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Thisdudes scx10iii build

this1dude

Newbie
Joined
Nov 11, 2022
Messages
10
Location
US
So ive been running this scx10iii bronco for a couple months now. First 30-50 hours was with minimal changes. But now its time to upgrade. But first im going to post how the first 50 hours of driving it went for me.
I picked up this scx10iio bronco used in early september. No idea how used but this is how i recieved it: 100mm shocks with white springs, portals, straight axle gearing. Rest was stock but missing engine cover, inner fenders and bumpers as well as bumpers being cut off the body.

The first thing i did was i did away with the 4.19 swampers on it and got some 4.75 inch tires. I chose the hyrax pre mounted. During drier weather in september these were pretty good tires on the rocks and climbed hills decently. Now that its wet these cake up really fast and dont shed mud at all. Because of 100mm shocks and portals they dont rub at all on the body. Will be picking up different tires to use until next summer though.

Being on portals and straight axle gearing i picked up a 5200mah 3s hardcase lipo. Stock 35t motor. On this the rig is faster than walking speed slightly, but slower than a honcho on 2s lipo. Overall not bad, 2-3 hours of running gets me to 3.8v per cell. A lot of rear end weight though.

Stock 40a esc/reciever 2in1 has handled the 3s without any problems. Stays cool. Havent bought a program card to change any settings. I do like the dedicated light connectors on it. 35t motor has had most of the torque i need but little slow on hill climbs. Low speed control is not great and drag brake is almost acceptable. Not a fan of 2in1 due to it being only 40a but it makes it annoying to have to buy atleast a new reciever as well just to upgrade.

Stock servo the spektrum 612 i believe l, ive read about a lot of issues with but other than being a little bit on the weaker side, i have had zero issues with this servo.

Stock radio is good, but setting 3rd channel endpoints is a very not fun process. Overall for an rtr id say im happy with the electronics setup on it.

Running trails. Being on the soft white springs 100mm shocks the truck sits pretty much full droop, being top heavy bronco body and my big battery makes it very prone to rolling on sidehills. Its tumbled so many times. I will say the body has held up prettt well all things considered. Dont think ill be swapping it any time soon. Im dedicated to making it more capable as is but with a spare. Which will take work. With no front bumper it climbs onto rocks very well with little hang up. The body does catch often. My most common issue is high centering on the skid, being back heavy makes this worse.

Upgrades i did in the first 30 hours. I got high clearance links. I see wear on them so they do rub still but its a small improvement. I added some treal brass portal housings to try to balance a little better. It didnt help. 60wt shock oil has helped a little on sidehills by slowingweight transfer but rolling is still inevitable. I often crawl with a buddy with a honcho. He sidehills better but everything else my 10.3 does better.
I bought the straight ssd bumper and cut it just slightly wider than body mounts. I like it there though its not great to look at. I did try a nicer looking bumper but its skid plate and sotting more forward hung up quite a lot so it was a trade off.
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A couple weeks ago i ordered rock pirates rear shock towers. Installation is straight forward but a few pointers. The mounting holes are not countersunk like stock ones so new screws are needed. Stock brace is too narrow so for those with a basecamp you need new body post mounts. Also shock holes arent threaded so i initially used longer screws and lock nuts but i didnt like having no upper brace. Pictured is the one i made. I bought a 4mm brass tube and a piece of m3 allthread rod. Nothing special. With 100mm shocks my axle will touch the chassis limited only by the cross brace the battery tray mounts on contacting the links. With this setup i get 5-5.5 inches of articulation total. Will probably end up limiting this some. Also the towers go so far forward larger batteries have to stand on their side to fit into the stock battery tray. I think the time is coming to run a smaller battery on the side tray instead. Now i really need to deal with my shock setup as laying them down some affects the rate making them even softer which was a problem before doing this anyway.
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Boy, that thing was quite a mish-mash when you got it. It sounds like someone put the Bronco body onto an SCX10-3 chassis that had originally been sold with a different body.

The portals with that big heavy body are going to make roll overs tough to defeat, especially with 100mm shocks.

