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Toad16v

Toad's df03 cash vacuum

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Hello, I hope you are all having as wonderous a day as I am. I'll preface this thread by saying how much I like build threads, part as I love reading other people's ideas, and seeing how other people have got around issues or personalised things, and also because memory seems to have reached capacity and it's nice to record what I've done and where I've spoffed all my spare money. I used to have a long build thread for a couple of corrados I used to run and started threads in the past for tractors I've worked on. 

As is a familiar story, lockdown bought about boredom, restricted where I could go and what I could do and increased the amount of spare cash I had - no longer was I spending a tenner on lunch or about a billion pounds on chocolate every day, so I started searching for productive things to spend time on.

When I was a youth I had a blackfoot, which I didn't use enough, painted terribly and left in bits at my parents house. I always fancied getting another rc car to mess around with, so I bought myself a hornet and would spend a little bit of time between online meetings or while my gf was finishing work building it, and I soon went down the line of upgrades with ball bearings going in very quickly and a torque tuned motor. Next I fancied something more challenging, capable and hopefully with less propensity for spending its time sliding down the street upside down, so I bought a Terra Scorcher, fortunately (ish) it's a pretty well specced kit, and apart from a Carson Cup motor and some cheap fastrax road tyrea it's stayed fairly standard. I continued to peruse forums, fb pages etc and eventually around Christmas I started to get the itch for another build.

At this time I also took 3 months of unpaid leave from work to help out on the family farm for altruistic reasons and the fact that I hate some of my colleagues and its much nicer being in a field with a collie for company than sending emails to someone I despise. This meant that cash wasn't so prevalent, but I had a little savings pot to buy myself stuff with - I also have a habit of buying broken chainsaws and repairing them for not justifiable, financially unsound sums of money. I'm due to have three hernias tucked in and used the inevitable recovery period as an excuse to buy a kit to build so in January I hunted around and eventually picked up a dark impact kit.

Obviously I'm an idiot and built it before I've had the op, so I'll have to buy something else to occupy me when it happens.

I did a fair bit of research prior to the purchase and while the ball diffs have a mixed reputation, I quite like slightly odd, unusual or weird engineering challenges and decided this was the kit for me. I bought a sport tuned motor, front diff out drives and carbide balls to build it with as I quite like doing things properly from the outset, but otherwise intended to keep the kit standard and as low cost as possible, I used a hobbywing 1060 esc due to the multitude of good reviews, and a cheap carson twin stick controller/reciever/servo kit as per my hornet build.

The build was good and interesting although I am not a fan of the plastics - the other kits I've built have felt a lot more solid when installing screws, this kit feels like threads will strip easily. 

I built the diffs up and ran them in an electric drill, adjusted the tension, re-ran them in etc until I was happy with them, in reality I didn't have a clue what they were supposed to be like but I couldn't turn the centre while holding the out drives and they felt pretty smooth in operation. The rest of the build was pretty standard, and I was lucky enough to build a makeshift spray booth in the workshop with a fan heater to get the shell painted. While I'm happy with mechanical things, paint and stickers are not my forte so I kept the shell simple.

 

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Took it out for its first proper run along with my terra scorcher, everything had been going well up to that point. One of the front fastrax wheels on the terra scorcher broke, the body pin fell out and a wheel loosened off enough for the drive pin in the hex to dissappear. The Dark Impact suffered a worse fate with the rear gearbox snapping where the suspension arm pivot fits. Up until those points both cars were great, and was nice to get out and hoon them around. 

I ordered a new gearbox parts tree for the dark impact and started to receive deliveries of shiny parts I'd found on the Internet and was powerless to ignore. 

I ordered a slipper clutch, centre one way, the df03/tt02b aluminium dampers along with a number of pinion options, and a set of yeah racing cvds.

Upon reading about the propensity of the gearboxes to snap at the suspension mounting points I set about making some braces from scrap aluminium I had knocking around. 

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Oh, and a set of adjustable turnbuckles, I really liked them from the terra scorcher and thought they would be a good addition.

