Torg's Tamiya Electric RC Cars: August 2009

Saturday, August 29, 2009

49400 in the house! :D

That’s all I want to type for now, busy painting…

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Saturday, August 22, 2009

Putting the Castle Creations Sidewinder 4600kV in the F201 makes it go very very fast. But if you run it too long, you’ll melt your differential (at least the lightweight ones). I put the lightweight ones in when the cap screw broke on the standard kit ones. The lightweight diffs are too expensive to melt on a regular basis so I’m going to put the stock black can back on it. To be honest my skill level and the speed of the sidewinder don’t match when on a track ;P It was fun to blast in a parking lot though. I’ve now put the sidewinder in my TT-01D, we’ll see how that goes.

What greeted me inside the front gearbox.

Notice here how the top metal ring has been pushed into the plastic.

kit ones, with broken cap screw. non standard 2x15mm & 2x8mm cap screws are hard to find.

I wonder if there’s anything I could’ve done to prevent this? Regular maintenance is a pain on the rear diff. Tungsten and ceramic balls are over $20 and you need 2 sets, combined with lightweight diffs at $20 a piece. I’m sorry, but spending close to $100 is not in my “differential budget”.

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Poor part or hard impact?

3 Racing Rear Aluminum Hub Carrier (0 Degree) For TT-01

First non-plastic part I’ve bent. If I smack the other one by the same amount I get a 2 deg toe in set? :)

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Toddler proof?

My daughter is almost 2 and a half years old (about a month away), I bought a Tamtech ‘The Frog’ a while ago with her in mind. Today we were out and about having a blast. Thank you Tamiya for building such a sturdy little car, it sure stands up to abuse! :)

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

My M03 Chase car

I was in a Costco store a while back and saw a stack of epicstealthcam’s and instantly loved the small size of it. “I need to put that on one of my RC cars”, classic impulse buy!

First I mounted it on my F201.

Then I mounted it in the bumper of my Lunch Box.

Then I built a M03L chase car with a combination of parts from my M03 and M03R kits.

The biggest problem with the epicstealthcam is that it can’t take any impact worth of damn, the battery will lose contact or something and you end up with a video file that’s 0 bytes. The quality is also pretty poor. I love the idea of getting RC POV however, so after some research I bought the GoPro Motorsports HERO wide, it comes in a SOLID case and has MUCH better picture quality.

The GoPro wide on my F201, M03R, TT-01D and DF-03MS.

What I might end up doing is mount the epicstealth rear-facing and put the gopro forward facing.

Hey there’s a giant hole in my tire…

Was using a 3Racing tire the other day, didn’t even notice the hole until I got back in the garage… oops!

Sunday, August 9, 2009

M05 pro first impressions

So far the biggest thing I’ve noticed is that it has a much better center of gravity than the M03R. Yesterday I was at the Tamiya Track in Aliso Viejo, CA to compare the two. Using the Type-A 60D slicks with hard inserts my M03R with a LIPO would flip around “SUV style” when cornering hard. I then switched the tires over to my M05 with a 5000mAh NiMh battery in it and it didn’t flip at all. I then switched the type-a’s back on the M03R and also put the same battery in it. It was a little better, but would still flip over.

My M03R has the M-chassis Dampers and stabilizers, the M05 Pro is unmodified. M03R has Futaba S9405 servo, M05 had standard S3004.

So, so far the M05 Pro drives easier with less setup tweaking (which I’m still not an expert on by a longshot ;P)

Huge Futaba MC401CR ESC problem

I used to love this thing, until the fuse I had in my DF-03MS blew. Big deal I thought at the time, I can just by another one right? WRONG!!! After contacting Futaba support here in the US, I simply got a “sorry those are not available”, when pushed further I got a postal mail address for Futaba in Japan and a “ask them”. Buyer beware!

F104 Pro

I picked up this kit at ultimate about a month ago and I’ve been driving it on the Tamiya track in Aliso Viejo, CA. On the smooth track there this thing is so easy to drive, the only adjustments I had to make was changing the exponential setting on my controller to make it less sensitive.

I left the motor the stock silver can, SR3000 receiver, LRP AI Runner ESC (overheats too quickly and has no on/off switch), servo is the DS1313. My first digital servo. If you didn’t have to cut the tabs on the servo to use it with this kit I’d try a different one to see if it’s the car or the servo that makes this thing so easy and smooth to drive.

The car is VERY easy and quick to build, only thing that I thought was strange was the front rims are wider than the foam tires (this is the first time I’ve had foam tires, fine on the smooth track, useless on a dusty road surface, and they’re expensive I’ll try to get some rubber ones at some point).

The battery mounts length wise in the carbon fiber chassis which is VERY cool, if it wasn’t for just one screw on the right hand bottom side of the car you could fit a square shaped lipo in there, instead I’m using the stick pack lipos mentioned in a previous post.

Here you can see the servo with the cut off tabs. It’s a fairly heavy one, might be helping the front tires get some extra grip without inducing too much understeer.