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Wow! 7 months since the last update, family life has been keeping me busy along with a few other projects but I've had a little time recently to work on this little fella.

First of all I had painted the bodyshell red and spent ages shading it with a faded, weathered look... but the thing about fading red is you end up with pink!

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I tried living with it for a few months but it just didnt do it for me so this week I was able to mask and respray it with a light olive green. Ive since started the weathering with a few layers of oil paint washes and some pastel dust rubbed in, so now its looks like this.

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Much better. Ive also extended the motor wires so I can reposition the ESC and receiver to the rear of the L beam "deck" and leave the cockpit area clear for fitting a Monster Beetle driver figure.

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Its been on a few runs out and back up Leith Hill and Ive not had any probs with the battery position so thats a keeper. Im pretty happy with it. Next up I'll fit a spare tyre in the rear bodyshell deck and cover it with a fabric tarp, finish the paint & weathering and get the lights fitted. Hopfully that wont take another 7 months!

Cheers

Nic

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Oh well, it's been a while since I've worked on the old Scout 😬 For most of that time it's been under a 1/6 scale Willis Jeep conversion project

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I mostly run scale trails now with my SCX10 but I have been missing that go anywhere crawlability so I thought I'd "get the band back together", liberate the Scout bits and fit them inside a much more capable and good looking chassis.

That's when I found RCMart selling the excellent GMade R1 chassis sides for less than £7 posted so I couldnt resist. They also sold the complete chassis cage kit for around £30 but I wanted to use as much of what I already had and make the rest myself.

So this week the chassis sides arrived!

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A little bigger than I expected but no bad thing, I hope to squeeze a driver torso in there with all the electrics and hopefully a lipo battery (never did like the battery on the axle look). I was able to trim the Scout tranny/skid plate to fit the inner holes of the R1 cage, it's not s perfect line up but a little care and it flexed into place.

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This allows me to fix the lower links to the cages outer holes. This will increase the wheelbase a little. I've then fitted the old high clearance links, Scout shocks to the cage and held it apart with bolted threaded rod and the Scouts mounts.

So here's how it's looking ATM.

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Once I get the axles off the Willis I'll fit those later. I'm hoping to fit a 2200mah 2S Lipo inside the frame for power & run it off the Scout ESC with a low voltage buzzer.

Looks promising to me, I'll keep you posted.

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Those Gmade r1 chassis sides look amazing fitted. It looks very aggressive. That was my intention with my scout to turn it into a scaler but it's articulation is amazing. You do miss it. Like you already know the front wheels can be horizontal and firmly on the ground and the rear axle can be twisted to almost vertical. Mine has still got a lot of the articulation but not as much as before, I didn't have the heart to reduce it to scaler levels of travel.

Really looking forward to see how this turns out.

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That's pretty much what made my mind up Terz1. I too missed the full flex that a scale body doesn't let you get away with. Also if I can keep everything inside this R1 cage I won't mind taking those risky routes that are likely to end in a rollover, this thing should shrug off damage pretty well... I hope 😉

So I find myself with one of those rare "afternoon without the family" moments so was able to get the axles fitted.

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That doesn't look too shabby 😜 I've put the one Scout side plate on the cage here to compare the geometry differences.

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You can see the upper shocks attach at almost an inch further out, while the lower links are further apart. Wheelbase is now 323mm. Just need to find some hubs and pins and I can get some wheels on the beast! 😎

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Borrowed the Maverick Scout wheels and hubs off my BF3 (the Scout wheels have a narrow offset) to get an idea how it'll look.

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Looks too narrow to me, due to the offset plus they catch the front shock springs on full lock and compression. Tried out some Flatiron tyres on WT01 wheels (they have major wide offset) and they look more like it.

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I also got to see its still got the articulation Terz1 mentioned 😉

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Looks better with the Jeep body and Im very interested to see it after that last Chassis build.

Really like the Olive Green too,

Was considering a complete Olive Drab scheme for my CR-01 before I ended up going with the lime.

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Looking really good! It looks like something from the mad max movies. I don't know if you've seen a film runaway from the 80's with tom selleck. Well there are these little deadly robots that attack people. It looks a bit like one of them. Which is a good thing!

That articulation is crazy! :lol:

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Temp rigged up the Scout receiver, ESC and balanced a Nimh on the front links to go for a garden test drive.

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It handles very well even with the pretty basic spec. Couple of things I noticed, the harder black spring is on the wrong side at the rear so I'll need to swap that over. But maybe due to the better geometry, even with the spring on the wrong side it didn't have much torque twist. It was so good I took the 5mm shock collars off all the dampers to let it articulate easier. I suspect this is due to the shocks being mounted further out and at a more efficient angle than the old Scouts setup.

I had assumed I'd get a new set of 2.2 beadlock wheels but these Tamiya ones are growing on me. I'll need to glue the tyres on as they slip and maybe try dying them black.

One more thing I might do is add a rear steering servo and connect it to the front with a simple Y lead. I already have another servo plate, link and the lead so I'm most of the way there. It'll be good get get a decent turning circle as crawlers with fixed diffs suffer from a huge turning radius. I didn't like 4WS on my scale trucks but as this is a dedicated crawler it might work better 😉

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Had some time to rig up the 4WS today. Already had a 2nd servo plate and a quick rummage in the spares box freed up some tough Axial servo mounts. I liberated the servo from my WT01 Monster Beetle project, connected it up with a Y lead and found it already turns in the opposite direction to the front servo, so in no time I had this crawling around my living room!

