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Hi there,

I decided to build a replica of my VW bus, a 1973 lifted type2 bay window (with a water cooled v6 engine ) into a RC model.

I purchased a reedition 2010 Sand scorcher and started the build couple month ago,

I thought it would be all about the details, trying to replicate all the work that went into my original bus into a 1/10 scale version, using a mix of old models parts, 3D printed parts and so on... 

This is where things started to be a little more tricky than I thought, the only body I could find online of a type 2 bus 1/10 (the one with the square front, not with the V front) is an ABS Body and a Lexan body found on eBay that are basically vacuum molded and lack a lot of details as a result .

Second huge detail is the wheel spacing, the bus front to back wheel distance Of the bus body is a lot smaller than the sand scorcher wheel distance... this is when I decided to cut the bottom plate and reduce the overall size of my Sand scorcher body :/ 

In this thread i’ll Show you all the steps of my work in progress, this is far from being done but i’m Planning on posting regular updates of my built . 

Hopefully this will be a good one . Here are some pictures of my (real) Bus , you can find more here

http://www.instagram.com/pacifist_northwest

. Let’s see how close I can get :) wish me luck. 

 

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Step 1: building the sand scorcher 

This part was all fun, to be honest the last tamiya model I built was 17 years ago , a ford escort 4x4 (I still have it, will post pix later) 

building the scorcher is pretty straight forward, I love the quality of the built , metal parts, feel solid and strong . 

 

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Step 2: when you realize the bus body is too short for the sand scorcher bottom plate ..

As you can see in the picture , the bus body (distance front to back wheel) is shorter than the original scorcher... 2 ways to deal with it, 3D print a new plate or cut and re-drill  the plate .. let’s cut it!yRQe1vDJ_CWzZGUWVQXwMOeWMKvBoWqmXXLCevBz

using a metal scissor , curing the plate was easy, but this is where things started to get messy ..uUq9q0ghI3ZxBIUrFGkW3Ruh0sP-Gb4ygp_3udK-

 

drilling the mounting hole back in place 

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mounting back the plate

-the original box barely fit in there and I made sure the steering component will have free range of motion .(notice the plastic box is really close to the steering component ) I basically got rid of the extra front box )

 

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et voilà , wheel distance fits the new body... now will everything fit , works well.. not sure :)  time to experiment .

 

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On 3/5/2019 at 8:24 PM, Bnkolate said:

By the way, is it the right part of the forum to post this kind of build ?? 

Might suit the Builds forum a little better. I doubt this forum gets much traffic. Message the moderator and ask for it to be moved.

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Step 3: Houston we are running out of space for components ..

well, after all that cutting etc , I wanted to make sure things will fit inside, the main issue was the steering component geometry, a pretty long rod that would basically push the directional servo to the back of the box, eating up most of the space for battery , receiver etc .. zTTDV9SoC8RDi7pqYXBBstf9VHOZdQJvMG7pwBGi

this is where I decided to place the servo elsewhere, could it fit between the front wheels , mmmh yeah indeed, very thought but why not . This is when I decided to get rid of the original direction mechanism and build a new one .

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Then i took the front part of the box and rotated it 90 degree to protect the servo, things start to make sense (in my opinion) now I need to secure all that and make sure there is clearance for everything, it’s going to be tight .

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A part of the box had to go to leave some space for the rods , oh well this is going to Be interesting :) 

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Step 4 -how will the body attach to the frame ??!

this is where things start to get messy, sorry about destroying the beetle body but I needed to come up with a plan and “recycle most of the body to make this plan possible . 

I started to cut the body to see how the wheel arches will be placed 

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in the following picture you can clearly see the size difference between the original beetle body and the new chassis .

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In order to fit the bus body around the wheel arches, some necessary trimming is achieved 

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my goal is to reuse the wheels arches combined with wheels arches guards to define the final placement of the bus body . 

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i used a translucent shell to make sure everything will fit correctly for the rest of the build, i’m Keeping the ABS one on the side to make the final body . 

This allows me to mark, see the fit, imagine the mounting points etc 

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things start to take shape ... still don’t know how I will fix the bus body to the plate though :) 

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Your 1:1 is an absolute beauty - i’ve always prefered the bay windows and particularly the T3s over the splitties. Maybe i’m a philistine though. 

This is going to look great when it’s done. I’m subscribed

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