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Futaba FXT - The Best Truck Tamiya Never Made

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Futaba FXT - The best truck Tamiya never made.

*** all information here is dredged up from basic google searches and in some cases pulled from my back seat, it may not be accurate, helpful or even entertaining ***

Now of course, the Dyna Blaster was the best truck Big T actually made but this comes very close, and It's a Futaba. In the crazy space dream that was early 1990's the radio control electronics titan that was Futaba decided they rather wanted to come play toy cars too. No longer content to merely provide sticks n' servos they wanted to burn rubber. When you have the power, influence and budget of a huge Japanese electronics company fresh out of the 80's boom you likely have some rather close friends. Instead of working from the ground up Futaba elected to licence parts and moulds from an equally successful company and use that as a base. Some kind of brilliant partnership with Tamiya was struck up and they were given access to a 2wd buggy to whip up into their own trailblazing masterpiece - The FX10!

Unfortunately in a painfully bitter twist of fate they were chucked the Striker design which was a woefully clunky buggy that couldn't inspire more hatred if it sprayed snot at you every time you turned left. Futaba did their best and made quite a sleek missile of a buggy replacing the Striker chassis with something not made out of old crisps,  and a rather neat polycarbonate shell.  On the upside I imagine it had better sales figures than the Striker - at least seven people bought them and four quite liked them. 

Somehow this didn't sour things between the companies and they elected to try again with a better base in mind. They settled on my favourite chassis ever, the Stadium Blitzer and made it even better. So much better in fact there is precious little Blitzer left and the vestigial remains of virgin Tamiya engineering are unfortunately the parts that hold the car back (blasphemy I know) Of course I am spitballing but I do think I wouldn't be completely wrong by saying the FXT is what would happen if you set out to make an RC10T but all you had to work with was a Blitzer and some imagination. Again they seemed to miss the popularity boat and while they were an extremely pretty and well engineered car I don't think they stood out too much. A few years earlier or later and the story might have been different. I think lots of people have vague memories of them, mostly being cleared out for pocket change in hobbyshop bargain bins in the late 90's and even early 2000's. I obviously don't because the FXT is the better part of a decade older than I am. 

What's the same?
- Wishbones front and rear are pretty much identical 
- C hubs, knuckles and the steering linkages all the same
- Tires are identical (the rears are still rubbish and will be replaced)
- Rear hubs and all the links 
- Dogbones 
- drive cups are close, they have an interesting unique feature but could be replaced with Tamiya 
- Gearbox I am 90% sure is the same save the differential - watch this space!
-Shocks are tamiya CVA dampers moulded in grey 
- Bump steer is still awful

What's new?
- Folded aluminum  chassis replaces plastic bathtub
- New wheel design (same size, offset and fit as the blitzer)
- Ball differential (very exciting) 
- Gearbox casing is different
- Totally new bumpers front and rear
- FRP shock towers
- Amazing polycarbonate body (which I don't have :( ) 


These don't seem to come up very often at all which is a shame. After a year or so of idly searching every so often and the week after painting my stadium blitzer up as an homage to the box art  I managed to find one in very respectable condition and jumped on it in short order. 

3WctmCa.jpg?1

I am extremely pleased to have one in the flesh. Even with cracked tires and, ahem, "untuned" suspension it feels very nice to squish up and down. The extra rigidity in the chassis is something I have been chasing since day one of blitzer ownership

ns3FlsN.jpg?1

The chassis has some scratches on its belly but honestly that's a lot better than I was expecting. I am thinking a sand, fill and paint and call it good.  I miss Tamiya screws however, some of these are pretty horrible quality. 

0DD6BiE.jpg?1

Rarely do you get this lucky! Nobody has glued the tires on.  I am just in awe :D  I will definitely be reproducing these rims in CAD for guilt free running

DrQhq7l.jpg?1

Just standard Blitzer tires, although these were really lovely and soft.

AeoCwpP.jpg?1

And as ever, you get a really funky angle when you compress the front suspension, I'm sure this can be minimised. It's a lovely callback to the Blitzer series :D 

ov1QGX4.jpg?1

TeJh0M9.jpg?1

The front and rear suspension (CVgrey damper) and a rather excellent shock tower. I will also be drawing these up, maybe get them sent to fybre lite or similar.