My factory Axial Bronco is pretty tough to roll now. I've added brass to the axles, aluminum wheels and limited the shocks to 90mm.

Enjoy tinkering with it. There's lots to play with on that body. It looks quite good when you put some time into it.
 
If you ever swap to the straight axles, the SSD Manual Locking Hubs are a great upgrade!

It's a lot of fun as a 2WD truck in 2nd gear.
 
Boy, that thing was quite a mish-mash when you got it. It sounds like someone put the Bronco body onto an SCX10-3 chassis that had originally been sold with a different body.

The portals with that big heavy body are going to make roll overs tough to defeat, especially with 100mm shocks.

My factory Axial Bronco is pretty tough to roll now. I've added brass to the axles, aluminum wheels and limited the shocks to 90mm.

Enjoy tinkering with it. There's lots to play with on that body. It looks quite good when you put some time into it.

So the bronco i believe comes with 100mm shocks. The axles arent stock axial portals theyre metal housing portals unsure of brand.
Ive ran it a few times without the body on and its been like driving a completely different vehicle. I do plan to limit the shocks. Also been looking at the boom racing extra wide 1.9 wheels to run some mud tires on this winter. Those may help with stability.

So a few weeks ago i bought rock pirates rear shock towers.

Install: these shock towers are simple theyre two flat pieces of metal. However they come with no hardware. The mounting holes are not countersunk like the original mounting holes and the shock holes arent threaded. Also they are too wide for the original brace so for those basecamp owners youll need different body posts to use these. The first run with these i put lock nuts on the shock screws but ultimitely wanted some bracing. So what i did was buy a 4mm brass tube and some m3 allthread and cut tp length. Worked out prettt well.

Driving: with the shocks on the forward hole, my axle will touch the frame at full compression limited only by the stock rear battery mount and upper links making contact. Laying down shocks affects the spring rate progression quite a bit so these already too soft shocks are even worse. May as well have a trailing arm setup in the rear now.

I do like the lower stance though. So it gives me a good point to work with. Being able to compress this far means i can ride the truck lower fine.
Note the 5200mah 3s hardcase i use now has to stand on its side with these towers.

I have also installed some +8mm hexes which have helped very slightly with roll overs. Thinkijg about going +10mm in the front.
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Welcome to RCC!"thumbsup"

Nice choice on the Rock Pirates RC shock towers! They look great and function better than the stock towers. I have a few sets on some of my rigs.

Looking forward to seeing more!
 
Welcome to RCC!"thumbsup"



Nice choice on the Rock Pirates RC shock towers! They look great and function better than the stock towers. I have a few sets on some of my rigs.



Looking forward to seeing more!
Thanks. Currently back tracking my build. More has happened just working out a few things and writing up my next post to catch up to how it sits today.

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Aaand to catch up to this point in time.

Like i said in my original post the stock electronics are pretty alright. However i wanted a little more. Initially i just wanted to jump up in motor a bit. 35t was a good starting point but im geared really low so i dont always have enough wheelspeed for some looser hills. Shopped around a bit and got a reedy radon 550 5 slot 10t motor. I purchased it on a whim to get free shipping on an order. Id otherwise been looking at a couple different brood motors. I got it a couple weeks ago however id seen a thread while waiting for it that showed the amps various 550 motors pull at basically their stall torque. Kost being around 70amps. Didnt want to test the 180a burst limit on the little 40a 2in1 esc reciever. Which i had already been looking into swapping out because i wanted programming options too. Hobbywing 1080 seemed like the go to option. However id heard about this one and some recent updates so in comes the isdt esc70. Now that i had a motor and esc i was gonna need at a minimum a stand alone reciever. But at the price point of a spektrum reciever accepting 3 channels and me already wanting a controller with more than 3 channels and a less confusing way to set end points, i went with the flysky gt-5.

The reedy motor fits without the fake pulley setup for the scale engine installed and went in nicely. I downsized pinions for my initial run to acheive roughly the same wheelspeed. 14t-11 tooth pinion. After a single 2 hour run i have quickly undone that decicion. The 550 being at full throttle for walking speed ate battery a little faster. My old 35t had enough torque to twist the hell out of the tires in a bind and even more so on this 550. It remained cool the entire run. Even geared as low as it was and being a 5 slot i saw drag brake improvement. I also had my spare tire on the body and my suspension is still being worked out so i went back over front down a hill because drag brake held so well. This motor is a win.

