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Mad Ax

Bear Hawk - Vintage Runner

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I don't usually poke my head into this forum that often, as believe it or not I don't actually have that much vintage stuff.  However, the one true vintage runner that's been a constant companion in my fleet is my Bear Hawk.  I haven't posted about it in detail before, so before I get into this weekend's work and some chat about the future, here's a quick bit of history.

I didn't know about the Bear Hawk until my return to RC around 2004.  Unlike a lot of Tamiya fans in the 80s and 90s, I never had access to Tamiya guide books - I didn't even know they existed - and my entire knowledge of Tamiya's RC range came from the bottom of the box of the Junior series Mini 4WD cars.  Since all my Mini 4WDs pre-dated the Bear Hawk (and indeed the Bear Hawk Jr. of 1992 actually had a wing, spoiling the car's main defining feature) I had never heard of the beast until I joined Tamiyaclub.

I immediately fell in love with it.  Something about that aggressive, wide body and lack of rear wing (which I always felt made RC buggies of the era look toy-like, even if they do work on track) really spoke to me.  As a huge fan of Mad Max and post-apocalyptic survival vehicles, I thought it looked great.  Sometime around mid-2006 I tracked down a well-used example from someone on here.

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The body was missing the rear cage, the wheels had been hand-painted and the tyres were toast, but it was a blast to drive and I had a lot of fun with it in a wood near where I lived.  I fitted some new stardish wheels and Tamiya tyres and even managed to track down an original bodyset NIB ready for a resto-mod.

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And then, less than a year later I ran out of money, had to move out of my rented house to buy a flat, didn't have the space for it, etc., etc., and I sold the lot to a colleague who was into RC planes and wanted something for his son to play with.

I was horribly disappointed when he brought it in a week later, body sprayed in some non-plastic-compatible red paint without a primer coat, decals cut so bad the decal sheet part number was still visible...  And so ended my brief love affair with the Bear Hawk.

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Well, for a time, anyway.  In mid-2010, almost exactly 4 years since I'd got my first Bear Hawk, this arrived from eBay.

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Well-used but complete, with wood screws holding the front subframe onto the chassis and some bad cracks in the body around the rear posts and some significant damage hiding under the screw that holds Andy Antsinpants' head on, this car would become one of my longest continual runners and one of my best ever friends.

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In February 2011 the shell got stripped, repaired and reinforced, it got a fresh coat of paint, some stardish wheels (white, painted black, with red rims) and a DF03 shock set.  In these photos it also has an aluminium bumper which I think is from Radshape, although it wasn't designed to fit this chassis and was only mounted with one screw.

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Despite having no motor in these pics, it became a runner.  However 2011 was the era when all bashing around my neck of the woods came to and end, all my RC friends who I'd met through Tamiyaclub moved on to other things, nobody was running local vintage races and groups like Iconic RC didn't exist.  RC around that time really became a thing I did in the flat to stop me getting bored, and if I ran anything at all (besides a Corally RDX at the local carpet club) it was in the car park on my own.

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But the saga of the Bear Hawk was far from over.  In 2015 I was introduced to the Iconic RC group on Facebook and started to go to some of their bashes.  In July 2015 I went to the first Iconic Revival, but I missed 2wd Saturday due to it clashing with a motorcycle trackday.  In 2016 I decided to keep the bike in the garage and made my 2nd annual pilgrimage to A1 Racing Club in Grantham - what felt like a really long way back then - to enter my Bear Hawk in the 2wd 89-93 class.  Now the Bear Hawk is a typical Tamiya mid-market parts-bin special - it's got independent suspension and a diff in the back, but it's not exactly a race car.  Nothing is adjustable, there's a choice of 2 gear ratios, no adjustable shock positions, and it even comes with steering pushrods thin enough to be pipe cleaners.  The RC10 re-wrote the rulebook for 2wd race cars and 7 years after the release of that game-changer, the Bear Hawk still hadn't caught up.  The 89-93 era saw not only a host of updated RC10 cars (Graphite, Champ Edition, Team Car) but also the Schumacher Cougar, series, Losi JRX-Pro, various Kyosho Ultimas, an explosion of Traxxas models and of course the Super Astute and Dyna Storm from Tamiya.  Against a field like that, the humble Bear Hawk didn't stand a chance.