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Having ordered even more parts, upgrades and general unnecessary gubbins tonight I've tried to remove some of the slop in the axles with a set if the tamiya 5mm shims. I've ended up with a 0.1mm shim in both rear and one front axle and a 0.2mm shim in the other front axle after some trial fits and waggling of the wheels. Not having done this on this sort of scale before, does this sound reasonable? I don't want to add too much load to the wheel bearings, but hated the extra floppyness present. I've also put a shim between parts p1 and c3 in the servo saver as it was also quite floppy as standard. I'm not 100% sure this is the best plan, but I don't think it'll stop the servo saver from working, but might make it more obvious that my driving skills are somewhat lacking rather than there being play within important bits of the car. 

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After the initial run out and snapping of plastic - I'm going to blame the cold weather as I didn't ram it into anything memorable, I rebuilt the gearbox as standard, ran it for a little bit and then put the slipper clutch in. I watched videos, checked out forum posts and scoured bits of the Internet for advice, and hopefully got it right. I left the kit motor pinion in for the time being as about a 5% drop in gearing sounded like a good first step.

I've set the slipper so that holding the pinion and one wheel solidly and rotating the other rear wheel the slipper clutch slips and not the rear diff - although I know I need to keep on top of the diffs. Holding the car on the carpet in the living room and putting some power on, neither the ball diffs or the slipper slipped before the wheels span, I figured this wasn't a terrible position to be in with just a sport tuned motor. I also got away without my girlfriend noticing what I was up to...

I decided against fitting the centre one way for the time being, I quite like being able to brake solidly, and it's something I might find useful to cash in if I keep snapping other bits. 

The car is currently looking like this, with some Carson wheels and tyres I picked up, and 7mm front hexes so they don't rub on the steering arm. I thought I'd see how it looked with white rims, think I'll pick up some proper white df03 rims and fit some schumacher tyres somewhere down the line. The tub behind it is a load of chilli seedlings we planted a week or so back.

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Having plenty of time to fiddle about at stuff indoors at the moment I've been able to install some more bits onto my Dark Impact.

Most of my RC driving recently and probably for the next month or so is in the street by our house. We are lucky to live at the end of a quiet cul de sac, so I can make the most of the road. I took part in last months postal racing round with both the Dark Impact and the Terra Scorcher. It was great fun, and I think it helped improve my driving skills. I found that the Terra Scorcher performed as well as the Dark Impact, I think partially it was down to the Dark Impact understeering more so cornering was trickier although it was quicker/faster on the brief straights. The understeering is undoubtedly partly down to the tyres not being great for running on tarmac, and I may look to replace them at some point soon but I'd like to do more with the setup of the car to make it a little better. I've lowered it on the suspension to help a little with this so the wishbones are running closer to horizontal than they were.

Quite some time back I bought a large number of parts from rcjaz, while I was at it I picked up a centre one way kit. I've been really unsure about fitting it as I have never been convinced that it suits my sort of driving or use of the car, but given my recent bashing in the street and desire to improve the turning circle I decided to fit it and see how it affects things. The car was a bit grubbier than I really would like it to be when opening up the gearboxes, but I took my time to clean off all the surfaces, joints and areas around the gearbox cover, and then cleaned it a bit more when the cover was off, hopefully no foreign objects made it inside. 

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I stripped the old prop joint, cleaned it and left the various components together in case I want to swap it back. I'll probably get a new bearing for it as its been exposed to grit, grub and the outside world on one face and I don't see the point in saving a few pence on a bearing that takes a while to swap out. 

 

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The new joint got built up as per the instructions, I smeared a bit of grease between the bearings, bushes and e clip to reduce any friction likely to build up between rotating and non-rotating parts. It probably isn't necessary, but I like to play it safe. I wacked a bit more grease into the gearbox before screwing it back together.

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As part of a job lot of parts from ebay I also picked up an aluminium one piece prop joint which I fitted to the front. I replaced the outer bearing as it was a bit grubby as outlined above. Fitting it gave me the opportunity to check out the front diff, which looked to be in good condition as well. Again I saved all the leftover parts in case I want to revert to standard. 

 

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As well as these two slightly more involved jobs, I put loctitie on the heat sink screws, this was another hop up that I really didn't think much of in terms of usefulness or effectiveness, but during my recent use of the car I was surprised to feel how warm the bars had become, I'm glad I did fall for their anodised charm now. I do wonder if lowering the gearing for the shorter, more technical 'courses' I'm doing would be better for heat buildup but this might be something to fiddle about with in future.

