Nitroholic

Could just have been old fuel residue clogging up the carb. If fuel was left in, the petrol evaporates leaviong the oil residue from the premix behind. You maybe got enough fuel through it to wash out whatever was there....and brrrrm! Now it's running ... it should be easier to keep it running. Especially now it;s had a proper going over! Hopefully now you can get the payback for your efforts and enjoy some playtime 🙂

Can be frustrating. I'm 55, been messing with engines since I was 12, and I still find ways to get confused Usually, it's down to an assumption I made, or a part I ruled out as being the cause without actually checking. If you haven't had the head off, do that next. Get a new base gasket before putting it back though. No silicon or other instant gasket. Will give you a good idea of the engines condition and likely amount of use. Is it a 2 bolt or 4 bolt motor? I had a few 2 bolt heads crack. One OBR ported head split clean through from the base to the exhaust bolt holes. Crack ran along a fin base and was very hard to see from outside. Blindingly obvious from inside....

Really, if you are going to use a drag brake for an onroad car, where the surfaces are pretty grippy... then it would be well worth getting a slightly better ESC that lets you control the level of braking you get. Having the brakes apply full on when you throttle off is going to make things a little jittery. I understand what you are trying to achieve, and thats basically just slowing the car into corners when you let off the gas. If you don't 'coast' but rather drive to the point you want to brake, brake....turn and get on the gas again.... being able to tune that braking is going to be something that will improve the experience.

Back to first principles..... motor needs 3 things to run. Fuel, spark and compression. 1) Fuel. You know you got fuel going in....but.... Check what carb you have. There are decent carbs ( Walbro) and some really quite nasty clone carbs that used to get shipped on some of the clone motors. They also had different baseline settings..not the usual ones you will find quoted everywhere. That would give you all sorts of issues. Also check the choke....and your starting procedure. Prime until the bulb is full and fuel is moving, choke on....pull a few times until it coughs...then choke off, and pull. Should fire right up. 2) Spark. It's possible you have a bad plug. Worth getting a replacement from a REPUTABLE supplier, as there are many cheap and rubbish copies on E-Bay. A bad plug may spark nicely when you test it out of the cylinder, but break down under load. Also check the plug lead is in good order, and the coil gap should be about hte thickness of a piece of thin card ( It was one good use of those taxi phone number cards I used to get through the letterbox before Uber was a thing) 3) Compression. Trickier to measure....but if you take the plug out and put through thumb over the motor, you should feel a decent amount of compression pushing your thumb off the plughole when you pull the pullstarter. If you don't you could have a blown base gasket, worn ring or worn out barrel. These are plated with no proper liner, so when the plating wears, you lose tolerance very rapidly and the compression goes. If you see any scoring or marking in the plating, this is not a good sign. The base gasket between the crankcases is also very thin around hte transfer ports. This can blow out, tear or otherwise fail...meaing your compression drops and your motor sucks fresh air in rather than fuel mix. These are fairly basic 2 stroke motors, but they can be fussy. Once you get to the bottom of hte issue, though, it should start easily every time. You just have to keep going until you find out what's wrong!

fail safe is going to come with all the radio sets these days. No reason not to include it. I'd look at something like the Futaba 3PV .... It's £121 , but when you look at hte specs, you get a lot of features and spec. The flip side is receivers are nearly £40 each, so if you plan on building a collection with a lot of cars....you will eaither need to keep swapping the receiver around, or bite the bullet to buy more.

Yeah .... upgrading is a potential minefield if you are not careful. Most 'strengthening' upgraders add weight. Weight saps hte performance...so you increase the power and fit a faster motor...which then eats the transmission. Sometimes, an easy path to upgrade exists. Like, for example, where the manufacturer makes a brushless and a brushed version, and you got the brushed one. Then you can upgrade the car with parts. Often, though, the options are more limited. In this case, you have started off with an entry level truck, enjoyed it ... but got to the point where you want more.

Yeah... I had one from new, and it was so stable and forgiving. Decided to get back into helis....and there isn't anything comparable out there that I could find. So..I got one for £25 in flying order, picked up a broken one for parts for £8 ( had snapped the flybar, and had one slow servo) and then a pair came up for £25. Untested....but looked in good order. As a bonus....one was the basic yellow....the other was the S300 version, with different skids, body and tail. The base model seems to fly fine...but the S300 wouldn't trim to a hover, and when I checked the swash I had no fore/aft control. Servo is dead. But I have enough spares to make 2 good flyers and still have skids, blades, tails, etc as spares. Total outlay is under £60.....and I have seen plenty asking more for one good model. And some tinkering fun to be had. Working with tiny screws through a magnifier on a tray to catch the things if one bounces!

Today...we attempted micro surgery.... Picked up a couple of cheap E-Flite MCX helis to play with. One seems fine, but the other has a failed servo. Have another chassis with parts for spares, so trying to tear down the thing to swap over parts. My old eyes are not liking the tiny tiny screws!! Still....will be good if it works. If it doesn;t.... then the MCX S300 parts on it are going on the stock MCX

I would recommend a variety of radios, depending on budget....and how many seperate vehicles you might end up owning to use with the same transmitter. 'Budget' brands like Dumbo RC, or FlySky work well, and don;t cost a lot of money. Receivers are cheap, so its easy to have multiple models bound to the one transmitter. Higher quality radio kit from...say Sanwa or Futaba...has better response and feels nicer in the hand. Plus you usually get more things to tune the setup, and that might be something you enjoy. Like I say, depends what you want and what you want to spend

Look online for a manual, assuming you don;t have one. There is usually an exploded diagram. If there is a grub screw, you will see it on the diagram.

