Back to it. Waiting on servos right now and that's starting to hold me up. I've got some old Futabas and Airtronics servos as well as a bunch of others but for one reason or another I can't or don't want to use any of them for this project.
Anyway- Previous pics showed the old receiver cover ( purple silicone "boot") but it just looks bad and offers no impact protection. So I decided to get a KYX box from Amazon. It's not sealed but aside from some of the Traxxas boxes ( all too big) not many of them are. I have an RPM box for the RC10GT but it's also too big as is the RC4WD box that's in the TF2. This This KYX box should work fine to keep out nitro-fuel and I'm not planning on ever running this truck in water so it should be okay. It feels solid and has a low profile. I did have to shave a tiny bit from the underside of the lid in order for the antenna mount to fit right next to it but other than that it fits nicely and looks good.
Also, I didn't want to use dbl-sided tape to hold the box to the mounting plate ( since nitro and adhesive don't play well together) so I opted to use flat-head screws from the inside instead. Problem was that the mounting plate standoffs only come up off the chassis 2.75mm and that's not enough room to clear the 3.90mm lock-nuts on the underside of the mounting plate. I could've used regular nuts but even with thread-lock, I don't want to risk having the receiver box vibrating lose if the thread-lock failed. So I added a pair of 3.15mm plastic spacers to give me a total of 5.90mm... plenty of room now to use the lock-nuts on the underside of the plate... securing the box to the mounting plate. To dress it up a little, I replaced the black-oxide button-head lid screws for stainless and put a tiny 'JConcepts' logo ( where a 'KYX' logo was supposed to be but wasn't lol).
Onto the engine. After getting the clutch portion installed and the flywheels/ clutch-nut torqued down, I had to enlarge the throttle-control arm hole to fit the ball-stud for the linkage. Delicate job since there's not much room for error and the arm is thin enough that it could've easily bent had the drill-bit gotten hung up.
In the old days I ran with a throttle-return spring and I wanted to carry that over to the new engine too. Problem was that the carburetor on this engine sits higher so in order to not have constant tension on the spring, I had to fabricate a little "tab" thingy that raises where the spring attaches to the engine mounting bolts. Pictures show pretty clearly what I'm talking about here. Now there's zero tension on the spring while at idle and it's not stretching the spring beyond what it should be when opening the throttle. Came out perfect.
While I was at it I decided to get rid of the Phillips-head chrome pull-start cover screws and instead use some black-oxide cap-heads. Looks better now and getting rid of Phillips-head screws is always a plus.
Also got the manifold cleaned and installed onto the engine and shaved a bit of the gasket down for the hell of it. Engine is now ready to be mounted on the chassis but will wait until I get the servos installed.
The rear bumper presented it's share of challenges as well but I got it figured out. The original bumper was really designed to utilize a 4 AA battery box... not a hump-pack, so I had to get creative. I instead utilized an RPM T-Maxx front bumper that matches the other RPM front bumper already used on the front end of this project. These bumpers are thick and look nice with plenty of room for a receiver hump-pack in the rear ( and no zip-ties).
Then took some TF2 Marlin body mounting standoffs to make a "cradle" of sorts. And used a scrap piece of plastic ( left-over RPM bumper scrap) and made a top piece that clamps onto the hump-pack quite snugly. The battery pack doesn't move around at all and is protected on the top and bottom with high-density foam strips.
