Chain Driven Kyosho Optima

This is my restored chain driven Optima. I built it from a damaged 1. gen.Optima and a damaged Optima Pro. Everything stock except for ball bearings and aluminum shock collars. The body and decals are repros by fellow TC member Integra Fan (thanks Marwan!) since I couldn’t remove the old paint even with brake fluid. I like the box art paintwork a lot but I decided to do a replica of my 1986 Optima. I modified the livery a bit because I thought I couldn’t do it as bad as back then. I was very impatient and had no good masking tape at that time. Now it turned out better. I fitted a vintage AYK 360 motor in the back. The tires are genuine Sand Supers. I managed to clean both tires and rims from the black paint the previous owner has applied. Can someone tell why people don’t remove tires before they paint rims? By the way: I finished cleaning the tires on the day Marwan introduced his repros, LOL. So far for the plain facts, as usual here follows the story of my very personal relationship to this specific car. I got my first Optima for Christmas 1986, it was my second 4WD Buggy ever. We had a very bad start because Optimas were the first buggies I met without enough space for a receiver battery pack. The MSC was equipped with a kind of diode which provides power to the receiver but as soon as the voltage dropped, and that was quite soon with the poor batteries of 1986, the receiver failed. Usually the car hit the worst possible obstacle in the near on full throttle a few seconds later. So obviously this wasn’t a propper solution. That’s why I tried to mount 2 batteries on each chassis rail. On the first test rund a stone catched a cable of this battery pack and ripped it off. You can imagine what happened: The car hit the worst possible obstacle in the near on full throttle a few seconds later LOL. It was about time for the 3. attempt: I saved my pocket money for month and bought my first real ESC with BEC, a Demon 2DH. It was already out of style in 1987 but the price was quite reasonable in comparison to other makes. I mounted it into the Optima, did a quick function check on the desk and took the car for a test ride into the garden. I pulled the trigger, released it but the car kept on accelerating and dropped down the stair to the basement eventually. I picked the car up, the wheels were still turning at high RPM and recognized a weird smell. The ESC hard burned through with just the load of a 540 silver can! The whole pocket money had went down the drain. I decided to put the Optima away for now. Things changed as I became a member of the local buggy club. I thought that the Optima was the best competition buggy in my range amongst a Zerda, Alien MID, Boomerang and Frog so I sold some of these in order to get a set of ball bearings and a better ESC, a Futaba MC112B. With this and a AYK 360 motor I entered the my first competition but I couldn’t even finish one qualifying heat because of radio glitches. In about 2km distance was the local model boat lake, I guess their radios interfered with mine. For the next race I changed from a 40MHz radio to a 27Mhz and everything was fine. I won my first trophy ever with the Optima eventually. I did some modifications to it such as adding a lower guard of aluminium and a self made undertray and rear wing. The body shell was taken from a PB Maxima. You can see it on the last picture. It’s a newspaper article featuring only a few cars of the grid. Yes, I beat even MID Optimas on that day. My restored Optima will stay on the shelf for now but someday we will hit the sand together again!! Outch, that was a long story!! If someone really read it: Thanks for your patience!