Heng Long RC tank ..... with BB firing gun. You could rig up a small camera system to give you visibilty

damn. I want this shell. No idea what I;d do with it except look at it....but...well...

Yes you can ..... In RC t erms, pretty much anything can be done. I built a 6WD Hyper 7 last summer for fun. I have a twin engined Savage, my Firestorm has a mid mounted brushless motor. What mods? ALL of them. You will have to make your own engine mounts, find room for the motor, sort out gearing, find space for the fuel tank you will need (bigger than the stock one for sure ) and then find out how long hte diff and driveshafts will last. Will you get a good result? Will it be driveable, will it break all the time? Depends on your fabrications skills and what parts you can add. Fitting smaller big block motors have been done, but I have not seen anything as large as a 5.9 put in.

Meanwhile..... in the chill of the garage ( so glad to have a roof over hte bikes now ) the daily Harley developed a weepy fork seal. As the roads have been gritty and saltry of late, that needed sorting as the grit sticks to the oil smears, and turns into grinding paste. Now...Harley liked shiny covers on the fork seals, with dust caps underneath. Muck trap!!! When I drifted off the covers....I found this: The dust cap had gone rotten, and there was a lot of moisture trapped in there too. Bought a complete seal kit with new clips, seals, drain screws, o-rings...everything. £25. Bargain. Was a pretty simple strip down, Fresh fork oil, plus a good chance to clean and tidy. Also took the opportunity to copper grease the mudguard bolts etc. Finally..I treated myself to a set of fork gaiters. Harley went to this layout for the Iron Sportys in 2010...so I did the same. Looks a lot better and keeps the muck off the fork tubes. Put a new set of front pads in as well. While it was all apart. Next job is to relocate the ECU from under the seat. Prevents fitting different seats. Not room under the side panel on these. Harley went to a smaller oil tank to make room on 2010 models..,.. but I have a plan. If there isn;t room under the side panel..make room! I now have a pattern side panel which I am widening by about 20mm to make room. Panel is made of 1mm steel, so it;s a cut and weld job.

Dream 50R .... nice little retro. Captures the look of the old race bikes nicely. @everclear1984 ..reminds me of swapping plugs on an SV1000S. The front plug you can see but not remove...until the rad, oil cooler and lines are out of the way. And thats the easy one. Part of the reason I loved my 900 Hornet so much was the fact that ALL the routine maintenance jobs were easy.

Basically....you can;t really do this with a single servo.... If I wanted to set up something like this, I would simply double up the servo and use a second rod to pull the brake. You would need to make up a new actuating arm for the brake, and find a place to mount a second servo. Then just operate that servo on the third channel alone. Most third channel functions are 'on/off' not propertional, so you will have no brake ...or all the brake you are going to get ... so make sure you can adjust the brake force physically with the actuating mechanism. But, yes. It should certainly be possible

Starter box is basically a motor with a rubber wheel that contacts the cars engine flywheel when you press the car onto it. A contact switch starts the motor, which spins the flywheel turning the motor over until it fires. You will often find the starter box has a glow plug igniter wire that runs off it's battery too....as hte glow plug needs power when starting up.

Yeah.....theory and practice are different beasts, and when I did this...I saw no improvement in anything. When the bearings wore out, I replaced the brace with an IRC one that was thicker and that served me just as well and was more resilient to muck and rubbish.

I bought some top-hat type bearings, drilled out hte brace to suit, and pushed them in. Can;t say I noticed much difference TBH.

https://usermanual.wiki/Document/tamiyarisingfightermanual.1472891499 dry version for you!

why? The larger wheels would mess with the gearing, and would either result in an over stressed motor/ESC or you would need to lower the gearing to compensate. Larger wheels would give you slightly more ground clearance...but you are not going to notice it on a 1/16 truck.

hmmm....well. I haven;t used my larger RC's for a year or two, so I think maybe it's time to...build a project out of one. Wanted to build a half-track based on an HPI Baja drive train. So might do that this summer. Want to build a 1/24 sacale crawler course in my garage, and will include some micro RC heli landing spots on there too. As this year...I also want to actually learn to fly my micro CP heli. Picked up a used old mCX co-ax, as I haven;t flown for a while, and need to get back into the swing of it with something controllable. Might look at a 1/16 tank build from scratch too. Kept meaning to do it... 3D print mixed with flat styrene sheet composite build. Got a few ideas.

I got a small pink 1/24 FTX Landy .... which has already been driven round the garage a few times.

Just check if they modified the chassis to make it fit too.

I think this simply comes down to needing clearance for the spur gear here. In the same way Nitro cars need a clearance hold for the spur. Otherwise, you have to mount hte motor higher, which thenmakes hte driveline layout less simple. It's easier to just make a hole in the chassis. A plastic cover would stop debris getting in...but...would snag on anything the car drove over and probably get torn off. You could probably make a cover of sorts with a piece of lexan ( bodyshell material ) but you would need to mount it on the diff mount screws, which isn;t ideal.