Let's get back to the business of building fun. My updating skills have been slacking due to the laziness of quarantine mode.
By now you've probably seen this skid plate and the separate link mounts. The skid plate has a small footprint which is nice. That's less area to drag and get hung up on the rocks. It also has a cool honeycomb rib pattern for strength. I'm not sure why they didn't make it one, solid piece. I guess they felt it needed strength.
The separate link mounts offer the very nice benefit of adjustable mounting positions. If you are a tinkerer or understand suspension geometry, this gives you more options to dial in your suspension. The one, huge drawback to this is that moving the links to the other mounting positions or removing them for any reason is going to be a huge chore. You are going to have to drop the skid plate out of the chassis to remove the links. If you've ever removed a skid plate from a scale chassis you know how much work this can entail. You're virtually rebuilding the chassis. Unless I am missing something, I don't see an easy way to remove the link mounts out the top of the chassis unless, maybe, you remove the floorboards. Or maybe you can notch your floorboards to allow you to remove the link mounts. You may also be able to remove the links if you are patient enough to sit there with an L-wrench, but that would also mean that you are insane. :mrgreen:
It's a 3-link front suspension so here you have the seven links mounted to the skid plate. Each link mount is held on by two screws of different lengths. The extra 2mm isn't doing much...just make them the same length. Ensure the lines on the links are all pointing forward so that you know which way to turn the links/turnbuckles if you need to adjust them.
A first, for me, with this build is that I'm going to try a Holmes Hobbies servo. This is the newly released SHV500v3. The specs are impressive, and even better, I won't have to use an external BEC.
It is a good looking servo too. All servos should be black.
And here's where we get to our first speed bump in the build. The servo doesn't fit in the servo mount. A servo mount that doesn't fit a servo is kinda useless.
I did a little trimming with my favorite parts tree trimmer from Harbor Freight. It was feeling neglected during this build anyway.
This did the trick...or so I thought. More on that later.
I heeded Rich's warning to have taps on hand for the shock towers. Before I received my kit I referred to the online manual and found that all of the screws going into the shock tower are 3mm. The most astute among us would realize that means you should have a 3mm tap on hand. I did not. In fact, I don't have any RC-sized taps on hand so I ordered up this drill and tap set as well as the handle from my bro, Du-Bro not to be confused with da bro. I don't know what that means...
I've warned you before, but I'm going to warn you again. Get a power driver for this build! The plastics are much higher quality than anything from Axial before except for the Capra. The shock towers on this truck, though, are made from a completely new plastic from a distant galaxy. This alien plastic is a mixture of concrete and granite. It will punish your pencil-pushing arms and you will quit before it does. The plastic is so hard that the screws squeak as you turn them. I'm not kidding. It's almost as if Axial got sick of hearing about the shit plastics from their past and thought, "We'll show those bastards!" :lmao:
You should also tap the holes in these towers as instructed. I did not tap most of them and my arms are still throbbing from turning the screws when my power driver quit. Yes, my DeWalt driver got stopped by these towers on more than one occasion.
I look forward to the aftermarket replacing these shock towers and not because they are a rubbery mess, but because aluminum will be much easier to live with come time for maintenance, repairs and upgrades.
The front, driver's side shock tower is two pieces. The Panhard mount screws to the shock tower. I am not sure why they made this two pieces rather than one other than maybe for ease of removing the Panhard bar once the truck is assembled. You can't get to this screw when the truck is fully assembled.
Now you start attaching parts to the frame rail. This same shock tower was difficult to install to the frame. The hole on the frame was undersized so I had to drill it out. And, as you can see from this photo, the shock tower doesn't line up with the hole. I had to squeeze the hell out of the shock tower to get it to line up with this hole.
Backtracking a bit, the screw in the center of this photo, which holds the Panhard mount to the shock tower, is in the only hole that I tapped. It's also the only screw hole of which I stripped the threads. :evil:
The floorboards look very similar to that of the SCX10 II. This is a complete fail IMO. Why? Because that's a lot of unnecessary snag points you have here. I will certainly work on fixing this.
The step in the manual for installing these floorboards confused me for a second. It appears, at least to me, that the mounting tab on the floorboard goes behind the frame. Upon closer inspect of the part, this tab is split and the frame rail goes in between it. Nice and secure mounting style. I like it.
It was at this point that I realized my servo mount trimming job was subpar. It may be difficult to tell from this photo, but the servo is pushing the shock tower outwards. Well, heck, that's not going to do. So despite Johnny 5's best efforts, we have to disassemble.
I got out my Ryobi portable "Dremel" and went to work. This is where I stopped. I tried to smooth this out and remove all of the ribs and steps in the plastic.
And from the top, you can sort of see that I removed the stupid, corner gusset which appears in the lower left corner of the servo opening as oriented in this photo. After this, the servo fits nicely.
Rich said this part is being revised to accept more servos so if you get a kit at a later date you hopefully won't have to make this modification. It kinda baffles me that it left the manufacturing plant this way though. Maybe they only tried Spektrum servos...I don't know. Shit happens though and this is a minor speed bump rather than a deal breaker or roadblock.
And we have a completed chassis! This sucker did fight me to no end when trying to get the other frame rail attached. There's just a lot going on and the frame nor the plastics are as flexible in years past. But you do have a nice, solid chassis in the end and so far I really like it.
Kthx. "thumbsup"
