The FIRST new built White Impact in TC

Seeing as I had booked the Monday, Tuesday off work this week, it seemed like good a time as any to tackle the build on my new Tamiya Dark Impact White Edition, so late on the Monday morning I set up all the stuff I would need to construct An RC car kit and settled down to build this car, first was the Diffs, now the Dark Impact (as with most modern Tamiya cars these days has ball diffs, now I have no plans to run this car and just want to assemble it as a shelf queen, however I thought it best to give the diffs and the gears a light greasing just to be on the safe side, now one thing that I found with this kit is that the small tube of diff grease they give you is scarcely enough to do one diff let alone two so I found myself trying desperately to eek out the last facets of diff grease from the tiny tube, the rear gearbox gave little problem aside for the amount of thin shimming washers that I had to install, However when I came to the front diff I discovered that one of the small ball races was missing and as it happens an extra ball race of a larger size had been supplied? This got me thinking that the wrong type of ball race had been supplied to this kit, a rare oversight for Tamiya as their kits are often perfect with the parts count even giving you a few extra fitting, but in this case I had to rebuild the diff using a spare bronze bushing that I just so happened to have, it will do for now as the car won’t be running at all.

Moving on the rest of the car went together as one would expect of a Tamiya build, the design of this car is quite minimalist with an obvious reduction of parts and an overly efficient use of some others, when I built the shocks which are standard CVA units I put a drop of oil on the lower seal O rings so as to make sure they slid up and down ok without drying out then built the rest of the shocks up dry, When doing the steering I did install a steering servo, just to keep the steering straight if nothing else, the whole build too just over 4 hrs to complete and with the chassis done it was time to paint and decal the body.

On the Monday evening I took the body shell up into the loft and sprayed on the first cote of the white paint then left them out to dry, the following morning I went up again and found that there had been a couple of runs in the paint so with the next coat I had to take care not to put too much on and lean it up on its side, A third coat went on around midday and once that had dried I got the body down, trimmed off the excess, drilled the mounting holes and applied the decals which compared to some Tamiya cars I have done recently were quite straight forward and now finally we have the finished article, and doesn’t it look amazing, the one thing that gets me, given that this is an all-white version of the original Dark Impact that is all Black? As it’s a limited edition with an 84xxx kit number, why could they not have been a little more inventive with the name? I would have called it either the Light Impact, White Impact or Bright Impact, would have been a much better more obvious name for this car than Dark Impact White Edition, that’s just Boring? Anyway the car is done now, I hope that you like it cos I certainly do.