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Haven't tried it outside yet due to the wet weather but even on the grippy floor it had a turning circle of just under 3ft! That's pretty darn good with locked diffs. Especially when it's as big as an SCX10 😉

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While they were together I compared the Scout's & the SCX10's tranny and I've ordered an SCX aluminium skid plate and links set from RCMart as they look very close and should fit the R1 cage nicely. That'll beef up the chassis strength but it means I'll have to wait for it before I do anything as the width and geometry may change a little. I did managed to cut out and fit the plasticard roof panel though, holding it in place with 2mm bolts.

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Good job with the 4 wheel steer. The scout does have a quite a big turning circle and it's something I'd definately consider on mine if I wasn't going the scaler route. I might have to get another to go full wheel drive and steer.

Looking forwrd to the next up date.

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Got to try the mods outside today and I'm pleased with the results. Here's s quick clip of the improved 4WS turning circle 😉

Should make navigating the rocks a little easier!

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Couple of updates. I weight the wheels a few days ago. I like to use lead flashing, the stuff you'd use on a roof. I simply score and break the lead to the right size and cut into sections with a Stanley knife. I then use double sided tape to stick the lead onto the wheels and once I've done enough layers I eventually wrap the lot in insulation tape.

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The rear wheels got 2 layers and the fronts got 3 layers of lead in total.

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With the tyres refitted the rears now weigh in at 300gms each and the fronts are around 380gms. I might take a bit off the rears as usual advice is to put halve the weight of the fronts in the rear wheels, but I'll see how it goes first. I held the tyres on with strips of double sided tape in the wheel grooves so it'll be easy to refit. Once I'm completely happy with the set up I'll superglue them.

Tonight I fitted the SCX10 aluminium skid plate. It's a little narrower than the Maverick Scout item but is a whole lot more robust and mounts the lower links much further in board to reduce the chance of getting hung up on obstacles. It also lined up nicely with two of the mounting holes on the G1 cage so it's now much tougher. Here its laid ontop of the Scout plate.

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Moving the links inboard meant they needed to be lengthened to retain the same geometry and hold the axle at an effective angle, so I swapped out the straight ball ends on the outter end of each link for some longer curved ones I had in the spares box. They now fit just right and don't foul the upper links, shocks or the drive shaft through the full range of articulation 😏

One issue was the SCX10 plate has a slightly tapered bolt layout for securing the transmission. 2 of the bolt holes line up fine but the other 2 are closer together rather than the rectangular pattern of the Scout plate. I had intended to drill the plate to fit the Scouts tranny pattern but on seeing how well defined the aluminium was I didn't want to risk botching the job. Then I realised I could fix the 2 bolts that already line up and drill 2 new holes into the transmission base using the holes in the alum plates as a guide. This worked well, using a 3mm hand drill to make sure I didn't go too far into the transmission plastic.

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I also found one of the original holes had started to split so I'll glue that later. Reassembled and it's now much tougher with less to get hung up!

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And it still has that full range of articulation.

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I've just started working out the cage panels in card. Once I'm happy with the look I'll copy them in plasticard and fix them in place.

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It'll be look great with the panels fitted. I was thinking of using lead flashing on my wheels but I found some wheel weights from rcbitz. You can really tell the difference with weighted wheels.

Are you a member of an online crawler/scaler club? I'm really getting into this type of rc. I'm sure I saw a thread you did on a uk crawler forum but can't remember where. I think I need to join one.

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It is turning into quite a stylish beast. Do you have a colour scheme in mind? Personally I think it would look great if you did the body panels in olive drab or perhaps some sort of camo effect to tie in with the axles.

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Terz1 was it www.ukrcrc.com? I was active on there a while back but not been on there much recently. Was a good helpful forum but not much traffic so questions took quite a while to get answered.

XV, yeah I'm with you on the colour scheme. As I've borrowed these axles from the Willis Jeep I'd prefer to keep them olive drab. I think I'll match to panels to that and keep the cage bars black to give it some definition. I might even add some WW2 decals to tie it in a little better. Actually that's just given me an idea to model the front panel on the classic Jeep grill. I was just going to fit 2 fog lights there on a plasticard panel but I might try out a few ideas now 😉 I intend to have that grill/panel be the battery access. I'm still not sure if I should cover the whole side in panels or leave more of the cage exposed. I think I'll completely do one side in cardboard and see how it looks. I can then choose which panels to keep and make up in plasticard.

I also need to sort out mounting the electrics and shorten and route the wiring.

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Nice rock hopper buddy, Will you be doing the panels in black or maybe alloy? :) I picked up a 1/8th that had been butchered and I modded it like you've been doing here :D twin motor twin steer super fun :lol:

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Terz1 was it www.ukrcrc.com? I was active on there a while back but not been on there much recently. Was a good helpful forum but not much traffic so questions took quite a while to get answered.

I think it may have been. It was how impressed you were with your scout and the free mods you did to it that I thought I'll have to get one of those. :)

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I'd say they're one of the best value for money RC deals around.

Done a bit more panel work and started planning out a battery try.

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I'm wondering if I fitted the panels inside the cage would the look be worth the effort?

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I'd say they're one of the best value for money RC deals around.

Done a bit more panel work and started planning out a battery try.

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I'm wondering if I fitted the panels inside the cage would the look be worth the effort?

I'd say so... the exo-skeleton look would be awesome!

The bodywork is looking great!

I always loved the look of the G-Made R1 when I first saw them, I'm really tempted to get one now (or just the cage and add my existing transmission like you have) - this custom build is fantastic!

Jx

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