Y8ySsgt.jpg?1


Getting ready for a full tear down where I'll catalogue parts, see if parts need fixing and have a poke at anything particularly unique or otherwise sexy under the bonnet. Really interested to have a look at the differential. Will be changing to ball bearings as perhaps goes without saying. As it stands the car is a slightly random mixture of bronze and plastic bushings which means there are some horrific new flavours of gunk and spudge everywhere. 

I will almost certainly be going brushed, so as not to nuke the hard to find differential too hard. Lipo is very much on the table as I don't think I need the weight of NIMH or NiCAD to make this car behave and I'd love to see it fly with the current on tap from a decent battery. Shocks will get a rebuild and potentially new springs but will stay in place. The plastic links will be replaced with turnbuckles, read: m3 threaded rod, I am not made of money. I am toying with the idea of bell crank steering as the stock Blitzer arrangement can be a tad pitiful.  If my Doomerang steering works okay then maybe I'll take a harder look. Or just slap together some M07 parts like a sensible person would do. 

Thank you for reading

Harry

 

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Very cool! I had one near mint for years sitting on the shelf to compliment my FX10 and I didn't have the heart to run it. I ended up putting it on Ebay not even expecting to get my asking price since it's somewhat unknown and it ended up in a bidding war... Who knew?

It's a great little gem, it's like the first gen RC10 and Stadium Blitzer got tipsy, disappeared into a back alley one night and 9 months later ended up with a combined offspring. 

Can't wait to see it restored! 

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23 hours ago, Hobgoblin said:

...  On the upside I imagine it had better sales figures than the Striker - at least seven people bought them and four quite liked them. 

HAAAA! :lol:

The FXT, to me, is the archetypal RC stadium truck. I look forward to seeing your work with this example!

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Had never heard of this before your thread, interesting read and well written, so thanks (Could have done with a cuppa whilst reading, but I've upset the Mrs so I'll have to make my own).

Looking at the images on Google you appear to be missing the battery strap too? I see someone is selling a replica in GRP on eBay, perhaps you could get one of those and use the templates for some lovely carbon to go with the shock towers when you approach Fibre Lyte?! (Although, for £20 for a GRP version perhaps you could rather easily design your own...)

Shame you don't have a bodyshell, what do you intend to put on it?

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2 hours ago, OldSchoolRC1 said:

It's a great little gem, it's like the first gen RC10 and Stadium Blitzer got tipsy, disappeared into a back alley one night and 9 months later ended up with a combined offspring. 

Can't wait to see it restored! 

Could not have put it better! Thanks for your story about yours, yes they seem to either fly under the radar and are sold for twenty pence posted or there is a mad bidding war and you can make some respectable money.

 


Yes I am missing the battery strap but luckily it is an extremely simple part to reproduce. I won't waste my money on the GRP version (I can buy a whole sheet of carbon for that :P ) as it sort of designs itself once you have the centre distance and battery length. Plus, with my thirst for bell crank steering I might be shifting the battery holder back to its short position which requires a shorter strap. In time we shall see.

I drew up the shock towers and strap 

VdOwHtl.png?1
I will be testing them by 3d printing soon. Out of the car the towers are a very strange shape which I quite like. They are 2.5mm FRP as stock so i have drawn them the same in CF,  but I will probably not change them until I break one.

10oPaJ4.jpg?1

bLMnSjJ.png?1

I also modelled the wheels, front and rear. These are quite close to the originals but with some liberties taken with geometry for the sake of simplicity. 

Ps5WThI.jpg?1

A test of the rear tire was pretty positive, only changes i'll make is the tightening of the 12mm hex, I shot too over size with my tolerance so can bring that back a tad. The front can print tonight and I'll fit them to my Stadium blitzer because, quite frankly they look awesome.

DiakMGy.jpg?1

Opened up the gearbox and was pretty happy with what i saw. Very light grease and little wear. The gears are different to a Blitzer but I have a sneaking suspicion they might actually fit the casing. They definitely will not fit the Bearhawk as the first spur gear is fractionally too large. 

SIn21y2.jpg?1



ZeJXAup.jpg?1

Note the strange drive cups with the notch in (for extra bumpy reversing) but other than that it seems to be a fairly standard cast aluminium Tamiya ball differential. I will strip this at a later date and lap the plates, potentially replacing the ball bearings for better ones. The perverse backwards engineer in me wants to draw it up with the mind to copy it for a specific Blitzer model but that can easily turn into a money pit.  I plopped my last couple of 1150 bearings in and sealed it back up. This made a huge difference already and the whole thing feels like silk. I had better get some more on the slow boat over before too long. I bought 40 about a year ago and they've all gone!


