Well, that was quick

I hit the track today with my B6 and Hyper TT to test out some VRP shock pistons and the new truck.  It was pretty much a disaster -- on the first lap I could tell my shock setup was totally wrong on the B6.  With the Hyper TT, I only did about 10 laps before I hit the wall in the high-speed sweeper and cracked the steering knuckle. 

Not a good day at all.  I've got some Integy aluminum knuckles on order, hopefully they will solve that issue and I can get the Hyper TT back on the dirt.

Hyper TTe all wired up

Got the electronics installed.  I was originally going to keep with the Asian theme and get all Chinese electronics, but considering the cheap Hobbyking stuff is only about 30-40% less than the good stuff and of pretty questionable quality, I decided to stick with my usual electronics.

• Sanwa 1258-TG servo
• Hobbywing Xerun SCT ESC
• SMC 4500kv 4-pole 540 motor

Already glued up the tires, so just gotta finish painting the body and I'll be ready to hit the track.  Looking forward to seeing what this baby can do!

Ready to Rip!

My present from Santa finally showed up today --

According to the box, it's READY TO RIP  😂

Despite the picture of electronics in the box, this one requires tires, paint, and electronics.  Hobao calls it 80% ARR (Almost READY-TO-RIP).

I'm pretty excited about the truck, it was fairly cheap but actually seems to be of pretty good quality.  Of course there will be a review to follow...

3rd try's the charm

I spent a couple of hours doing some maintenance and cleaning up the wiring on my 22-4 2.0 for the third time, I think it's a little better now and should have a bit better weight distribution as well with the ESC in the back.  Still not perfect, but the RX-481 receiver is a little problematic because you need access to both sides of the receiver to get to the bind button and the connectors.

I think this is as good as I can get it.

By the way, for 13.5t motors, <-B (forward) seems to be the best rear belt tensioner setting.

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New:

Must've been naughty

I ordered a new kit from Tower on Tuesday for Christmas, and Santa amazingly delivered it on Christmas eve.  Unfortunately, when I opened it, I found a plastic model airplane instead.

That was a major bummer, I felt like a kid getting coal in his stocking.  Going to call Tower tomorrow, hopefully they can overnight it to me.

On the plus side, look for a new kit review in the new year!  Trust me, it's not something you're going to be able to guess.

Merry Christmas everyone, hope Santa treated you better than he did me!

Team Associated B6 / B6D flat arms vs. gullwing arms

I spent a few hours at the track today testing B6D flat arms vs. the B6 gullwing arms.  I normally run flat arms, but tried out the gullwing arms (and gullwing tower) with the exact same shock package, shock locations, ride height, etc.

The gullwing arms basically soften the front steering and smooths it out and makes it a little more linear.  It also makes it a little easier to drive.  What they do is stand the shocks up more, and keep the progression more linear by keeping the lower shock mount more inline with the upper shock mount through the arm stroke.  So there is not as progressive a spring rate as the outside arm loads up and compresses in the middle of the corner.

The flat arms provide more initial steering and corner entry bite, and are a more aggressive setup in my opinion.

Overall I found it a step backwards on our mid-high traction small indoor track.  Definitely on looser traction, you will want to go with flat arms for the steering.  I know the pros use gullwing arms on high-traction surfaces in mod, but for me, I like a lot of steering and have a more aggressive setup.

By the way, you can bolt on a different pair of arms, but it's not going to work out of the box.  With more hours of tuning, I'm sure I could get it working better, but overall my B6 is really close to my ideal setup right now and I went back to flat arms.  At a minimum, I found I needed to drop the inner front ballstud 0.5-1mm, as the softer front induces more mid-corner roll.

Welcome to my new home!

For those of you who have been following me on my old blog site, you'll know that I've since moved to Blogger.  All of the content has been moved over from the old site to this one as of today.

Why did I move?  Well, there were some advantages to Blogger, namely:

1. Tumblr is owned by Yahoo which isn't really doing very well, and there isn't a whole lot of support on Tumblr.  The blogs look nice, but aren't very well supported.
2. Easier user interaction.  It's really hard to post comments on Tumblr.  Nobody really has a Tumblr account, whereas Blogger is owned by Google and pretty much everyone has a Google account.
3. I didn't like the way the archive works, it's hard to see a history of past posts.