The final job I did today was to remove the Carson receiver and replaced it with a Flysky receiver to use with my FS-I6. I had to adjust the wiring a bit, and then set up the endpoints on the steering. It appears that there is better throw in one direction than the other, so I should benefit turning in one way than I used to with the old, basic Carson transmitter.

I'm quite looking forward to taking it out and finding out if anything I did to the car has had a noticeable benefit to the driving experience, sadly its a bit damp out and wandering around is quite painful still so this may be a few days away.

 

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Quick test run this morning showed that it's far more nimble around tight turns with the centre one way in place. I'm curious as to how brutal it is on the system when it catches up and drive is restored to the front wheels again. Glad I went to the effort of installing it.

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Had some time today where I had nothing else to do, so stripped the front of the Dark Impact and fitted bearings instead of bushes to the steering arms. Wish I had done it sooner, the grease and dust had combined to start wearing away at the bushes, posts and the arms. Also, there is some play in the arms from where the step screws fit, it isn't something that can be removed by tightening. Might have to buy a new set and see if I can find a way to remove the slop. The work I did has removed some play from the steering.

Also fitted the turnbuckle steering rod from the servo, completely unnecessary, and was annoying to adjust when the old one was perfect really. 

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Great write up!

Love your suspension arm braces, there used to be an aftermarket carbon fibre hop up for that but like a lot of the original dark impact parts seems to be long discontinued now.

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Really enjoyable read, thanks for sharing. Hope the op all went ok and you've got another project lined up already!

Love the body colour, what is it please? Car looks great, upgraditis sure is a catching ailment! 😁

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16 hours ago, Superluminal said:

Great write up!

Love your suspension arm braces, there used to be an aftermarket carbon fibre hop up for that but like a lot of the original dark impact parts seems to be long discontinued now.

Thank you. The braces aren't the prettiest, but hopefully do the job.

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6 hours ago, B.RAD said:

Really enjoyable read, thanks for sharing. Hope the op all went ok and you've got another project lined up already!

Love the body colour, what is it please? Car looks great, upgraditis sure is a catching ailment! 😁

Thank you!

It's ps 59 Dark metallic Blue backed with bright silver. I'm pleased with the way it came out.

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Realised last night that I have spares for the steering after buying a c parts tree for the front hubs. I could have swapped them all out while it was in bits yesterday. Doh!

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Took the Dark Impact out again this evening to try to beat my postal racing entry from Sunday. I did on on first run. The second run I was 2/3rds of the way through the time when I assume the esc went into thermal cutout and it coasted at speed into a kerb, which was sad. The impact didn't seem to cause too much damage to anything, but the tracking was out - I adjusted both endpoints across one step as it was bottoming out one way and not the other. This has happened before. My suspicion is that the impacts cause the servo to jump a tooth or something like that.

It's a Carson CS3, so fairly weak and not that quick, I think I'm going to try a new Savox servo on it to see if that is better.

Also need to look at the reason behind it cutting out. The motor was pretty warm, the esc wasn't *that* hot, both certainly get hotter in my tt01. Solid red light on the esc if anyone has any ideas.

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If it's the tble02s, I had the same issue with thermal cut out on my Mad Bull, also for seemingly no reason. I switched to a Hobbywing 1060 and it's been perfecto ever since, and runs much nicer on that ESC too 👍

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Sadly it's the 1060.

I'm going to change the gearing a bit, drop it to the 25t pinion and see if that keeps temps down while wanging it around the street. Hopefully will mean less top speed if it cuts out again. :P

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Fitted a new Savox 254mg servo last night, adjusted the steering and end points, but not sure it isn't still wandering a bit - I suspect there is a little play somewhere I've underestimated, but it's OK. I'm surprised by how noisy the servo is, but internet searches seem to suggest this is normal. 

Fitted the 25t pinion, reset the mesh and chucked a bit of grease on the gears. At some point I'll take the slipper out and put my new hardened steel pinion on the shaft, perhaps strip, clean and rebuild the diffs while I'm at it.

I picked up some second hand df03 white wheels a while back, bought a set of schumacher honeycomb tyres and medium inserts as they seemed like they should work for running on tarmac. 

Took it out last night after all the fettling and it felt pretty good. Lots more grip from the tyres, significantly less sliding around which will take a bit of adjusting to, and I imagine will put a bit more work on the slipper clutch. 

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Great job

Much as I love my DF-03 I can't believe how much money I've thrown at it. 

 

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