My plan was to drift in the house with my LDRC RX-7 after I installed the Dasmikro gyro, but the correct connectors weren't included. So after some stock drifting, I got to work on the Fordyce. Man, shouldn't this truck have come with a Ford body? Afterall, it is the FORDyce...
Anyway, here are the parts received with this shipment. Vanquish 33/8 underdrive ring and pinion gear, motor washers, TLR screws that should be compatible with the motor washers, aluminum VFD transmission standoffs, spool for the UD gears, and the aluminum motor plate that should have come with the truck. I don't care what anybody says, plastic motor plates can go to hell. I am still awaiting the Castle motor end.
Let's tear up that rear end first. I am a butt man!
The anodized red fill cap has always sparked the childish nerd in me. It's just such a cool little scale touch! Vanquish could have cheaped out here and included a plastic cap, but I like that they didn't. The anodized red cap is one of my favorite scale touches on any RC.
Here is the stock third member. You can see the grease used is a small amount and also not the light blue Vanquish grease that I will be using. I do wish Vanquish would sell these metal bearing retainers separately so I could replace the plastic parts without having to buy the aluminum third member. Not much grease here, but at least there was some grease. I did notice more than one of the screws were loose and I did not see any thread lock. That's a first for me and an RTR. I'd rather have loose screws instead of stripped holes, but this one doesn't seem to have been assembled with care.
The new ring gear, spool, pinion, screws and shim at the top and the old ring and pinion gears at the bottom. It was nice that VP included screws and a shim. My truck already had a shim on the output between the third member and the driveshaft so be careful to not install both. That would have bound things up for me. YMMV.
Ring gear attached to the spool. The spool is required because the stock pinion gear is cast with the spool being part of it as you can see two photos above. Assembling the new ring gear to the spool is still a less than smooth process and always has been for as long as I have been assembling VP rigs. The screw heads contact the spool and make for some tight and notchy screwing. You don't want this type of screwing to be tight...
While I was tearing up her rear, I installed the Traxxas GTS shocks. Apparently I really like these shocks as well because I have three, yes 3, sets at my house that I bought on eBay from take-off resellers. As you can see, the Vanquish S8E leakers are significantly longer than the GTS shocks. Basically the Traxxas GTS are 90mm eye to eye whereas the Vanquish S8E are 95mm. Again, you can shorten the Vanquish shocks with the included lower shock ends, but I prefer my shocks to hold oil. I did remove the pivot balls from both ends of the S8E and they fit perfectly in the GTS shocks. That's a design win. The Traxxas balls were not the correct width for this truck.
Next up, let's get into the transmission. The aluminum standoffs probably do next to nothing, but they were $10 and I am a sucker. The one drawback of those is that they do not have the cross-drilled hole to hold them while tightening the screws like is present in the plastic parts. Not a huge deal though as it doesn't take much to hold these until the screws are tight.
Plastic motor plate on the left versus the aluminum plate on the right. On the plastic motor plate, you can see where the screws started digging into it. This makes for very difficult motor adjustments as the screw heads want to always fall in these same ruts. No thanks. The aluminum motor plate is expensive, and one could argue overpriced, but I will take it over the plastic garbage. You could also pay the $9 for the plastic tree that includes a new motor plate and go that route.
The assembled VFD transmission plus the new leftovers.
