A piece ‘a Me

I recently ordered a consignment of Axial AX-10 and HPI Wheely King customising parts from my good friends Charles and Joe at East End Machining in the USA. It was a sizable order and I’ve been waiting on it for a while now. Well I found out I got stung for Customs and VAT on the way in by those great folks (cough) at HMRC. £43.38 for the privilege of bringing into the UK something I can’t buy anywhere but the USA. Thanks. Really makes me glad I live in the UK guys…

Still, Charles and Joe are great guys to deal with and I know already it’s gonna be worth it when I get the package. It’s gonna make a big difference to both rigs, and hopefully there’ll be a lot of fun to be had building and running them in their enhanced state.

Here’s ashot of my new tidy, computer crap free work corner in my room:

Look! Space! Shelves! Foot Room!

Well I had a fun week last week, I built some meaty bash plates for the axles. I know, they’ll catch on stuff all over but they look as mean as hell IMHO
It was a bit of a trial an error job. I pretty much got the plates worked out right the first time, but the 3-screw mounting to the back of the axle was giving me that ‘please don’t put that kind strain on me’ puppy-eyes look, so I had to add a brace at the top.
Dad (bless him, I’d have never gotten anywhere with all this metal working without his tuition!) had the idea of bracing the plate again the top link mount, so impact stress was directed into the triangle of the top links and spread out between the top links, the mount and the chassis. It was a solution, and a good one, so i went with it. The first version used 10mm wide 1/16th plate strips with a bend at each end to screw against the bash plate and the top mount. This seemed to work well when I built it but…
While testing the truck for the first time with the plates on, it took a nose dive off a log and landed on it’s face. The bash plate worked great, nothing but the tyres and the plate hit the ground. The only problem was the bracing strip snapped clean off. after a bit of muttering expletives, I went back to the drawing board. I came up with the idea of using tie-rods anchored to the battery plate at the front and a small lump of 1/8th plate at the back. These weren’t 100% straightforward to do, however as I had to drill the tie-rod holes at a slope through the plates on the axles to get the angle to the bash plate right. I used M3 all-thread and 4mm allu tubing to make the rods and place a nyloc at each end and would em up. They seem to be a lot tougher and have stood up to me carrying the truck about by them. The combination of the rod and the sleeve tightened up against each other makes a very strong tension/compression system that makes them very stiff and resilient.

All-in-all they look nice and work well. I dunno how much use they will be for crawling though, as they could well get hung up easily. Oh well they make for nice eye candy at the very least

I attended my first event at the weekend (only as a spectator, sadly) and where better to start than the UK Nationals! Getting there involved getting up at 5 am and a couple of hours in the car to get to the place (miraculously we DIDN’T get lost either!!).

The Nationals were held at Bracken Rocks in Derbyshire, which is a private competition site usually used for motorcycle and mountain bike trials. It’s a perfect spot, with camping on site and lots of ROCKS.

The event was very well organised, with 2.2 and Super Class competitions taking place over the day on two courses each. Usual rules applied (5 min limit, points accrued for reverses, roll overs and repositions, points take off for each gate passed). We stood at the bottom 2.2 course for the morning session and were hooked from the start. Loads of people I’ve told about it said it sounded a bit dull, but it damned well isn’t! It’s pretty intense watching them crawl, scramble and twist across the rocks. I enjoyed it a ton!

The competition was certainly stiff in the 2.2 class, with many experienced operators with some really sweet rigs.

We also wandered up to one of the Super Class courses to watch the supers tough it out. The course looked nigh-on impossible from where I was standing! It soon proved difficult, but by no means impossible, as we realised why they call it Super class. Insane rigs with everything going to make them crawl rocks. The feats they pulled off were immense, climbing almost vertical faces, twisting in all sorts of mad directions. Great stuff.