Uu5xmog.jpg?1


The chassis is in pretty good nick it just needs cleaning. From the clouding it seems that Mr Cyanoacrylate had come round for tea at some point. This would have spelled a brittle death for a plastic tub so score 1 for metal. I spent more time trying to remove the incredibly rotted foam pad than disassembling the car. The probably carcinogenic foam dandruff flaked off without too much hassle but the adhesive backing was a huge pain. I think that's what they use to hold space shuttles together. After a liberal soaking in a nightmarish cocktail of Meths, pernod, paintstripper, Mr. Sheen, brake fluid and Drambuie (the Esther Rantzen) and a bit of scraping with a Stanley blade it was mostly vanquished. 

I will be planning to sand it down and repaint anyway so it's a little academic. 

0uyWVsj.jpg?1


 

3 hours ago, ChrisRx718 said:

Shame you don't have a bodyshell, what do you intend to put on it?


For bodyshell, I will keep my eyes peeled for an original (or reproduction) searching leads to lots of people looking, precisely zero people selling and one poor soul who began making moulds for reproduction shells but then had a rather appalling string of rotten luck which left him unable to continue. In the meantime I will probably consider from Tamiya the F150 or King Cab repro or maybe an old style RC10T. Still very up in the air. I might go mad and have multiple bodies - I can get a baja beetle body to sit fantastically low on this chassis...

Thanks for the responses guys 



 

 

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That's odd - I can say with certainty mine did not have those odd notches in the diff cups. Doesn't look worn in the pics, it looks designed that way. 

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Yes it is a bit of a weird one, my first through was a crack but then I noticed the consistency of the marks and they are all like it, so it is definitely a feature rather than a bug.

It is setup so that when driving forward all is normal and fine, but reversing neatly locks the dogbones back a bit and seems to "bump" the whole arm as it rotates. Not a clue i'll leave it for someone smart to explain. Blitzer/DF01 cups fit the spline so I have options to change them out. I am tossing up changing to a CVD shaft also as I have some spare top force ones. Either way I will need shims for final assembly, even with all the metal and slightly nicer plastics it's still pretty sloppy. 

I drew up the bent chassis stiffener plate. Neat little design that adds a lot of strength to the front of the car. I will end up with a full FXT CAD model before too long at this rate. 

EsgbDch.png?1

And then I began messing around...

K4bmduA.png?1

Using only existing holes, hence the slightly bizarre part geometry. I have already trial printed the mount and changed it quite a lot but the overall concept is the same. One difference is I have swapped to a low profile servo. I will make some proper steel shafts for the steering assembly, Luckily bearings were dispatched today, enough to finish this car and have spares. 

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Today I ended up building the car back up a ways to test things out.

As a simple little job whilst I waited for the laundry to finish was a strip and clean of the shocks. It's been a while since I really stripped a proper CVA damper but looking back through my falcon bits I found an instruction sheet in case I got dreadfully lost. The dampers were in really surprisingly good condition, so good in fact I wondered if they had been run. After taking apart shock number one my question was answered in large print.

hVq0jAG.jpg?1

Shaft was bent as a nine pound note. Right on the threads too. This suggests that the shocks have been run and most certainty  have been jumped.  More importantly they've been landed - badly. A small but fraught venture with pliers and vice had it sitting pretty again. Because the actual plain portion of the shaft is straight still it functions. I will note this and mark the shock body so I can replace it in time when I've jumped it, ballsed the landing and snapped it at the weakened point. 

FVwL7cg.jpg?1

Nothing particularly interesting to note, I drained what little oil there was out and replaced it with some fairly light 30wt Team Associated oil. I went with 30wt to start with principally because it's all I have, I can't be beggared with the hassle of buying liquids at the moment and I like soft suspension. 

cQlqYU3.jpg?1

Feels a lot better with oil in! Who would have thought. I also bodged some turnbuckles together as I luckily had some odd scraps of threaded rod and actual turnbuckles sitting in a drawer. The God of Small Measurements smiled upon me and blessed me with having almost exactly the right sizes in my collection of tat so I was very happy to plop them on straight away. Most of this car is still being setup with plastic bushings due to the aforementioned bearing shortage. I am using new ones at least. 

