Tamiya TA-05 M-Four Upgrades

Here is the rear end of my TA05 M-Four. I got a couple of TA05 aluminum bulkheads from speedtech. I got the 1C suspension blocks to get some more toe in and I put the hard M05 stabilizer on there. Note that getting the rod stoppers require bending the stabilizer quite a bit. I also got a set of touring car dampers and used two of them on the rear. I have soft touring car springs on.

Here is a shot of how the split suspension blocks would hit the normal placement of the front M05 stabilizer. I recently started building an M06 and it had quite a different mounting location. But they won’t fit either because it would hit the body posts mounted to the bulkhead. Another note about these aluminum bulkheads is that they have four holes on each side for body post mounting positions, but the plastic ones in the kit have five and one side needs to be a little “twisted”. So if you already cut the little nubby underneath per the manual step 30 (page 16) you will need an extra set of body posts (B-parts).

A shot of the front end. These have the Shorter Mini Dampers. I also got Fluorine Coated suspension balls to use in the new suspension blocks. I have medium short springs on there at the moment. I may switch back to soft depending on how this feels.

Underside shot of the rear end. You can see the stabilizer mount points fit perfectly. Also got some (normal) TA05 Titanium screws on sale a while back. I’ve been scraping the bottom pretty good on this car so far. Trying some new screws to see if they hold up better.

Also got two sets of Carbon Mount Spacer for Damper Stay. Normally you would use one in the front and one in the rear I think. But the plastic bits that come with the kit are double the thickness of one of the carbon ones. Does this make any difference when driving? Probably not… I have not been able to test the car on the track yet.

I put some 300,000 weight “oil” (it’s more like paste!) in the front gear differential. Someone else at the Tamiya track is running a spool. I figured I would try different things to learn more about a gear diff and it’s effect on car handling. The rear diff has the kit 1000 weight oil. I rebuilt both diffs after noticing that they had leaked quite a bit in limited running. This time I sealed them off with Team Associated Green Slime. We’ll see how they hold up.

The picture above on the right shows a very easy way to get dampers, turnbuckle adjusters, etc off. Just insert as shown and twist off. Better than pliers!

I’m still investigating what I can do for the front stabilizer. And I’m going to get a Setting Spacer Set for the carbon damper stay.