Show us your Ghetto Mods......

[Ferruz]

About my Kyosho Big Boss. Even if this monster truck is from 1988 (maybe mine's 1990, but still...) it is my main runner. In order for it to be up to the task, I've tweaked it up a little. Nothing too hard on the eye like what's on the Hornet, but still quite ghetto. Let's start.

-The 5.8mm ball ends are a weak point on this car. Fortunately spares are available, but I didn't like the idea of wasting them so easily, especially the ones that connect the shocks to the suspension arms, which kept popping or breaking every time I landed higher jumps (which you are probably not supposed to do with a vintage car, but that's another story).
I had these nylon zip ties in a toolbox:

 So the solution came automatically:

Works great. Did that just over 2 years ago, and never had to open the bag of spare ball ends ordered in the meantime.

-Chassis cover. As other fellow car crusher series aficionados like @Saito2, @nowinaminute and @mongoose1983 well know, most chassis covers on these cars decided to just vanish altogether, and left us with no roof above our ESCs.
I cut my new one out of a PET plastic box, as I'm sure many others did, secured it with three short screws (taken from an old light switch) and ran electrical tape around it to seal it properly. I replace the latter from time to time when it peels off, happy with the result especially when driving in rain or melting snow.

-On these trucks the body shell sits on four pins, and is then secured by other four on top of it, so basically the body gets sandwiched in between the pins. There was way too much play on mine and while driving the lexan bounced and screeched on the body posts like a ghost galleon in the perfect storm.
I cut four little pads out of some gummy material of the right thickness and punched a hole in them with a three hole punch. Slipped them in the body posts just on top of the under pins, and now the body shell is cushioned like a princess on her pillows. No more ghostly sounds to make me flinch during night driving.
Oh, and my niece provided the material for the pads: it came from one of her Disney bracelets!

-This one's more of a ghetto solution than a mod: the Arrma ESC on my Big Boss came with T connectors so I installed an adaptor to downgrade it to the Tamiya ones of my batteries. That added quite some bulk and more wire lenght, but the heat sink retainer from the old MSC came super handy: it now serves as a container for the adaptor and retainer for the wires, and gives me more than a valid excuse to keep it on the car which is good, as I find it looks delightfully old school.

-This last one is probably the most interesting and useful ghetto mod on my Big Boss. I've done it a couple years ago, but took pics in the process with the intention of sharing them here someday.
 As anybody who own one may have noticed, a major weak point of this truck is how the front bulk is attached to the chassis. Only for screws in total do the job very poorly, two at the top and two at the bottom and both sets in the center, where the plastic is particularly thin and flimsy. I'm surprised, actually, that it held on that long.
In order to improve it, I decided to try and design a brace, after noticing that there was room for it exactly where I wished it to be: between the side suspension mounts and the side grooves in the upper part of the bulkhead.
I cut the brace to fit out of an old Hornet front bumper, and used two servo mounts and two random shock mounts as brackets. These are the parts:

After measuring and fetching the right drill bit, the operation started.

Two screws hold the bracket to the servo savers, which themselves are screwed to the suspension mounts through the chassis in the inner side.
It's not as invasive as it seems, besides the inevitable drill holes in that part of the chassis which is hidden anyway. I am usually not for invasive mods, but this one was just screaming for it.
In the picture below, the yellow indicates the brace, the red the servo mounts and the blue shows the shock mounts.

The shock mounts on the inner side have eyelets so can be easily held and turned to tighten the brace, if it's ever needed. I hope it's clear enough to understand. Anyway, since I did this my front bulkhead felt like one thing with the chassis, and still does to this day. Once everything is back into place, you hardly even notice the brace.

[Saito2]

Some great ideas there @Ferruz! I intend on incorporating some of them on my Big Boss .

[Ferruz]

@Saito2 glad if you will!  Same here: I want to do some maintenance on the Boss' gearbox whenever I get the chance in the next days, and I intend on incorporating the great tips you posted on the thread we recently resuscitated. I'm excited to do it, will let you know how that goes!

[Ferruz]

 My Manta Ray has just a few ghetto mods, all od them in the winterizing/waterproofing department so I take them off in the good season.

-to protect the ESC from splashes, I cut open a leftover bag from a kit to cover it, and attach the bag to the chassis with heat glue in strategic points. It doesn't get more rudimental than that but it's very effective, all I have to do is blow off the snow, or droplets, which otherwise would soak into the esc. The bag does sit on the heat sink, but at the criminal temperatures I have to deal with it's far from being a possible issue. Once the snow's gone, the bag is removed. No pics as it's summer now! And no need for pics of that anyway...

