Phoenix portal kit awaiting assembly - anything I should order before I start?

[pwjm]

Been saving this kit for a winter project, but in talking to a fellow club member yesterday, he mentioned that it would be worth my time to replace the sintered transmission gears with hardened ones - the gears that come in the kit don't hold up well.

He also said there's an updated assembly manual with some changes that improve the mesh on the transmission (shims installed different or something).

Anyone else have any tips or suggestions to consider before assembly starts?

 

[indybama]

When i got my phoenix, right after they released it, i built it right out of the box, other than a gspeed v3 chassis n delrin skid. I run 4s exclusivley in mine n it took a beatin, well over a yr, before i had any issues. I chipped the corner of one tooth n it started actin funny. Replaced them with an extra set of sintered gears n beat on it some more, by beatin on it, i mean backflips off rocks n trees. Its took some pretty high falls as well, n comes back for more. Second time the gears went, dont think i got all the broken chip out, i did replace them with the machined set. If youre goina upgrade to the machined gears, id just go on n get the light weight version while i was at it. Otherwise, VP stuff is pretty solid man. Ive got multiple VP based rigs n love every one of them!

 

[Col_Sanders]

Some people say the machined gears stop or at least minimize the ticking but that was not my experience. I dont really remember seeing too many posts about the sintered gears in the transmission failing, but the machined gears will be stronger. I'd go with the lightweight machined gears to get that rotating weight down a bit.

IIRC Exocaged on youtube did a video about shimming the transmission to get rid of the ticking but his VRD sure seemed to be pretty noisy in a recent video.