Cuiken

I'm probably on board with the gold wheels option. Playing devil's advocate though, there was a 'big truck small wheels' kind of thing going on in the '70s/'80s that I think the 1.55" wheels do sort of capture: Whether that actually makes for a decent RC truck though is a different matter 🙂

So I fitted some class 1 tyres onto an old set of Element RC rims and tried them out last night. I'm really not sure which I prefer. Help me out with some opinions... They give the truck a really different look. In both cases, the back wheels sit a bit too 'inboard' but, to me, the wee 1.55" ones have a sportier appearance. I think it's maybe just that they look chunkier because they're slightly wider than the class1 tyres. Meanwhile, the Class1 wheels/tyres, to me, look great in gold and have a more 'off road' kind of vibe. Polling for opinions on this!

Thanks! Todays update is simpler. I swapped in the 'blue' springs on the rear and think they feel about right. The shock oil (350CST I believe) might be a wee bit stiff though as the rebound is a bit slow. Easy fix later on if I want to change it. Irritating miscalculation on my part though is that when I fitted the 72T spur and 24T pinion I found that there's not enough range of adjustment to get them to mesh (about a 1mm gap between them). So, ordered a 75T spur with some 26T and 28T pinions. As to my concerns about heat, it occurred to me that my TRX6 runs a 3300KV AXE combo and is geared for ridiculous speed in it's 'high gear'. No heat issues there. Pretty sure I'm running the stock 45T spur with a 9T pinion and, I believe, the transmission reduction (inc diffs) is 6.32 in high gear. That would give a theoretical top speed of ~16.5mph which feels about right because it really shifts. I don't think I can get anywhere near the same final transmission ratio out of a truck using the StealthX box (even with a smaller spur) so I'm guessing it shouldn't be too hot. Again, a quick calc suggests that a 28T pinion and 75T spur should only give 14.7mph which is a good chunk slower than my heavier TRX6 is running. I'm going to be optimistic .

Okay, a wet weekend meant loads of time indoors. Perfect opportunity to apply 20 (yes 20) coats of paint to the shell. The last complex paint job I did was on pretty much the same shell (see below). So, emboldened by previous success, I thought I'd go more complex again (5 colours instead of 3, lots more fine line masking). Masking took a while. 6 coats of Tamiya PS-2 Red (it's really transparent so needs more coats than other colours I find). 4 or 5 coats each of Yellow and Orange (PS-6 and PS-7). You'll notice a couple of spots where paint managed to get under the tape. I found it much tougher to prevent this happening with the really fine tape and so many coats of paint. Room for improvement but the overall effect is still fine. After that I did 4 coats of Tamiya PS-1 white (it covers much better than the other colours), 4 coats of Tamiya PS-12 silver leaf (as backing and for the rear bed, front bumper and tailgate trim) and then, lastly, a coat of matt clear coat on the outside of the shell over the front bumper and rear bed: The front grill that comes with this body is black (not chrome). It did not look great so I masked and sprayed it with Tamiya Silver Leaf TS-30. I was really surprised by how well that came out. It only took one coat and I was left with a sort of old chrome/aluminium finish. Looks perfect on this truck and matched the other silver areas well too. I also added the usual cheesy £11 interior which fits this shell particularly well (with a bit of trimming). With all that, the roll bar and minimal decals applied, it ended looking like this: I was fairly happy but thought the wheels looked too small. Maybe try some class1 tyres on 1.9" wheels I thought? Before diving into that though I thought I'd try moving the side bars back out (they were fully retracted) and use their runners to cinch the body in slightly around the middle (I had to trim ~3-4mm off the bottom of the body to do this). Aesthetics are weird, this minor mod made all the difference. Not sure if it comes across in the pics but, somehow, the wheels look spot on now. I might want to move the rear ones out by ~3mm or so per side but, otherwise, I think it looks great: I have to say, I think this shell is the bees knees. Absolutely delighted with how it ended up sitting on the chassis with really very little fuss. I'm not quite done with the build yet though. The extra weight of the battery and shell means the back suspension is now too soft. So, heavier springs are on order. I'm also waiting for a 72T spur gear and the last part of the rear drive shaft extension. Beyond the basic mechanicals, I want to extend the rear bumper mounts so that the rear Vanquish bumper sits just inside the shell (rather than ~2.5cm inboard as it does right now). This won't end up being visible but should provide a bit of protection for the shell when it tumbles. I have some brass tube on order to help with that. Looking forward to seeing how it handles once I've sorted the gearing (and this constant bl**dy rain stops for a couple of days).

