DF02 Aero Avante Money Pit - Renamed

[ChrisRx718 4470]

Holy thread resurrection Batman!

Photobucket (pah, good riddance) has watermarked my images since I last visited this buggy. 

So what happened to it? Well it saw plenty of use, most of it on rough roads since it is pretty terrible on anything but fairway-spec short grass. 

So it lost its rear wing at some point (likely after flipping over) and those Tamiya plastics had become somewhat brittle in the worst possible locations:

Rear upright blowout, this was repaired with some blue TT02B pieces, which are identical (and were on special offer on RCMart at the time)

Then another known weak point; the front suspension crossmember / tower. 

Cue GPM front crossmember and a huge ABS wing intended for 1/8 scale buggies:

This made it pretty good fun albeit the top-speed needed some work, it was perfect on 3S LiPo but on 2S it was a bit pedestrian (and yet I wonder how it ended up so battered?!)

In its natural habitat.

But all of that was about to change...

[Kowalski86 3035]

That spoiler make ls it almost look like a Top Force! I like it. Did the plastic get brittle from age or sun exposure?

[ChrisRx718 4470]

9 hours ago, Kowalski86 said:

That spoiler make ls it almost look like a Top Force! I like it. Did the plastic get brittle from age or sun exposure?

I think just age. It was stored in my shed which also sees huge temperature variance, in the winter it's about as cold as it is outside (so down to -5°C I guess) and in the summer it's like a sauna, getting incredibly warm.

Unfortunately I have nowhere else to store my models so I currently have about 30 vehicles in there. The things that seem to suffer most are cheap off-brand Chinese tyres, which last about 1 season before they disintegrate!

[ChrisRx718 4470]

So what's the best bodyshell ever made for the DF-02?

The lesser-spotted Aero Avante!

The sticker set on this thing do it absolutely no-favours whatsoever. The bodyshell is actually a really cool shape but depressingly; it has no cockpit like the OG Avante. Also, the wheels are grey, which sucks.

Looks great, an absolute pig to cut out however!

But wait, it's sitting far too high on the chassis:

Nooooo! That GPM front damper mount is not going to permit the use of this body. It's pretty obvious if you look at the box-art image above that this was never going to work.

It would require some divine intervention, or some measuring and an order to Fibre Lyte. You'll have to wait to see the outcome of that.

I mentioned above that the colour scheme is nothing like as good as the OG Avante, so I set about changing that and mimicking the namesake as best as possible:

  

DF03 Wheels and Tyres, some Avante repro stickers from MCI, new gearing for silly speed and some cheap (but critically gold-coloured) oil dampers from my local hobby shop. 

The aluminium rear dampers were also added (and significantly cheaper than the Tamiya equivalent) to replace the now broken-once-more plastic rear upright.

Mmmmm, Yellow...

 

[alvinlwh 5895]

On 2/27/2023 at 8:02 PM, ChrisRx718 said:

So what's the best bodyshell ever made for the DF-02?

The lesser-spotted Aero Avante!

First time I see another Aero Avante fan! Not many will agree with that statement though.

 

[ChrisRx718 4470]

So fast forward ahem, almost 3 years, and I've started re-working this to make it obscenely expensive:

First up was a tear-down to see what I was dealing with. I couldn't remember placing an aluminium propshaft (should have read my own build thread) so that part was unnecessary, oh well. 

I thought to replace the bits which keep breaking with aluminium parts. Usually I advise against this, because it will only place additional stress on the suspension arms now, but I was frankly fed up with replacing these uprights and the Yeah Racing! parts were very cheap and made to a high standard (intended for the TT02B, but they're the shared cross-platform). 

Bearings in those front C-hubs and the supplied sleeves and step screw arrangement sits annoyingly proud. Also on the front end are some new universals / CVDs, again just Yeah Racing ones but better than a dogbone arrangement. Not so necessary on the back, which doesn't have to do any steering. 

The eagle-eyed amongst you might have spotted something carbon fibre about the above image, too. That's a new shock tower and no, I have no idea how long it will last!

The springs on these cheap dampers I got from my LHS are way, way too stiff for the lightweight DF-02. The bore is too great too, so I fear I might have to sack them off. I notice Xtra Speed do a nice set of gold dampers, but my experience of their dampers is one where the oil rarely stays on the inside of the cylinders - they leak like a colander. I may have to resort to the ridiculous TRF Aeration dampers I've been eyeballing - massively overkill for this project, but I think we're already past that point.

Finally the rear end; this has been assembled with another carbon reinforcement. You can maybe see where this actually doesn't replace the rear damper mount (unlike the front) but rather serves to reinforce it instead. Due to the 3D nature of the original part this was the best I could do for now - plus it still looks the part and will provide the much needed strength!

I assembled the whole thing with a set of TT02B turnbuckles, assuming that the parts-sharing nature of that buggy would mean the same or "near enough" the same geometry. Nope; the whole thing is now a mess. I have positive camber at both ends and the steering tie-rods give me a bunch of toe-out. 

I could simply adjust them, but then I spotted some rare DF-02 parts on TamiyaUSA. Not being able to purchase them directly I sought the help of @Frog Jumper. Now it's just a matter of waiting for the postman...

