Steering linkage/knuckles: Custom linkages/ Stock Wheely King knuckles
Servos: Hitec 5645 front / Hitec 645 rear
Wheels: Axial 2.2 Beadlocks
Tires: Proline Masher 2K
Battery & wiring: Thunder Power 2100 mAh 2 cell Lipo
ESC: Mamba 25
Baja King – A Wheely King Crawls
Text & photos by Jay Kopycinski
The 4WD HPI Wheely King is a fairly new kit, but builders are already playing with them to build crawlers and come up with ways to modify them. Such was the case for Jeff Zahniser from Phoenix, Arizona. The rig you see here capped with a smartly painted Proline Baja Bug body looks clean and discrete, but the chassis and internals lying below are laid out and matched to work well together.
Jeff started with a stock kit from which he kept the axle components, transmission, and handful of misc. hardware. He decided to base his 2.2 Class crawler on a MFM Racing scale chassis. Jeff mounted the stock tranny inside the black anodized plates of the chassis and a small plastic skid was fabricated and added under the tranny.
The epoxy locked axles are hung from the chassis by TCS aluminum links and mount to stock axle brackets that have been rotated 90 degrees after some minor Dremel work. Wheelbase is set to 12 ¼ inches and Traxxas shocks are used to provide articulation and dampening.
The power to move this crawler comes from an 1120 brushless motor juiced by a lightweight 2-cell lipo battery with a Mamba 25 speed controller. Radio gear is straight-forward and simple, coming from a Traxxas Maxx kit. One channel drives the brushless throttle, while two channels control front and rear steering independently.
A Hitec 5645 digital servo cranks the front knuckles and a Hitec 645 steers the rear, using custom steering linkages. Each servo mounts to a small piece of electronic circuit board attached to the stock upper suspension link.
Axial beadlock wheels and Proline Moabs provide traction on all terrain. The front tires run without foams but filled with 4 oz. of Airsoft BB's, while the rears run cut-down foams. All these are turned by massive Revo driveshafts that mate directly to the Wheely King tranny and pinion shafts.
Jeff’s Baja King is not adorned with frills, but a clean well-assembled rig built to perform reliably in the rocks. He’s still got a bit to do to dial in the suspension and chassis weighting, but so far he’s pleased with the performance results from the combination of parts he chose. It looks like he’s built himself a competent crawler.