- for the same purpose (protection and shield) I trim a smaller bag to fit the motor. Broccoli elastics are perfect to keep it into place, and they come in different colors so you can choose the one that works best with your car. They only lack the Tamiya logo, really.

This too gets removed after the winter of course

 

-This is the only ghetto touch on my Manta Ray that's installed all year round.

A little transparent plastic box shield that was trimmed from some packaging or blister (I have a box full of plastic packagin leftovers exactly for this purpose) fits perfectly around the receiver. It doesn't make it waterproof but it saves it from snow and splashes, which is prettyvmuch what I need.

This too proved to be very effective and I suggest it: if you keep an eye out for the leftover packaging you'll find the dimension you need for pretty much whatever electronics in whatever car (a box of pens, chocolates, socks, cellphone, many things will do, they are around us all the time).

My Manta Ray sank to the bottom of a ditch last month, two good feet of water, and the time to dry it up it was good as before. I'm sure I was very lucky, but also sure that this helped.

[Ferruz]

Yesterday while looking through my rc spares I found these tires I forgot about. I've modded them like this for ice running, for what I remember they worked well as long as I was easy on the throttle, but at higher speed they'd become quite hazardous, shooting off screws here and there 

They gave the car an intimidating look once installed

[TurnipJF]

I bet they did!

[Kevin_Mc]

I repeat - an animal! 

[Re-Bugged]

On 7/11/2020 at 7:29 AM, Ferruz said:

Yesterday while looking through my rc spares I found these tires I forgot about. I've modded them like this for ice running, for what I remember they worked well as long as I was easy on the throttle, but at higher speed they'd become quite hazardous, shooting off screws here and there 

They gave the car an intimidating look once installed

Well, once the Hornet is beyond repair (but highly unlikely from what we have already seen!) These tyres will make some rather nice Rottweiler cuff links. 

[benitom]

Kyosho Optima Mid - temporary solution for using longer rear shocks until proper size shocks arrive 

[xzenonuk]

can no longer get parts for my thunder tiger xxb or xxt, i used random parts with much time and effort to produce this....

hyper mini st arms on the back and all the other daft stuff you have to replace or tweak for that to happen, runs awesome, it has a speccy rx in it at moment and a hpi bullet esc and motor 4300kv i think and a metal gear servo, goes awesome breaks instantly and grips the ground like a champ, im just scared to break it again as i cannot get parts for it lol

 

has the full shocks from a hyper st mini as well 

 

it's original motor and esc are in my bandit 3300kv the motor in it is a sweet spot for 2s, inbetween the 3s madness and the 2s of the stock motor

im pretty drunk hope the above made sense and all of the above happened because one hub carrier broke and cannot buy them any more lol

 

the spoiler broke recently and my steering started to go wonky, had to hack saw another shaft as 4 foot in the air jumps and many cart wheels said no

[Ferruz]

I'm in the process of installing turnbuckles on my Manta Ray, and I guess this has to go in the ghetto mods section...

Here is what to do when you need some step screws and you don't want to wait another forever for some online order to show up.

Works a treat.

Big bonus, if the saving bit of plastic comes from the antenna tube of a toy grade rc car belonging to your beloved nephew 👹😜

[Grumpy pants]

I just dislocated my toe, caught it on the bed post 😩

Wife popped the poorly toe back in place, but it won’t bend and it’s smarting like a bad boy 😂

Ghetto fix - battery Velcro strip from my RC spares, as we are out tonight and I’m not going to miss out 💥

[ADRay1000]

I had a lunchbox years ago that I would zip tie the transmission mounting rod down to the bottom of the slots at the back of the battery holder as a fix for worn out springs. Sorry no pics. 

[ADRay1000]

I had a lunchbox years ago that I would zip tie the transmission mounting rod down to the bottom of the slots at the back of the battery holder as a fix for worn out springs. Sorry no pics. 

[Kowalski86]

This TT02R, the bellcranks are held down with nuts, and instead of the "nice" aluminum bumper holder hop-up, I have a piece of scrap plastic that works just as well while being lighter. The front steering limiters were cut off.

With my D12, the chassis is glued together in several spots, ditto one of the gears in the gearbox. Be careful with your loctite, kids.

[Ferruz]

Time to resurrect the infamous thread with a couple new hacks I wanted to share here.

Since I started gathering parts for a massive restoration/facelift of my Manta Ray two years ago, at the same time I got an urge to try and squeeze as much life as possible out of the car before embarking on said restoration. Because of that, every time there is an issue or maintenace to be done on this buggy I'm invariably drawn towards trying to make do with what I have, and use ingenuity rather than going for a new part even though I already have them. This has lead to some exhilarating results lately.