However, the field was huge and there were some other non-race-spec Tamiyas on the grid, and after holding my breath all day I took 3rd place in the D Final against 8 other drivers.

IMG_20160730_204618984.jpgIgnore the tag on the trophy - there is always some last-minute trophy re-organising at the Revival.  There wasn't even a 77-83 C Final.

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In 2018, after a disastrous 2017 running a re-re SRB, I campaigned the Bear Hawk at the Revival again.  I felt it was time for a fresh look, so a Kamtec Baja body found its way into my workshop, along with some proper Schumacher race rubber and a Tamiya DT-02 turnbuckle set.

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And given it's a Bear Hawk underneath, the choice of livery was obvious

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Sadly my performance on race day couldn't match the car's looks.  Torrential rain across the weekend made conditions tricky, I'd only brought dry tyres (to be fair, we'd had a 2-week heatwave of 30*+ temps)  and the pit shop didn't have any wet tyres in stock.  Plus, I'm a bit of a muppet at off-road racing and I tend to crash a lot.  I finished last place in the C final, making me officially the slowest person to actually finish in the 89-93 class.  Although to be fair it was a close race - all 7 of us finished with the same number of laps.  6.

Yes, that's right, 6.  A whole day of qualifiers to get 6 laps in the final.

Anyway - the saga of the Bear Hawk was far from over.  Although it hasn't seen the Revival track since 2018, it has been a regular companion on my non-competitive jaunts to Robin Hood Raceway in 2019 and 2020 for the Tamiya Junkies bashes and is also my go-to runner for family trips to the beach.

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It is actually these beach trips that have prompted the crafting of this very thread, because I took a family run to the Brean back at the end of April after travel restrictions were lifted in England.  I was blasting the Bear Hawk around on the huge expanse of flat sand for a whole 2 minutes before it slowed to a crawl and then stopped.  I thought battery, then overheating due to the load of the sand, then sand in the motor, but in fact it was none of these.  On 7th May, with the first Tamiya Junkies meet of the nervously-anticipated 2021 season just a few weeks away, I pulled the motor out to take a look.

Hmm...  Those brush springs seem to be a long way down.

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Not only are the brushes badly worn, they're also pitted on the end.  Possibly sand, but more likely arcing due to being at the end of their travel and not fully making contact with the commutator.

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That comm isn't in good shape

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Still, put it in a drill and hold a piece of 600 grit wet-or-dry and it soon comes up shiny and new.

P5070089.jpgWho needs a motor lathe?

I didn't have any spare stand-up brushes, but I had an old Novak Fifty-Five crawler motor that had nearly-new stand-up brushes in, so I used those.  Perfect fit, and now it easily lifts the front wheels under acceleration.

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While I had the motor out, I noticed the transmission was looking a bit nasty.  The motor has the paper bush thing installed but the transmission cover doesn't very flat.  I don't think it's a great design on the Bear Hawk.  I'll make a new one out of FRP when I have time.

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Inside the transmission I see another famous problem - I've been using the old Tamiya cheese pinion.

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Gears out, wiped clean and blasted with the airgun, cases off to soak in detergent for an hour while I look at some other rusty parts.

Ideally I would replace these horrid things with stainless pins and e-clips but I'm a bit short of funds, so it's stuff like that which sits on the to-do list for ages.  If these pins corrode too much they lock up the suspension entirely.

On the left is one I cleaned with abrasive, on the right is a rusty one fresh out of the car.

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I put them in the drill then span it up against the bench polisher.  It's not perfect but it's much more smooth and shouldn't corrode as quickly.

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Gearbox halves rescued from the utility room sink

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Spur gear isn't perfect but serviceable.  Looks like the pinion hasn't been fully adjusted either.  But that's OK - it gives me more fresh meat to dig into with the new brass pinions I have on order.  I could have gone for 32dp steel from RW, but Maverick do genuine mod 0.8 in brass and they're a fat fitment too so they work well on the Bear Hawk, which has quite a long run from motor mount to spur and sometimes needs the pinion to be stretched right to the end of the motor shaft.

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And that's that for now.  The car is fully reassembled, the rusty pins have been greased before insertion to hopefully keep the saltwater at bay, and I'm just waiting on my new pinions to arrive so I can get it all properly back together and ready for a bash in just two and a half weeks time :) 

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