Hopefully you'll enjoy this blog format better now that it's hosted on Blogger.  Let me know what you think!

Schelle Type 1 steering arms review

I got a tuning part in the mail to help with the 180 degree turns we have at my local track.  These are Schelle Racing Type 1 steering arms, and add a fair amount of Ackermann gain when turning, especially at full lock.  They pull the steering ballstud in a little bit and also forward a little bit, you can see the difference in the picture above.
I did some testing today, and they definitely help you finish the turn mid and corner exit.  They are quite aggressive, enough to the point where I was thinking about lowering my roll rear center a bit, but I like them basically as a bolt-on.  The geometry seems pretty good, stock Ackermann must be a little bit off, as even Associated makes a pair of +1 Ackermann steering arms.  Stock geometry induces a little bit of push in my experience.
Recommended if you need more mid and exit corner rotation in 180′s.  They’re cheap to try at $8.

Winter is coming

Well, actually winter is here.  With the onset of the rainy season, the indoor track stays damp and sticky all day long, even with minimal watering.  What this means is that slicks reign supreme, as long as the track is blown periodically.

I was working on my B6 with another racer, and he had some tips that worked out pretty well.  I normally run it in basically a dirt setup, with 23mm of ride height and a good amount of body roll, but I dropped it down to 21mm and lowered the inner rear ballstuds 1mm.  I also loosened the diff a bit because of all of the traction we have now.  These changes reduced quite a bit of push I was having mid-corner, as the rear was trying to push the front.

This dropped my B6 best laptime down to 16.9s.  My 22-4 2.0 is down to 16.3s, so the B6 is about a half second off of my wheeler.

I find the two quickest ways to get your car working better is to either have a faster guy drive it, or to drive a faster guy’s car.  It’s hard to know what you’re missing until you drive a better car, and then you have specific goals to work on.  After the faster racer drove mine, he realized how down on power his 17.5 Yokomo is compared to mine.  After I drove his, I realized how much better corner rotation he gets, with no push whatsoever, and how much better his shocks are setup.  I ordered some VRP pistons to try, and will probably be lowering the shock wt. a little bit.

There’s a few rookie races my son is going to do over Christmas break.  After that, I’m going to throw a 9.5t motor in the 22-4 and let ‘er rip!  The 13.5t motor is easy to drive, but I think I could lower my laptimes a little bit with a mod motor in there.

Why I sold my TLR 22T 2.0

I’ve been reducing the stable a little bit the last few weeks, and one of the cars I sold was my TLR 22T 2.0.  I had it for about a year and a half, and it was basically my project mule that I spent the most time and money modifying.

The main reason I sold the truck is that it’s likely a 3.0 will come out from TLR in the next few months.  And possibly an Associated T6 of some sort soon also.  But the other reason I sold it is that it wasn’t really the right platform to compete with here locally.

Where I live, the stadium track class is 13.5t spec, and the TLR is a bit too heavy in that class with the sideways battery Exotek chassis.  ROAR weight limit is 1700 grams for the truck, and my truck was in the high 1800′s almost 1900 grams.  Dropping 200 grams is pretty difficult, but losing weight helps a lot in a spec class, especially when very few trucks out of the box are anywhere near it.  So it would have cost a lot to get anywhere close to competitive weight wise.

I did like the truck, and it’s still one of the better ones on the market.  My TLR was extremely durable.  In a year and a half, and probably around 150 battery packs, I only broke one camber block and bent two turnbuckles.  That’s pretty much it.  The plastics don’t wear very well however, so I did replace all of the arms and steering components a couple of times in the life the of the truck.  The T2.0 was the first truck that TLR really optimized for mid-motor, and it ran fairly well.  I never quite got the front end grip that it seemed the Associated trucks had, but the Frank Root setup worked pretty well and it was pretty close to a perfect setup.

I also kept the truck for my son to race, but he moved on to the 22-4 2.0, and is faster with that, so I will be using that (cringe) for my son to race.  It’s just so easy to drive, but it’s definitely not as durable.  The T2.0 was a tank.