The first is about the front shock tower: following a bad tumble over rocks at high speed, it cracked badly on the right side. A quick search online for an aluminum counterpart did not help the cause (none available, exept for one in a horrendous off green colour for a premium price, nah thanks). I do have an extra parts tree with a new one, but because of what I said above I wanted to try and fix the old one first.

I started with glueing it back together with decent quality cyanoacrylate 

Then, with the right tip and what I hope was a steady hand, I drilled through it like this...

...so to make room for a nice, long M3 screw to go right through the tower

There's not much material to work with obviously, but the shock tower's thickness was just enough to make me want to have a go at it.

First screw went in a treat, so why not a second one the other way to reinforce the piece even more.

Here you can see the M3 screw heads circled, and the direction the screws are going

This worked exceedingly well. The shock towers is now actually even stiffer on the righ side because of the screws, and all my butchering and stitching is not even that noticeable once the car is back together. I did run a few battery packs already and it holds one great:

The second ghetto mod is pretty straightforward. Upon mounting a new set of Kyosho Sand Super tires on the Manta's rims, I noticed it was time for some new inner sponges as well. Old omes were just too munched up to be usable alone. After realizing the ridiculous cost of ordering some online, I just got creative. This small sheet of foamy-ish packaging material did the trick. With some trial and error I was able to cut stripes of the right lenght, one that would allow slight compression when inside the tire once it's glued to the rim, so that the padding material feels consistent all around.

The feeling, once done, is the same as having new foams. Sorry I didn't take more photos of the material itself, but I'm sure you'll still be able to identify it (it's the very padding that comes in many of our RC parts deliveries).

Feels good sometimes to save the coin and do with what you got in house.

All the resto parts can safely stay in their packages for the time being ahah

[Re-Bugged]

Stadium Blitzer steering upright fixed with a bit of string from my wife’s handbag & wire found nearby, good as new 😎 

[ADRay1000]

zip tie body repair 

[Re-Bugged]

TT02R chassis cover…

Pesky little stones we’re getting in the vent holes of the motor and intermittently jamming things up during Racing by Post sessions.

So an acrylic paint tube box was trimmed & zipped tied on, so far so good 👍🏻

[Grumpy pants]

One of my favourite threads this one 👏
 

Life hacks for Tamiyaholics 😂

[Pizza Frog]

Here's a spontaneous mod I did a few months ago, I was impatient to run the frog but I didn't want to run it without bracing the gearbox first, so I screwed some shelf reinforcing brackets onto the gearbox 

It does seem to help, the old frog ran nicely without issues but I will replace those brackets with something better when I get the time.   

Here's a re-re frog with metal strips bolted onto the gearbox;

 

[JimBear]

Where's Elivs when you need him?

Sorry, this thread always gets me thinking of Elvis Presley and "In the ghetto" ...

@Pizza Frog - do you know if the ORV gearbox should be braced in these spots? Or does it need to be secured across the cheese metal? I have an ORV chassis where the previous owner has made a skid plate contraption on the lower part, and I sort of wonder that's enough?

[Pizza Frog]

1 hour ago, JimBear said:

Where's Elivs when you need him?

Sorry, this thread always gets me thinking of Elvis Presley and "In the ghetto" ...

@Pizza Frog - do you know if the ORV gearbox should be braced in these spots? Or does it need to be secured across the cheese metal? I have an ORV chassis where the previous owner has made a skid plate contraption on the lower part, and I sort of wonder that's enough?

The brackets have been bent inwards so they apply the most pressure closest to the drive cups.
Any kind of clamp that stops sideways flexing of the cheese metal over the diff should help, the bevel gears in the green and purple frog skip a little without the bracing.
 

[JimBear]

31 minutes ago, Pizza Frog said:

The brackets have been bent inwards so they apply the most pressure closest to the drive cups.
Any kind of clamp that stops sideways flexing of the cheese metal over the diff should help, the bevel gears in the green and purple frog skip a little without the bracing.

Thanks, good to know. I'll continue the work started and add some sort of bracing on the top of the diff too, just to be sure.

[Re-Bugged]

13 hours ago, Pizza Frog said:

Here's a spontaneous mod I did a few months ago, I was impatient to run the frog but I didn't want to run it without bracing the gearbox first, so I screwed some shelf reinforcing brackets onto the gearbox 

It does seem to help, the old frog ran nicely without issues but I will replace those brackets with something better when I get the time.   

Here's a re-re frog with metal strips bolted onto the gearbox.

 

Looks like a wheelie bar could be fitted to it once the badass Brushless goes in 😉

( @Xeostar in the UK on here was making some braces for ORV’s a while back, there was a thread on it somewhere)