I had a great day and so did the guys I was with, and I’d just like to take the opportunity to thank the organisers, competitors and all the people involved for making it a really fantastic even. The sun even shined all day, a total miracle on the UK!! :hehe:

So now I’m going all out to build a comp rig of my own. It’s gonna be a blast, I know it is
Photos from the event are posted here:

http://flickr.com/photos/pixel_mason/sets/72157606149671185/

Had some good clean fun with the new Wheely King tonight. I unwound after work by taking it on an initial shakedown test around the garden at home. We’re lucky enough to have a vast garden, driveway and mown paddock right by the house, so I had plenty of room to stretch it’s legs.

It glides real easy over rough bumpy ground, is perfectly at home on grass or gravel, and can climb over some really lumpy obstacles, even with no diff locks. I even managed to fight my way through a patch of grass that was taller than it was, without stopping! It takes the knocks and has a pretty goo lick of speed for something that’s primarily for off-road bashing out of the box.

As far as the rock crawler project goes, I’ve identified these important problems so far:

It grounds out in the middle on pointy obstacles. This could be cured with locked diffs, I feel, and maybe reducing the ground clearance in the middle to make is see-saw more over the pointy bits.

It stops when it lifts a wheel at both ends. Obvious really as it has unlocked diffs.

It leans to on side. I\m pretty sure this is caused by the mega soft suspension. I removed the collars from the springs, and the rear stabiliser bar from the lower links. This gives it insane axle articulation but also means the constant side ways torque from the mid-mounted motor tips it to the right. This won’t be an issue once it’s slowed for crawling hopefully.

It scared also the cat senseless
Picture alert!

Well I got it today, was delivered to work at about 11pm. That wasn’t bad considering I ordered it 9am the previous day and paid nothing for the shipping!

Big thanks to: http://www.modelsport.co.uk/

It’s am impressive truck for the money (135GBP all in), very well designed and built, very neat electrics with a full ESC (electronic speed controller) that has a brake function for changing from forward to reverse (a neat trick I thought!).

My only reservations are the radio controller bundled with it is a wheel and trigger type and because I’m old fashioned I prefer the 2-stick type. I was delighted when I discovered that swapping the crystal into my Acoms 2-stick radio transmitter worked a charm, it works fine with HPI’s radio receiver and ESC.

Pictures to follow, along with more progress on the planned mods.

I got my newly acquired Tamiya King Cab stripped down pretty much to component parts tonight. It’s sat next to me in about 6 ice-cream boxes at the moment.

I also cleaned out my bro’s old RC toolbox and washed it out (was full of dust and crap). I found a couple of cool bits and pieces in there. No King Cab spares though :(. Looks like I’ll be hitting eBay and spare dealers in stages over the next few months to renew what I need. I might also have a go at fabricating some parts myself in metal for it. The stock parts are pretty tough and are surprisingly undamaged, but metal looks cooler and is less cumbersome, so could be good. We’ll see
I’d post a photo but it wasn’t worthy before I stripped it, and now all there is to look at is a lot of jumbled parts in boxes. I *will* photograph it as I start to rebuild it though!

All good so far, as long as I can get a usable electric set out of the bits I’ve got I ought to have it going again pretty soon. Watch this space!

Hey now here’s a thing. One of the guys at work has gotten into RC (that’s radio controlled model) rock crawling. He used to be a full-size off-road challenge competitor but had to give it up due to family commitments.

RC stuff costs a ton less and is easy to do on a kitchen table or in a small workshop. You can also involve your kids (I don’t have any yet, but it’d be a useful thing if I did).

So I have 2 projects planned now:

1) Buy a HPI Wheely King RC Monster truck and set about modding it into a demon rock crawler.

2) Restore my brothers old Nissan King Cab Tamiya truck

See, my brother and I did this when we were kids but I thought I’d ‘grown out’ of it. More the fool me, I forgot how much fun building, running, breaking, fixing and servicing these things was. Also now I’ve got access to a workshop and tools, can get metal stock, and am getting a bit handier with metal working, I can do a lot of mods using custom hand crafted parts.

I can’t wait to get started. Stories and pictures are sure to follow!