracking. Seemed to go ok - will sticker it next weekend.