Novafox racer / basher

[BuggyDad]

17 hours ago, Mad Ax said:

So I messaged the organisers and asked if the Fox could be added to the allowed buggies list - and they said yes! 

Oooooh. This is interesting. I have a Fox NIB, I haven't bought the DT-02 I was thinking to run and like you I preferred the idea of something more "in the spirit". Plus my idea isn't really about the chassis that much anyway, I don't intend any irreversible mods. 

[Mad Ax]

Here's a late update to this car.  One thing I've never really liked about the Fox is the rear wing - it seems to far forward and too low like it doesn't really belong.  Plus my body has got a bit battered over the years and the mounts are hanging off.

I was looking at adding some scale improvements to the car for some Club 380 racing, and my first thought was to remove the wing entirely and add something like a spare wheel, but it just didn't look right.  So then I thought, why not make a better wing mount to move the wing up and back?  So I made one out of brass.

These are the only photos I took at the time, and in this shot it looks like it's way too far back, but it looks better in the flesh.

[Mad Ax]

Here's a better angle that I took today.

I wasn't just out to take photos - I wanted to update the chassis to take a modern battery.  My plan had been to fit a shorty LiPo, but it wasn't going to be practical to do that and keep the nerf bars which are a main theme of the car's visual styling.

So I tried this square pack from my touring car.  It's a perfect fit, just needs new battery posts.

Added battery posts

result!

[Mad Ax]

I also decided to trim off the wing mounts and make a closing panel

A bit of ABS.  I'll glue this in place and add some decals later.

[Mad Ax]

I gave it a quick test-run around the garden, and found the 380 motor gets really quite hot.  I think I'll have to order a heatsink and fan before the race meet.  There's a remote possibility (depending on wife's new shifts) that I might go to the first round in April, so I'll have to see if I can afford a heatsink before then.

[mtbkym01]

12 hours ago, Mad Ax said:

I also decided to trim off the wing mounts and make a closing panel

A bit of ABS.  I'll glue this in place and add some decals later.

What glue do you plan to use on this?

[Mad Ax]

On 4/7/2025 at 10:27 AM, mtbkym01 said:

What glue do you plan to use on this?

In the end I used Gorilla Glue, because I had some and it was convenient.  Most of my other glues had dried out.  Hopefully Gorilla Glue will have enough flexibility to deal with the shell flexing while in use, after all it is flexible enough to stick the world's largest primate to things so it must be pretty good..?

[Re-Bugged]

I’m a big fan of Gorilla Glue, works well & you can still use the same tube weeks/months later as the glue in the nozzle hasn’t gone hard blocking the rest of the contents in there.

[Silver-Can]

Have to say I'm really digging the wing mod you've done. I'm about to do a light refresh on my novafox, which will include a new shell (which I'll keep stock) but since my existing shell also has wing mount issues (ie torn) I'm gonna give this a go. Would you mind letting us know what hardware etc you've used. Cheers 👍 

[rwordenjr]

On 4/6/2025 at 1:43 PM, Mad Ax said:

Here's a late update to this car.  One thing I've never really liked about the Fox is the rear wing - it seems to far forward and too low like it doesn't really belong.  Plus my body has got a bit battered over the years and the mounts are hanging off.

I was looking at adding some scale improvements to the car for some Club 380 racing, and my first thought was to remove the wing entirely and add something like a spare wheel, but it just didn't look right.  So then I thought, why not make a better wing mount to move the wing up and back?  So I made one out of brass.

These are the only photos I took at the time, and in this shot it looks like it's way too far back, but it looks better in the flesh.

How did you mount this wing ? 

[Mad Ax]

13 hours ago, rwordenjr said:

How did you mount this wing ? 

The photos aren't clear - I'll try to get some better ones next time I work on this car.

Basically there's a brass plate that screws into the rear shock tower, and another that the wing bolts onto.  They are brazed onto brass rods which have been bent.

[Mad Ax]

Updates!  I was bashing this car around the garden a couple of weeks ago, and I noticed the little 380 got super hot after a short run.  Gearing isn't an option and there's no extra weight in this chassis, so there's not much I can do to reduce load on it.  OK, I was running on short (freshly-mown) grass, but all the Club 380 rounds will be on grass too, so that doesn't really help.

The only solution, then, is active cooling.  I placed an order online, and this arrived yesterday.

Cooing fan.  Perhaps it sounds like a pidgeon?

