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Nikko85

A smaller Clod for 2021

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This is my first ever RC build, so please go easy. I've bugged the posters at the 4x4 section for a while with my questions, but thought I'd share the process here.

It all started with this pair of cars I got from Ebay for around £40, I really wanted the Tandy/Taiyo Off Road Tiger for a conversion, having followed some of Nowinaminute's posts, but I thought the other car looked interesting too.

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It looks like Quick Drive Clodbuster, but there was a hitch. It isn't at all. It's a copy and no parts are identical, but it is very close at points. It was made by "Scientific Toys, Hong Kong". I can't find out much about them, and I've searched for other examples of this model, but with no luck. Was it ever a Mega Monster, or was that a sticker from the cereal box?

It arrived with a 9.6 v battery with Tamiya connector (nicer at least than the 8 x AA system) but other than that is was terrible. The steering was weak, non proportional and really unresponsive, with a very complex mechanism, and the car was pretty slow. I don't mean slow for a toy car, it was just slow.

So, I decided that it was time to try some hobby grade gear. I had loved RC cars as a kid, but have not looked at them for a decade or two before this. My older brother always had hobby grade RC cars, but I loved my Nikkos (hence the name). However I wanted to finally get with the times, learn about modern RC and this was the perfect project.

The plan was simple. I had read guides from people who had converted other QD monster trucks, so had some idea of what to expect. Or so I thought.

The first thing I did was change the servo. For the QD cars you can drop in the servo after cutting off the tabs, but no luck here. The housing was quite different so I had to add double sided tape and rubber on both sides of the servo housing so it squeezed in tight.

 I also had to drill out a hole for the wires to go, and then make my own servo horn. All the other servo horns that came with the servo just didn't fit to give a nice geometry. I made the servo horn by cutting a piece of plastic (I found on the street) to size and then screwing this onto one of the arms of the servo horn that came with the kit. I could probably buy a neater looking horn, but I found it really hard to get dimensions online, and I don't have a big bag of them. 

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And now we have working steering. The steering has been great, such an improvement. It's simple system, but works really well, and has worked without a hitch, once I've worked out the steering EPA.

So, with the steering done I decided to move onto the motor.

After reading a few posts I picked up an Ezrun 18T combo, which I had heard works really well with the QD. However I ran into a couple of issues. The Ezrun combo didn't work with my transmitter, so I had to get a new one transmitter, but I also got a cheap 320A ESC. When I finally got it running on the Ezrun I wasn't impressed. The speed was there, but it made a really horrible noise, like the whole thing was struggling with the power going through it. After accidentally flooring the acceleration I managed to break gears in the diff, spraying plastic inside the gear housing and making a mess of everything. Opening it up again, I saw the gears were tiny and terrible. It had to go.

I had read a tale of someone fitting a 540 gearbox in the backend, and I had one spare, very similar to the hornet. As a bonus, the wheels from the Fake-Clod worked perfectly with it, so in it went. To make it fit I trimmed down the ends of the gearbox housing that attached to the chassis and used a 5mm aluminium bolt as the pivot. The bolt runs through the entire assembly so I can squeeze it too make a stiffer join.  I added some red springs I had  and hey presto, a 540 powered mini Clod. The new gearbox meant it is about 2 cm longer and 1 cm wider in the rear, but nothing that looked crazy.

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My first effort was quite complex, with elastic thread to stop the back end popping off (there was no limit to how far the back end could rotate away from the chassis) but this was soon improved. First I added aluminium L bracket, sprayed black to hold the shocks. I also melted the ends of the springs into the cups, meaning they could work under tension and compression. This meant I could get rid of the elastic that was stopping the back end falling away from the chassis completely on a jump or when picked up.

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Because the 540 motor is pretty big, to give enough travel in the rear the car sits a little high at the back, but that just makes it look meaner. The rear is stiffer than the front, but I'm happy with it. A few test and the car was going really well. The gearbox is well built, with gears around 3x as thick as before, and a larger tooth size.


The  battery case was next. The 320A Esc can't handle more than 7.2 volts with a 540 but I wanted to use the tray I had. I debated a 6 x AA pack, but that would be more ££ (or soldering which I hate) so I cut out the battery tray very carefully so the 7.2v could be added. There was just enough space to keep the ends of the battery tray on. I had to cut away on one side for the bit of the battery which sticks out, so I may be stuck with this design of battery stick. Now it fits very neatly, which is a real plus. The battery is deeper than AA, so I used the oven hob to bend the battery tray around the new battery and squeezed it back in. It now looks like it was designed this way.

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The last thing was getting the car looking good. I added some stripes using electrical tape and a craft knife and windows with some smokey transparent plastic and double sided tape, sticking them on the inside. The very faded chrome got a chrome/silver spray, and then some black shoe polish to age it ("chrome" spray paint looks quite crap, but with shoe polish it looks just like aged aluminium). I added a engine hood from an old Nikko, a bumper (the original broke but I had a spare from another car that could be made to work) and sprayed the black roll bar white. Final act was to use a silver sharpie to colour in the door handles.

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So now I have a 540 powered fake Tamiya QD Clod. It runs really well, the turning circle is tiny and can really shift. Gearing is quite high, but it also means it's happy around the house doing loops of the kitchen floor. It's not massive by any means, but it's a little more Clod like than the other QDs around! My final task will be to get some real white QD tires (as they take bearings) and new tires, as these ones are very poor.

I'll probably give it to my nephew or niece, as I've got another (real this time) QD MP which is getting the brushless motor, and the Midnight Pumpkin is my favourite, but we'll see. I find the fun is in making things more than using them. 

Any questions please do ask, this was my first RC build/conversion and it was pretty fun. Probably spent more than it was worth, but it was fun to make. It's nice to have something no-one else has too!

 

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10 hours ago, jonboy1 said:

love the ingenuity you've employed here - brilliant work!

Thanks. It was my first build but really fun! 

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