Rock Buster?

[DC]

Is aony one familiar with the rock buster made by world machines?Seems to be an exact copy of a grasshopper,I picked one up in rough shape with the insruction manual.Is there any origanal spare parts out there for this car.Would like to restore but I may have to use tamiya parts ?

[wldnas]

Hi KD! []

The World Engines Rock Buster is indeed a Grasshopper clone of questionable quality, it's pretty much exactly the same as the Tamiya original bar for a few minor differences in the parts used to make it up, for instance the body is a slightly different yet original design that sorta looks like that of the Grasshopper, the manual speed controller is also of a different design as is the front bumper.

The car uses the Hornet style rear suspension set up and is fitted with anodised blue aluminium oil shocks on the rear, to the front there should be a very primative form of anti rollbar and it's fitted with Hornet style tires on Chrome finish wheels, a later Rockbuster 2 came out and that had slightly different decals and bigger (Wild One/Fox) sized gold plated wheels and tires.

The car's design was later bought up and then reproduced by Academy Minicraft under the Road Runner quise, it's the same car but with slightly different decals again, as with the Rockbuster this too spawned a Mk2 version, but the differences between the two are pretty much the same.

I actually have a MIB Academy Road Runner 2 in my collection, unfortunaly the build quailty of these cars and the plastic parts mouldings that it is made from are very poor, there is a great deal of flash and distorsion on some of the parts so I have no plans to build this car at this time as it's much better off as a MIB.

In light of the inferiority of the original Rockbuster and Road Runner parts, I would seriously suggest that you substitute with Tamiya parts where ever possible, OK some of the RB & RR parts have different mounding lines on them to Tamiya parts, but the quailty of the Tamiya plastic and mouldings themselves is far superiour to the originals so you would have a better car as a result.

Virtually all of the chassis parts are interchangable and only the wheels, body, rear shocks, speedo and front bumper set this car apart from a Tamiya Original, so if you still have these parts then all you need to do is rebuild the chassis with what Tamiya spares you have then fit the Original Rockbuster bits ontop and no one will be any the wiser

So in this situation I'd say It's OK to use top quality Tamiya parts to restore an inferiour car, however I would not suggest doing it the other way around [8)]

[DC]

Thanks for the info ,I am planning on fixing up the car seeing as I have plenty of spares but it it's going to have to wait A little while(already have other projects ahead of it) just thought it was a neat find with the manual. KD

[wldnas]

actually I have a manual for my Academy Road Runner which I imagine could be quite similar, however it's not a very good manual at all, it the illustrations are very sparce and poorly drawn and the descriptions leave a lot to be desired, again your far better off deffering to the Tamiya Product on this one, download a copy of the Hornet manual, that should give you all the info you need to know