[Mad Ax]

It's a neat little thing.  Nicely machined heat sink in black with silver details (just like my paint scheme) and with a nice carbon fibre fan cover.

I immediately ran, excited, to my workshop to force it onto the motor.

How cool does that look?

 

[Mad Ax]

I wouldn't have time to actually do anything with it until today.  I had 20 spare minutes at lunch, so I took the car to the workshop with the aim of stripping down the chassis so I could hook the loom up to the receiver.

While I was at it, I took a photo of the wing mount.  @rwordenjr you were asking for this I believe?

[Mad Ax]

OK, here's how the wiring comes.  You get a splitter cable with 3-pin pluggage on one end to go into the receiver, and 2 2-pin pluges on the other end, presumably because it's cheaper to supply a Y-cable in the single-fan pack and the twin-fan pack than to make a separate single-pluge cable for the single-fan pack.

Before stripping down the car, I decided to test it first using the breakout cable I made.  This handy little pluge sits outside the chassis box and can be used to bind the transmitter without taking literally everything apart, and also to pluge in a transponder if I'm racing.

And of course, the reason we test things is to find out that they inexplicably don't work.  Well, this one didn't, anyway.

Except when I took it off the car, it did.

FYI, it does not sound like a pigeon, it sounds like a banshee being sawn in half.

[Mad Ax]

Connected.  Doesn't work.

Disconnected.  Works.  Actually hard to see in this photo, because I couldn't get the phone to focus (I wasn't using my proper camera because I couldn't find it, although narrowing down all possibilities and using clues hidden deep within this very photo, I have now found it).  Not only could I not get the phone to focus, I also couldn't bend my finger enough to touch the take-picture-now button, so I had to do it with the end of my nose.

I've seen this before with cooling fans.  Interference from the motor magnet makes them not work, which sort of defeats the point of having them.  Sometimes moving the heatsink to another location helps, but in this case that location was "on the other end of the car" which was not as much help as I really needed.

I couldn't remember how I'd fixed it before, but I went to my Random Drawer of Old ESCs That Probably Don't Work Any More and took off a similar-sized fan.  Unfortunately it had totally the wrong pluge and was also really slow, but it did work when installed.  However it was then that I noticed that rotating the fan body caused it to stop.  So I went back to the fan that had come with the heatsink, and sure enough, when I turned it 90 degrees, it worked perfectly.

Here it is working perfectly.

At this point I had to stop, because I had already used my entire 20 spare minutes and was eating into the time I had allocated for Filing Expenses* And Making Up Timesheets.

*The expenses are genuine.  Filing non-genuine expenses would be fraud.  The timesheets however are made up.  I can't post a genuine timesheet, because if anyone ever finds out what it is I actually do all day they would have no choice but to promote me to Commander in Chief of the Entire Universe.

I will be back tomorrow lunchtime to add the 2 remaining screws into the heatsink, and also to reduce the entire chassis to its constituent parts in order to connect the pluge to the receiver.  I'll probably have to make another Y-cable anyway because I think the receiver only has 3 ports on it and they're all already used.

[Mad Ax]

I had a bit of time yesterday to finish wiring up the fan for this.  TBH all the internal wiring really wants sorting out - all these cables could be shortened and made much nicer, but this was really an exercise in making it work, so I could do some testing on the garden.

There's a lot going on in that chassis.

Assembled

The fan wiring worked out just wrong, IMO, but it works

The black leads are supposed to look cool, but they're such straggly things they're impossible to tie neatly to anything

Ready for a test-drive

Rear closing panel.  TBH this really wants some paint, but I must just put a decal on it.  A 3D-printed louvre would look cool.

[Mad Ax]

So, how did it go?

Well, after 2.5 minutes of driving around the garden, the motor was pretty gosh-darned hot again.  It seems to be a motor that likes to run hot.  I experimented with a few different fan positions until I found one where the air was blowing directly down through the vent holes - I could feel the heat coming out of the vent underneath the motor - so that's probably as good as it can get.  It doesn't look as good as having the fan angled out the back, but maybe I can move the motor around on the mount to improve the aesthetics later.

The first round of Club 380 is happening near Nottingham tomorrow, but I've decided that's just too far for me for a one-day event.  The cheapest way would be on the Peugeot 3-wheeler, but a 7-hour round trip on a 400cc moped is a lot in one day.

So, looks like I won't be racing it until the end of May - but that's OK, it'll keep until then!