Next up we start connecting parts to the chassis. This is when it starts feeling like a truck to me.
The driveshafts are as oily as the axles. Again, not a complaint - it' just an observation as this is not a bad thing. They are very scale looking, all metal and pretty cool.
The manual has a big mistake here - probably the biggest that I noticed. The axle offset is completely reversed in the manual. The Panhard mount and short side of the axle are on the opposite side in reality. Very odd that this one slipped through the cracks.
Because an Atari 2600 has more memory than me, I forgot all about the addendum until it was too late.
The lower links were attached to the skid plate with the M3 x 20mm set screws instead of the M3 x 16mm set screws. I didn't notice any issues so I left them in place. I'd be curious to know why this change was made and if the 20mm screws cause any issues. I didn't notice any.
But the I did change the screws that attached the lower links to the axles. As you can see in this first photo, the screw is barely into the second mounting tab which isn't ideal for strength.
Here's how it looks after the longer screws were installed. They are maybe 1mm too long, but they shouldn't get hung up on anything.
After the axles are attached to the chassis, it's time to build the shocks. I went with the same flavors as in the shocks on my Origin - 35wt in the front and 70wt in the rear They are beautiful shocks. I love the anodized blue caps myself. And it's a great contrast to the raw aluminum bodies. iPhone color recreation sucks so the blue is actually lighter in person.
Overall, these are great looking shocks. The finish on the shocks wasn't perfect, but the defects were either minor or hidden. It looks like the anodizing had been rubbed off here, but you can't see on the outside it so it's not a big deal. You can also see the lip in there which stops the hollow ball from pushing through.
The spring perches are made from aluminum which is cool. Personally, I'd rather have a plastic spring perch that's captured with a screw in place of an aluminum perch without a capturing screw. These are a tight fit onto the lower shock mounts though so hopefully they stay put.
The shock caps have an o-ring seal which is a nice touch. There are no bladders inside of these shocks.
Oddly, the preload adjuster doesn't have an o-ring inside of it or anything else to prevent it from walking. This is much less of an issues on scalers when compared to racing RCs, but it still would have been nice to see an o-ring in here. You can see more missing anodizing inside of this adjuster, but, again, it looked great on the outside.
Another thing that is odd to me is that the hollow balls that go in the shock cap seem to be metal, but I couldn't tell for sure. I'm not a fan of metal balls on aluminum shocks.
This ball wouldn't go into the shock and I thought the cap wasn't machined correctly. Thankfully, it was the ball that was bad so I replaced it with one of the spares that was provided and the shock fit fine.
Here's the shock with the bad ball.
After the truck was sprung I noticed that the rear axle had a lot of side to side movement. It turns out there is slop between the slots in the skid plate and the hollow balls. I don't think there's enough slop to get one of my shims in there though.
For steering power I chose the Hitec 7954. SSD only makes a 25T horn (like all servos should be), but Hitec uses a 24T spline so I had to go with a Vanquish 20mm servo horn.
When I went to install the servo horn I noticed the drag link was far too long. In the photo below the wheels are straight, but you can see how far the drag link extends past the servo splines. I would have had to point the servo horn way towards the driver's side in order to have the axle centered.
I think this is a design flaw. The servo horn and axle should be able to be centered together.
My first thought was to exchange the long rod end on the drag link to a short end. After talking to OSRC, he also made this switch, but noticed that he gained some bump steer. I decided to give it a try because I like the servo horn to be as centered as possible.
Below you can see the stock, long rod end on the left and the replacement, short end on the right.
This fix seemed to work for me. As you can see in the photo below, the servo horn still isn't centered, but it's much closer than it would have been with the long rod end.
I really don't notice any bump steer and I get full steering so I'm happy with this fix.