CR01 experts: suspension and driveline

[Saito2]

While I like Tamiya's completely unique take on a crawler suspension for the CR01, I'm a bit stumped on making it work properly. The first issue I have is the severe drive line/shaft angles. Whether its because Tamiya clocks the axles so they a horribly out-of-phase or because the front drive shaft exits at a very steep angle (more likely), the drive shafts bind and hop badly. You can feel this if you push the truck along the ground with your hand. One of the ways to lessen this is to lower the ride height which leads to the next issue...

The suspension travel isn't all that great. The store-bought fix for drive line bind seems to install the Tamiya short barrel springs. This cuts down on suspension travel even more. It appears either the shocks bottom out (on full extension in the CR01's case) or the cantilever's hit the bottom of the chassis. I admit the suspension allows for a fair amount of droop in stock form. This is likely to help in very rocky conditions, but I wish to simply trail-drive at a walking pace and would like more suspension travel vs. droop.

To truly fix the binding driveshafts totally, I would likely need to drop the whole transmission to lessen the shaft angle, which hurts ground clearance. I have zip-tied my cantilevers to reduce slop. I want to make the the stock suspension work better but maybe I should remove all of it and run conventional shocks. Any CR01 expertise is appreciated.

[nde63h]

i think the manual is wrong here. universal joints do not preserve constant angular velocity but if you connect two at same bending angle and exactly 90 degree out-of-phase you can make the final output in-sync with the input.

my suggested correction:

here's the explanation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_joint

universal joints exist in a lot of rc cars. it is good for us to understand them deeply.

[Saito2]

Yes! You're absolutely right. I never took notice of that. I'll give this a try. Thanks.