The isdt 70 esc is pretty cool. For 25 bucks i figured id give it a shot. Blue tooth programming without needing anything extra and being able to change things on the trail is an amazing feature for dialing in a truck. I know its not a frequent thing to adjust settings but for inititally setting it up i really like it. I set a throttle curve for really low speed for half of my throttle range and a quick ramp up after that. The low speed control of this set up is far superior to the stock set up. Unless something unexpected happens this setup will stay. The programming is very straight forward plus you can actively watch battery voltage, temperature and few other things while actively driving by using the app. Will report back after running with the 14tooth pinion.

The radio. Its fine. I like the feeling of the spektrum better but its going to be a while before i pay for a 5 channel spektrum. No issues with the functionality of it just feeling in hand is a change.

Originally i had been planning on sticking with stock front shock towers and was setting up shock keys to actually stand the front shocks a little straighter up, but i was so kindly informed that the rock pirates front shock towers move the panhard mount a bit allowing for more compression of the front end. In my quest for stabile suspension, more movement down allows more room for limiting max height while maintaining the amount of travel i do want. Havent run it enough to report how changing the front geometry is going yet but they do look nice on there. However with the added bit of travel my 4.75s now rub when steering at full compression so will be putting an o ring externally on the shock shaft or trimming the body which i dont want to do.

Ran the rig last night in the dark. The extra bit of travel in the rear from changing the towers a week or two ago is proving to be nice. Headlights being my only lighting are well very scale to using real headlights in the dark offroad. Fairly useless. So changes will be coming to my lighting situation. I have some desert lizard shocks that arrived so ill be seeing about setting those up tonight and will report back on that tomorrow probably.

Heres some pics
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Update:

Did roughly 10 hours of crawling on saturday and a crawl between oast post and now lasting a couple hours. No broken parts yet.

Desert lizard 100mm piggybacks are a bust. Anything but the long spring under the piston limits my downtravel too much and even on light springs and running a 5200mah 3s lipo i dont get much shock movement. Springs also rub the inside to all hell sounding awful. Did learn too my shocks are either not the stock ones or have aftermarket caps. Either way bought a set of injora springs off amazon and have been playing with spring weight. Much improvements have been made so far running second from lightest spring in the set and 60wt oil.

Really liking these rock pirates front towers thinking of going with 90mm shocks soon since i have improved downtravel.

Motor and esc setup has been great. Through 10 hours of crawling saturday esc temp got to 10f above ambient and never higher. Motor stayed cool too. Reedy 10t 550 5 slot. Stock pinion. Straight axle gearing and aliexpress portals. More wheelspeed than stock is nice while maintaining very good slow speed control and torque.

Got a different set of wheels and tires for mud since hyrax are a terrible choice unfortunately the foams that came in were too firm for crawling so i took them off an hour in. Rc4wd 4.75 boggers on rclions (amazon wheels) 35mm wide beadlocks.

Added 2 pod lights in back of cage and temporarily mounted a light bar on the front of the front bumper for night crawling last saturday. It took an expected beating and still works. Also finished cutting front fender a little bit. 3d design for some side plate risers so i can cut a little off bottom of side of body and rear to match the front being cut is in the works.

Servo: stock servo is still kicking but im finally finding it to be weaker than i wpuld like at 14kg and .2 seconds for the spektrum s614. Ordered an amazon 35kg servo so when the samix horn comes in ill install and see how it goes. Have my eyes set on a promodeler 505 or 630. The samix servo horn is much improvement iver stock. Stock the screw kept backing out due to horn pressure but the samix one made for scx10 iii has a clamping screw too.

Upcoming: black friday sales hit so i got 2 dlux cut to length driveshafts since theyre significantly slimmer. Scalerfab had a sale so rock sliders on the way. Also ordered misc scale accsesories.

Unfortunately im bad at taking pics while working on the crawler.
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