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.

Old:

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!