 

[ChrisRx718 4470]

Update time!

The parts from @Frog Jumper arrived from TamiyaUSA:

Quickly realised that the fancy blue kingpins won't work with my aftermarket C-hubs, which already have a ball bearing / step screw arrangement. Ah well.

53865 Aluminium Steering Link UK RRP: £39.99 
53789 Aluminium Racing Steering UK RRP: £46.99
53788 Turnbuckle Shafts UK RRP: £35.99

Yup, safe to say what I paid wasn't anywhere near those prices, even if the HMRC did sting me for some extra taxes 

Steering setup first and this really surprised me. Tamiya provide hex-head hardware for this Hop-Up (which is unusual) in the form of some countersunk 3x18mm screws. Nothing odd in that.

Except they have been manufactured from mozzarella. Literally the softest cheese ever. Bare in mind that the chassis deck isn't new and already had self-tapping M3 step screws in these holes, so it should have been pretty easy going, even if these screws were a tiny bit longer. Yet just a few "turns" in, using a titanium-tipped 2mm hex driver (which I always use) the head rounded right off. Imagine if you'd have paid the UK RRP for that nonsense!  Fortunately I was able to extract it and used one of my own, black steel countersunk screws. I didn't even try with the other one, just went straight in the bin!

 

Worth it for the amount of blue bling and there's not a hint of slop in this setup. TT-02BR what? 

Next was 54028 Tamiya Buggy Aeration Oil Filled Damper Set

The less said about this the better. Where most dampers provide a therapeutic, relaxing build process with seemlessly well-fitting aluminium goodies and that level of Japanese engineering which brings joy; these have been designed by the work experience kid. In the dark. Based off of some sketches. And it's those sketches you get instead of the comprehensive build instructions we are all familiar with.

  

Look OK though right?

Well we have a problem:

 

Yeah, the whole "Lowrider" look wasn't my intention here, as it happens.

[ThunderDragonCy 7886]

That whole thing with filling the caps with oil and quickly getting them on the shocks is a bit tricky. I following the instructions in the TRF201 manual. Maybe those are a bit clearer? 

[Superluminal 3750]

Do they have a vacuum in them? What ever it is, is stronger than the spring!!!

[ChrisRx718 4470]

So I finally figured out the damper thing, but I still don't like them.

Bouncing the dampers under 'no load' would suggest there's nothing wrong; they spring back as you would expect, only when you place the vehicle on its' wheels does the problem manifest:

Rubbish.

So I stripped the dampers right down (goodbye oil) and tried to find where it was binding. 

It wasn't the seals; they were well greased and slipped up and down the piston shafts with ease.

It was this blasted thing; the bottom seal / cap to the damper body:

The rod simply won't pass through the hole in that cap. It's a poor moulding - tut tut, Tamiya 

The fix was really quite simple; I had to introduce this part to Mr Reamer:

Huzzah! Time to reassemble.

But wait, not yet. Another terrible inclusion on these dampers is the way they connect to the chassis. The top connection is "OK" but it rattles, which irks me. The bottom connection however:

Is a 4.8mm (ish) ball connector made of the same reinforced plastic as the connector at the end of the rod. I sanded the flashing off as best as I could, but it was anything but free moving:

Yuk yuk yuk 

So I sacked those off altogether and went with traditional 5mm ball connectors and studs all-round:

And this ugly pile of plastic waste went in the bin:

Au Revoir!

So what is the result of all that fiddling?

Rebound! At last. The DF-02 Lowrider is no more.

After all that faff, I ventured into the living room to find my daughter. This about sums up my mood with these dampers:

[Kol__ 3377]

46 minutes ago, ChrisRx718 said:

After all that faff, I ventured into the living room to find my daughter. This about sums up my mood with these dampers:

😂😂😂 ...and dressed as Peter Rabbit I see?

[Superluminal 3750]

Huzzah! They actually look really plush now.

 

[alvinlwh 5895]

1 hour ago, ChrisRx718 said:

Is a 4.8mm (ish) ball connector made of the same reinforced plastic as the connector at the end of the rod. I sanded the flashing off as best as I could, but it was anything but free moving

I once built a MTX-1 which came with these plastic balls as standard. A fellow member remarked that my suspension feels really stiff (I had no experience with monster trucks/crawlers linked suspensions at that time) so I changed them all with metal balls and the suspension freed right up. Now I keep such balls on hand in bulk.

[ChrisRx718 4470]

11 hours ago, Kol__ said:

😂😂😂 ...and dressed as Peter Rabbit I see?

Paddington Bear, minus the hat and boots...

10 hours ago, alvinlwh said:

I once built a MTX-1 which came with these plastic balls as standard. A fellow member remarked that my suspension feels really stiff (I had no experience with monster trucks/crawlers linked suspensions at that time) so I changed them all with metal balls and the suspension freed right up. Now I keep such balls on hand in bulk.

 

I tried the metal ball option (you can see one just in shot in the image below. Unfortunately the connection was still rough, the plastic ball connectors from the Tamiya moulding actually measure closer to 4.7mm diameter whereas the ball studs are 4.8, so they were too tight. I don't know why Tamiya do it, they need to keep things simple!