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lifeofbrian2007

Most upgradable vintage buggy/hardcore upgrades

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I'd love a Tamiya vintage buggy but I'd like to make it durable and modern with high quality parts. I know M.I.P. make some diffs for the Bigwig and others, and I've always wanted a Bigwig, but there's not much point spending $150 dollars on the M.I.P. diffs if the rest of the car is cheap toy grade plastic. TT01 and other road cars have so many upgrades, but I hardly see any for the buggies.

 

Cheers.

 

 

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I'd say the DB01 series are very good with plenty of upgrades available. 

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The aluminium "upgrades" wont handle the abuse that buggies dish out, a few hard bumps and you will snap something, plastic flex's, and will take bumps better.

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10 minutes ago, wolfdogstinkus said:

The aluminium "upgrades" wont handle the abuse that buggies dish out, a few hard bumps and you will snap something, plastic flex's, and will take bumps better.

Sure, but Tamiya plastic is very toy grade rigid plastic with no flex, RPM or similar would be good but I've never seen any.

 

 

 

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1 hour ago, Theibault said:

I'd say the DB01 series are very good with plenty of upgrades available. 

I've looked at that chassis and read good things, but I'm surprised there's not more for the classic buggies, Boomerang, Frog etc.

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17 minutes ago, lifeofbrian2007 said:

Sure, but Tamiya plastic is very toy grade rigid plastic with no flex, RPM or similar would be good but I've never seen any.

 

 

 

Depends on the kit. Many of the higher performance kits have better plastics or fiber reinforced plastics. I personally find the classic re re's to be strong and stand up to use pretty well. 

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I think you may be missing the point of Tamiya's models. They are not "cheap" or "toy grade," but they are indeed plastic. It's right there in the name: "Tamiya Plastic Model Company." They're designed to be user-friendly, easy to build, and fun to drive. "Hardcore" (whatever that means) is not in their nature. 

That said, they are remarkably robust, often surviving use well beyond what Tamiya's engineers imagined, and often (as said above) bouncing back instead of breaking. I have more than one 30 year old Tamiya vehicle with old original plastic parts that are still doing just fine, as does almost everyone here. Tamiya engineers know what they're doing when choosing plastics for certain parts of the car. If something is rigid, it's meant to be, and if it needs to have some flex, it will flex. And if you do break something, replacement parts are cheap and easy to find, at least for anything still in production. So why worry about it?

My advice to you is that if you want a Bigwig, or any other Tamiya re-re, get one. Build it dead-stock, exactly according to the manual, and drive it with skill and respect. Learn its capabilities and limitations, and don't abuse it. Add modifications as you see fit, but realize that it's a re-issue of a 30 year old design that comes from a time when a 17-turn modified was a really fast motor, and run-times were 10 minutes if you were lucky. It's a remarkable piece of engineering history, and well worth spending time with. But you have to approach it on its own terms.

If for some reason you want to smash something into a brick wall, or jump it over your house, choose something else. Traxxas, maybe, or one of those cheap Chinese things that are everywhere now.

Or, if you really want to bash something around, get a Hornet. If there's one car in the Tamiya catalog that deserves the term "hardcore," that's it.

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In the past, I would have recommended an ORV.  The Frog and Blackfoot has a lot of vintage and modern Hop Ups...  But these are becoming too hard to find, and too expensive when you do...

AmPro offers a lot of 3D Printed upgrades for the Hornet/Grasshopper chassis.  These might adapt to the Lunchbox.  I'd love to spend time on that, but I have other things I need to be spending my money on...

But like MarkBT said, no matter what you do, you're never going to get a truly vintage car to perform as well as a modern car.  You have to learn to love it for what it is...

Terry

 

 

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5 hours ago, lifeofbrian2007 said:

...I'd love a Tamiya vintage buggy ... I've always wanted a Bigwig...

 

Well, what are you waiting for?  

Don't worry about regrets now.  We all got only one life, right?  Get it, build it, love it even before you run it.  Then stay up at night thinking if DF03 wouldn't have been a better choice.... get a DF03 and wonder why you didn't get TXT2.  Repeat that again and again and again...  

Most of us have done that dozens of times.  And you know what?  The Bigwig is as fine as any other Tamiya. 

 

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11 minutes ago, Juggular said:

Well, what are you waiting for?  

Don't worry about regrets now.  We all got only one life, right?  Get it, build it, love it even before you run it.  Then stay up at night thinking if DF03 wouldn't have been a better choice.... get a DF03 and wonder why you didn't get TXT2.  Repeat that again and again and again...  

Most of us have done that dozens of times.  And you know what?  The Bigwig is as fine as any other Tamiya. 

 

Yep...do this myself. I am always seeing new and different chassis that appeal in one way or another. It just adds to the variety and interest in my collection. I still love my Lunch Box with all it's floors just as much as my hopped up TT-02.

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