Highmark
I wanna be Dave
Way back around the end of last year I decided that 2018 would be year that I made my Quadrennial return to Axial Fest. Problem being, every small truck I own has some weird combination of non-axial parts so I needed to buy / build something extra special to meet the Axial Fest rules. Pro-line had just blew my socks off with the new 46' Wagon body and I new I had to have one. I had one of their original 4 door bodies for many years, but was always too chicken to chop it up, but this new readily available body would do just fine! I've focused on SORRCA builds for many years, so I knew I wanted to take this opportunity to build something a little more conservative.
My early inspiration was the Legacy built Power wagons as they're a nice combination of not-stock, but also not overly hill-billy'd:
I started by stealing this nicely SSD equipped slider that I got for a few pennies and a bag of beans. It came with SSD Axles, links, MIPs, and the SSD knuckles / C-hubs.
Just plopping the body down on the chassis told me pretty early on that some minor modifications would be needed.
I started by Butchering some Scaler Fab sliders.
And I made them gooder with some key-stock which tuck's nicely up into the running boards (I'm kind of proud of these if you can't tell)
Because I'm cool, I wanted to use one of the fancy new Warn 8274's so I went about carving out a front bumper.
I also decided to go with the smaller 4.3" swampers, as I think they're much more proportional, though they will be replaced with much shinier ones later:
Somewhere along the way I went really crazy and cut out the bed. I started with a styrene drop bed, but it along weighed about as much as the truck by itself, so I suspect it will become lexan before it's over with.
Also, I went about building a metal grill because I was to impatient to wait for the RC Nerds grill which will probably look much nicer than mine.
I'll cut out the stock grill and shoo-goo this sucker in there:
Along the way I did sneak in a few performancy upgrades. Namely the Toyzuki transfer case, rear upper link raisers (re-cycled tabs from those Scaler Fab Sliders). I also completely replaced all but two of those SSD links to make the geometry not-terrible and modified the heck out of some Dinky cantilevers to fit under the drop bed.
So here's sort of where we are, much to do and short time to do it!
My early inspiration was the Legacy built Power wagons as they're a nice combination of not-stock, but also not overly hill-billy'd:
I started by stealing this nicely SSD equipped slider that I got for a few pennies and a bag of beans. It came with SSD Axles, links, MIPs, and the SSD knuckles / C-hubs.
Just plopping the body down on the chassis told me pretty early on that some minor modifications would be needed.
I started by Butchering some Scaler Fab sliders.
And I made them gooder with some key-stock which tuck's nicely up into the running boards (I'm kind of proud of these if you can't tell)
Because I'm cool, I wanted to use one of the fancy new Warn 8274's so I went about carving out a front bumper.
I also decided to go with the smaller 4.3" swampers, as I think they're much more proportional, though they will be replaced with much shinier ones later:
Somewhere along the way I went really crazy and cut out the bed. I started with a styrene drop bed, but it along weighed about as much as the truck by itself, so I suspect it will become lexan before it's over with.
Also, I went about building a metal grill because I was to impatient to wait for the RC Nerds grill which will probably look much nicer than mine.
I'll cut out the stock grill and shoo-goo this sucker in there:
Along the way I did sneak in a few performancy upgrades. Namely the Toyzuki transfer case, rear upper link raisers (re-cycled tabs from those Scaler Fab Sliders). I also completely replaced all but two of those SSD links to make the geometry not-terrible and modified the heck out of some Dinky cantilevers to fit under the drop bed.
So here's sort of where we are, much to do and short time to do it!