XPpUODB.jpg?1

Used a mixture of tamiya ball joints and some generic ones. Where I could thread into the plastic I did so but a the rear gearbox it was a 3mm plain hole too large to thread so a long bolt and nut through the whole lot. works pretty well. This side  I have the top force CVD joint and I think this will work quite nicely. I might change the cups out for Blitzer/Manta Ray ones. Still cannot fathom the reason why it has notches. 

FGrvEVF.jpg?1

I did a bit of printing and I have a mostly working V1 bell crank setup. It is running on bushes for the moment but takes two 1150 bearings because I like to standardise my life. The shafts are just threaded aluminum at the moment and are too long by design. Easy to chop down when I'm done fiddling. The steering servo is a low profile one I originally intended for my Doomerang, but fits perfectly in this. The servo mount is a bit of a mutt, lots of cruel and unusual geometry going on to use existing mount holes whist holding the servo securely and not fouling on the battery tray position. 
 


Pretty decent movement for a first version. Servo is pretty quick even on a 120mah 4.8v I used for quick testing. I will need to limit the throws and play with EPA on my transmitter.

ZjdJ7xa.jpg?1

Much less of a hellish angle when you compress the front now. Talk about night and day! Amazing how a little tweaking can have such an effect. 

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I've been in talks as to how to keep the fixed steering but still be able to use a regular stick pack - which honestly is a very sensible goal. 

9J5EA3Y.jpg?1

The way I've come up with at the moment is adding a servo mount to the end of the battery holder. It mounts using the existing holes. If you stick a servo in from above facing downward it is at the perfect height to use the bump steer removing bell crank system in place. I've also considered mounting the servo way up the back (like the DF03) but there are some issues with this.


Anyway I had some spare time whilst I wait for shims to come on the slowboat from China so I've been doing a bit of wiring.

RGxD8n4.jpg?1

Stripped the case off the LRP ESC. The wires weren't great and not nearly long enough so I just removed what was there and started replacing it with modern 14awg silicone. 

0FprDpS.jpg?1

I've been feeling a bit of a bubblegum theme for this car for a bit of a novelty, I have a kyosho Mega 18t motor which has a pink and blue label so I began working backwards to match it where I could. I remembered hobbyking used to do a really good colour range of larger (well, 12-14awg) wire. It was my go-to for Robot Wars builds as it helps to clearly colour code. Unfortunately they seem to have long discontinued everything but boring red black and blue! And finding pink silicone wire turned out to be a huge rabbit hole where I'd have to order at least 200 meters of the stuff for it to be worth it. A quick peek through my old robot event toolbox looking for a pinion puller yielded a 2m length of the exact colour in the exact size! Thanks 2017 me!

1B642nx.jpg?1

2vWW50R.jpg?1

All clipped back together, was a surprisingly easy job! 

8MrZ1IP.jpg?1

Old esc's are quite funny to wire up, there fact the battery positive "shares" with the motor positive amuses me no end. Schottky diode has been added too for point of novelty.

tCNjpXy.jpg?1

I think that looks rather neat with the motor all together. The FXT also has some nice mounting points for wire anchoring which is quite handy. 

ZePh5Yo.jpg?1

Oh and I managed to get some NOS proline tires which have some really cool spikes! Once I gave them a wipe down they were fine. Very sticky!

akdUU9g.jpg?1

Look pretty funky with some quick tire writing! 

1BZ6kbv.jpg?1

And with the bodyshell I managed to snag from Jonboy1. The Rock Socker is, for all intents and purposes, a Stadium Blitzer shell - except it doesn't share the precut body mounting holes. This is good news for me because the FXT has completely different mounting locations. No holes to hide! 

For paint I am thinking the regular details in black; window trim, grill and the gaps around the rear cage. The main body colour will just have to be my new favourite, Bright gun metal with an obnoxious bubblegum pink roll cage, and some pink and blue stripes! It works in my head at least :D

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Very cool!! Here I thought these were just 1:1 clones of the Stadium Blitzer.

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dLWp5zs.jpg?1

Still colour matching :lol:

NiMH battery is in and fits great with the steering servo come battery retainer. Just need to chop the plugs over to xt60. 

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UxQDiAV.jpg?1

The body shell has been painted to match the internals, I'm not 100% on the shade choices, I think I should have gone brighter but I'm sure by the time I've run this truck a few times it will need a new body anyway and i can do a V2!
I went with black for the grill, below the window and the panels behind the cage, regular gun metal all over and pink and blue for the detailing. I wish i'd got the florescent stuff!  I think the gun metal goes really well with the wheels

lCoSYni.jpg?1

I still have a lot of decal work to do, I need to get some Tamiya and Futaba logo's on there,  maybe even some Kyosho and LRP to fully represent the brands used in the car. It's a real mashup of brands - I think I have most of the common ones covered!