I still have a few sets of TLR wheels and have a full set of electronics ready for the next stadium truck to hit the market.  Who knows, I might even consider a Kyosho.  That’s a brand I’d like to try.

Leaky diffs

Well, I have about 50 packs through my 22-4 2.0, and the rear diff seemed a little light and the rear wheels were a little loose under power, so I opened it up. Getting to the rear diff isn’t TOO bad…

• 3 screws on top
• 4 screws on bottom
• 3 screws on belt cover
• 1 screw wire stay on servo mount
  
• 2 nuts shock mounts
• 2 screws swaybar

So 15 screws to get at the diff.  You don’t have to do the last two steps, but it makes your life a little easier to get the shock tower off to the back of the car.

Looks like the fluid had all leaked out, there’s not a whole lot in there so it didn’t really make a mess, but I’m guessing it will tend to leak through the o-rings if anywhere.  The only sign was a tiny wet spot on one outdrive.

The outdrives were on pretty good, so I ended up having to stick the diff housing in a vice and use a small flathead as a chisel to pry the outdrive from the housing.  I guess they were on a little TOO good.  I think motor spraying the black oxide parts makes them super clean for assembly, but they will tend to gall together.

One rebuild kit can service two diffs, which was nice.  Hopefully it stays together better this time.  I didn’t pop open the front diff, but I didn’t notice any leaking and it still feels pretty good.

Why I sold my Slash 4x4

My first RC car was a Stampede that I quickly turned into a Slash 4x4 LCG.  That truck served me pretty well, and at one point I had two Slash 4x4 LCG’s.  But I recently sold my Slash 4x4, and here’s basically the story on why.

The Slash 4x4 is pretty good in a few different ways.  Parts are cheap, and they’re plentiful and easily available.  That’s probably it’s strongest suit – Traxxas has the widest distribution network of any RC brand, you can basically pickup parts in every town.  The Slash 4x4 is also a versatile machine.  You can race it, bash it, turn it into a speed rig, crawler.  It’s basically a jack-of-all-trades.  But it’s also the master of none.

And that was basically the reason I sold the truck.  It’s a good learner vehicle, because parts are cheap and it’s reasonably durable.  But the plastics slop out ridiculously fast, and it’s really not that great of a race truck, even though I got it to handle pretty decently.  95% of my driving is on the track, and it’s not a very rewarding vehicle to drive.  It’s imprecise (steering slop and sensorless motor/esc) and coarse relative to race-bred machines.

There were a few other weak spots that drove me nuts.  The diffs leak basically no matter what you do and need to be rebuilt periodically.  The motor mesh was never that good, because of the floating nature of the spur gear.  Traxxas pinions are horribly bad, whatever pot metal they use sucks.  The truck uses a weird wheel offset that’s basically only shared with the HPI Blitz.

Even on the durability front, it really isn’t that tough compared to trucks like the Tekno SCT410.3.  The driveshafts and axles are pretty flimsy.  Plastic driveshafts?  Come on…

In the end, I lost interest in short course trucks, and the Slash became relegated to loaner duty.  But my son drives pretty well now, and so I no longer need a demolition derby loaner car.

It’s possible, though unlikely, I eventually end up with another short course truck.  If that happens, it will almost assuredly be a Tekno.  I’m strongly considering getting an EB48SL, which is an electric buggy easily convertible into a short course truck.  I’m not sure I want to make the jump to 1/8 scale, but that would be the most likely candidate.

Changing of the guard

I sold a couple of my RC cars, the Slash 4x4 and the 22T 2.0.  They’re off to better and brighter places.  They were fun while they lasted, but those were the two cars I drove the least and I’ve been focusing my time on my B6 and 22-4 2.0.

I don’t know if I’ll ever own a Slash again, but I’m sure I’ll get another stadium truck sometime in the future.  Maybe when a T6M or 22T 3.0 come out.

I’ve got a B64D on preorder, so that’ll be the next car coming in.  I’m having so much fun with the 22-4 2.0, I want to see what Associated’s answer is.  There will definitely be a heads-up comparison between the two in the near future!  I’m not sure it’s possible to make a better driving car than the TLR, but I’m looking forward to seeing Associated try…