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Himoto Spatha repair & review

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Thinking about buying a Himoto Spatha? Why wouldn't you be - the spec list looks great, full bearings throughout, proper decent shocks and a brushless 3210kv motor too. 4WD and decent looking body sets, fully RTR all for £159! What's not to like??

Let me help answer that question...

A mechanically challenged mate has just sent me his Himoto Spatha after it was making some horrible noises and he wasn't sure what it could be. It was pretty obviously gear slip, but it was so bad I suggested he post it down to me and I'd take a look for him. What I found on a quick inspection was the teeth on the motor pinion looking very nasty.

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So I stripped back a bit further, and found the spur gear on the drive shaft to be quite significantly distorted, a big ol' wobble on rotation. That would have been causing the pinion gap to tighten to solid interference as it rotated. 

While the motor was out, I gave the wheels a turn to see what was going on with the diffs, more out of intrigue than anything else. What I found was horrible, grinding noises and complete slip of the teeth. I took both front and rear diffs out and they were the same, they could spin past engagement with barely any pressure. I took the diffs apart and found the tiniest dab of grease in both, and the gear teeth completely concave and worn through. No grease had made it to the "lower" driveshaft cup (as you look at the open diff from above), the poor gear must have been subjected to some brutal heat. Bear in mind that my mate has only put two battery packs through this... 😳

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To replace the spur gear, it was actually cheaper to buy the full prop shaft set, which also came with new end gears and bearings. We also bought two new diffs, again cheaper than a rebuild set. I opened up the new diffs and found just a squidge of grease on the top side of the inner gears, which wasn't actually making contact with anything. Even on rotation the grease wasn't being picked up and spread around 🤦.

I packed the diffs out with AW grease, put them back together along with the new prop, spur and end gears, replaced the motor pinion with a 17t 0.8 Tamiya steel pinion and rebuilt the truck.  There are no instructions for this, but it's pretty intuitive. I found 90% of the screws would no longer go fully tight in the holes thanks to the cheap plastic. They went tight enough, but not to Tamiya standard (which is saying a lot!).

So, to answer the question - should you buy one? My advice is simple...NO. All the thought is there, the mountings for everything are decent, the spec list reads as great, but ultimately the quality of the really important bits is just rubbish. I doubt it'd survive a silver can, let alone the brushless set up that comes in it. Save your £159 and buy something else. An interesting project for me though!

Hope this was useful! 😁

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