PMGReem.jpg?1

Looking a bit more polished next to it's Stadium Blitzer twin. 

I will say I'm really pleased to be able to take this out for a run soon. I need to play with the steering a little more and add some shims (this shows the Tamiya roots) and away we go. 

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On 6/17/2020 at 8:37 AM, Hobgoblin said:

dLWp5zs.jpg?1

Still colour matching :lol:

NiMH battery is in and fits great with the steering servo come battery retainer. Just need to chop the plugs over to xt60. 

Man that tub screams RC10!

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2 hours ago, GTodd said:

Man that tub screams RC10!

Absolutely, I think Futaba had long seen which way the wind was blowing with regards to winning designs and I think that while done in jest, what I said at the start of this post does ring rather true!

 

On 4/21/2020 at 4:17 PM, Hobgoblin said:

I do think I wouldn't be completely wrong by saying the FXT is what would happen if you set out to make an RC10T but all you had to work with was a Blitzer and some imagination


And that is 100% part of the charm of this car. It's very close to being serious but it has enough little rough patches which stopped it from standing out. I really really would love an RC10T some day but I'm priced out of the market, unless we're talking nitro they're very expensive these days. Maybe I'll get to hold my FXT next to one at a race meet someday :lol:

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Hey Crazies,

I am not happy with the steering and so have been working out a better solution, My main hold up is how to mount the servo in a less... inelegant (read, dumb) manner. 

DxJT2v9.png?1

I sucked up some inspiration from one of Tamiya's more modern 4WD chassis, the DF03 with the steering servo slung at the 'hip' of the car. I think this might work well here but how to do it without punching mount holes in the chassis or flunking out and using servo tape/foam pads to just stick the sucker down. 

a5iBAAP.png?1

I just grew a tumour onto the battery retainer and ran with it. The angle of the tab matches the chassis tub so it sits fairly snug in the frame. 
TAmSUAM.jpg?1

And I can slot in a standard size servo with no hassle, love it. The crank has also been redone so it's at the same angle as the servo/tub now and I have made the lever arm slightly higher so it's less of an extreme angle.  I was expecting to have some issues with the angle but honestly it works pretty **** well. There will be some odd losses but with the excess torque of modern servos it's sort of moot. 

9WmlmFT.jpg?1

9z083BH.jpg?1

It wiggles away quite well! The rack is also beefed up, nearly twice as thick as well as running on nylon bushings. Much less play and a lot stronger. I snapped my v1 uninstalling it. 
 



A little more tweaking and finishing and it can be tested and I think this one will be a winner! 

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On 4/22/2020 at 12:00 PM, Hobgoblin said:

Could not have put it better! Thanks for your story about yours, yes they seem to either fly under the radar and are sold for twenty pence posted or there is a mad bidding war and you can make some respectable money.

 


Yes I am missing the battery strap but luckily it is an extremely simple part to reproduce. I won't waste my money on the GRP version (I can buy a whole sheet of carbon for that :P ) as it sort of designs itself once you have the centre distance and battery length. Plus, with my thirst for bell crank steering I might be shifting the battery holder back to its short position which requires a shorter strap. In time we shall see.

I drew up the shock towers and strap 

VdOwHtl.png?1
I will be testing them by 3d printing soon. Out of the car the towers are a very strange shape which I quite like. They are 2.5mm FRP as stock so i have drawn them the same in CF,  but I will probably not change them until I break one.

10oPaJ4.jpg?1

bLMnSjJ.png?1

I also modelled the wheels, front and rear. These are quite close to the originals but with some liberties taken with geometry for the sake of simplicity. 

Ps5WThI.jpg?1

A test of the rear tire was pretty positive, only changes i'll make is the tightening of the 12mm hex, I shot too over size with my tolerance so can bring that back a tad. The front can print tonight and I'll fit them to my Stadium blitzer because, quite frankly they look awesome.

DiakMGy.jpg?1

Opened up the gearbox and was pretty happy with what i saw. Very light grease and little wear. The gears are different to a Blitzer but I have a sneaking suspicion they might actually fit the casing. They definitely will not fit the Bearhawk as the first spur gear is fractionally too large. 

SIn21y2.jpg?1



ZeJXAup.jpg?1

Note the strange drive cups with the notch in (for extra bumpy reversing) but other than that it seems to be a fairly standard cast aluminium Tamiya ball differential. I will strip this at a later date and lap the plates, potentially replacing the ball bearings for better ones. The perverse backwards engineer in me wants to draw it up with the mind to copy it for a specific Blitzer model but that can easily turn into a money pit.  I plopped my last couple of 1150 bearings in and sealed it back up. This made a huge difference already and the whole thing feels like silk. I had better get some more on the slow boat over before too long. I bought 40 about a year ago and they've all gone!


Uu5xmog.jpg?1


The chassis is in pretty good nick it just needs cleaning. From the clouding it seems that Mr Cyanoacrylate had come round for tea at some point. This would have spelled a brittle death for a plastic tub so score 1 for metal. I spent more time trying to remove the incredibly rotted foam pad than disassembling the car. The probably carcinogenic foam dandruff flaked off without too much hassle but the adhesive backing was a huge pain. I think that's what they use to hold space shuttles together. After a liberal soaking in a nightmarish cocktail of Meths, pernod, paintstripper, Mr. Sheen, brake fluid and Drambuie (the Esther Rantzen) and a bit of scraping with a Stanley blade it was mostly vanquished. 

I will be planning to sand it down and repaint anyway so it's a little academic. 

0uyWVsj.jpg?1


 


For bodyshell, I will keep my eyes peeled for an original (or reproduction) searching leads to lots of people looking, precisely zero people selling and one poor soul who began making moulds for reproduction shells but then had a rather appalling string of rotten luck which left him unable to continue. In the meantime I will probably consider from Tamiya the F150 or King Cab repro or maybe an old style RC10T. Still very up in the air. I might go mad and have multiple bodies - I can get a baja beetle body to sit fantastically low on this chassis...

Thanks for the responses guys 



 

 

Great work! I recently started to rebuild my own FXT from when I was a kid. ¿Do yoy have the model of the wheels? I would love to print them.

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I will post photos of my own FXT, it was 20 years stored inside its box and now working again! Some details that I will resolve, like the cracked lexan body that is original I want to reenforce and renew. Great post!!

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Thanks for the comments @XAMV83 I would love to see pictures of your truck. I will reply to2 your private message shortly too. 

I'll work on uploading my printed parts soon! 

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Nice build Hobgoblin.  I recently bought a FXT, which I had as a kid in the early '90s, so I have a soft spot for this truck.  Mine also needs some work and restoration.  Slowly getting parts for it. So far have a full set of Acer bearings, MCI decals, new original front tires and have a spare Dynamite 15T brushed motor I'll probably use at first. I'd like to do a bell crank steering setup as well, but really don't know where or how to start...?  Any suggestions or advise would be greatly appreciated.  Also I really like what you did with the turnbuckles and ball joints so I'll need to do the same.  What a difference the front suspension is, so nice.  

By the way, you should be able to get bearings for your truck from Acer or Boca.  A few weeks ago I just bought new from Acer; 11- 5.0 x 11.0 x 4.0mm rubber sealed bearings and 1- 5.0 x 8.0 x 2.5mm ceramic bearing for $20.  Boca also has FXT bearing sets, $14 for steel bearings or $39 for rubber sealed bearings. 

I noticed RCScrewZ makes a stainless steel screw kit for the Tamiya Stadium Blitzer.  Anyone know if this kit would be the same and be worth getting for the FXT?

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Recently picked up another FXT. The orange one showed up today with a bonus of a vintage Kyosho Le Mans 480 Gold motor in pretty good shape.  The green one I picked up earlier this summer.  Both getting restored over the cold months.

 

FXTs.jpeg

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I registered on the forum to say thanks for posting!  I got one of these for Christmas when I was about 10 in the early 90's.  It was my first non-department store RC.  It was such a great experience.  I remember sending my Dad out of the room when he tried to help me put it together.   There's so little online content about them so it's great to see your posts.

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Few bits came in the post today

efjM5M0.jpg

This is helping with the temptation to get a mild brushless in the truck. I think it drives so well it deserves a little more motor! 

Zdutxf1.jpg

May '95... these parts are a couple years older than me! 

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Great to see you fixing up this old truck. I just  race mine in the 2020 Vintage Off Road Nationals. Had a lot of break downs but love you steering mod.

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