Okay, sway bar fitting: Since the axle sits ~2cm further back than stock, I needed to move the sway bar mount as far back as practical. This was easily done by attaching the rear mount offset by one screw hole and then drilling an additional mounting hole in the plastic bumper mount. The upshot is that you get a decent drop to the trailing arm's second mounting hole and the sway bar arms don't foul against the body mounts. As you can see I made up some drop links from 3mm threaded rod and some spare link ends. I had to do this because the drop links that came with the sway bar were too short to accommodate the new full drop of the rear axle. FYI, the stock drop links are 4.2mm eye to eye and the new ones are 6.2mm. This length of drop link allows for full droop on the rear axle without overextending the sway bar and doesn't foul the body mount under full compression: With all that installed, you end up with a really nice level of control on the back axle (using the lightest sway bar from the kit). Appreciate I'm adding tons of detail to this thread. Hope it's not too dull. From the test drive yesterday I have to say the end result is really pleasing. I reckon this is going to be a top notch fast trail truck and I can recommend building one of these up. There's not much else out there quite like it.

Got the driveshaft extension today and took it out for a quick test run (no body shell) on 3S and with a 22T pinion instead of the stock 18T one. I've also hooked up the sway bar. This was a bit of a fiddle so I'll post pics later. Anyway, test run was pretty successful. The suspension works an absolute treat. With a heavy 3S 6000mah battery on board, the chassis glided over bumpy stuff at full speed and cornered without too much body roll. Sure, the 'crawler' 45 degree steering means you don't want to go full lock at full speed but that's to be expected. Couple of minor 'jumps/whoops' showed the landing to be incredibly plush and properly damped. Really impressed by how it's working out. Top speed was still a fraction low but the motor was only a little warm so I'm hoping that I'll be able to get to the speed I want by running a 24T pinion and 72T spur (vs stock 87T). This should get me an extra 30% speed topping out around 13mph (vs 10mph at the moment). I'll give that a bash later. If that still doesn't do the trick I might spring for a 10.5T (3600kv) motor instead (should give another 20% speed). So, bit of tidying up to do and then on to the body work!

Mounted the motor and ESC last night and gave it a test run around the kitchen. Still only front wheel drive until the new driveshaft parts turn up but really just wanted to check it runs in the right direction. Good news (for me at least). Forward runs forwards. Given how easy this was, and that it didn't seem to affect the weight distribution at all, why is this not the stock orientation? Strange. Anyway, what I gleaned was that it basically runs fine. I only ran 2S, and it was wheel spinning all the time, but I'm still concerned it might be a bit slow. This probably makes sense given it's a 3040kv motor. My actual crawler runs 2800kv in more or less the same chassis and it's not exactly flying. I'll see how it does once there rear wheels are driven. There's probably some scope for pinioning up a bit but I'll need to be careful of temps. Any tips on getting a bit more safe speed out of this thing gratefully received. Otherwise though, it's looking good. I still haven't booked up the sway bar and it is delightfully leary in its handling. Really moves like a big old truck. On 3S though I'll probably need to reduce roll a bit so I'll hook it up later on today for another test.

Okay, bit of real progress to report. I managed to get a few hours over the weekend. Main job was to measure up and fabricate some new suspension arm and shock mounts. The aim here was to do something a lot like the Extreme RC approach where a set of Axial Yeti trailing arms are slung below the belly of the truck. Why not use the Extreme RC kit? Well, the stock part from them only covers the 313mm wheelbase and I need ~333mm. I did chat to them and they suggested they could do a custom part but the cost/lead time were starting to get a bit high (like more than half the price of the original RTR car). I also needed to build a mock up to figure out all the required measurements. In the end I did the whole job in ~ 2 hours with some aluminium sheet I found in the garage. First job, cut down the sheet to make 2, 20mm2mmx110mm bars: Next was to drill the mounting holes (these line up with the 6 holes in the chassis rail) and one hole to which I attached the trailing arm. Okay, it's not pretty but it did work. If Extreme RC are producing the 'Rolls Royce' version, these would probably belong to the British Leyland school of engineering 🙂 FYI, the tools I used were an small angle grinder, drill and a bench grinder. Really took very little time. Here they are mounted up: To get the wheelbase the correct length I found I could simply use the original lower links in place of the upper links and move them back 'one hole' in the chassis rail. All slung back together: Some simple mounts knocked up to which I attached the stock shocks: And finally with the shell mounted. Really happy with the wheelbase. The wheels also fit perfectly inside the wheel arches with zero rubbing. I set the rear shock height so that the chassis sits level under full compression and the resultant rear droop looks pretty good as a result: Lastly, check out the insane articulation! Again, no rubbing: To be honest, I don't think that much articulation is going to be a good thing. If you're eagle eyed you may have spotted that I've already mounted, but not yet connected, a rear sway bar. This will definitely tame the amount of articulation on offer. For a pre-runer though, I think that will work way better. Ohh yes, and last job was to rebuild the transmission with 0% overdrive and swap it round in the chassis: Not yet test run it to find out if this actually works. Lastly, bit of a tip on that rear drive shaft. I bought the 'wheelbase extender' kit from Element as it's a fairly cheap option. Unfortunately, it's only intended to get you from 313mm to 325mm. In order to get all the way out to 333mm I've had to order a whole new drive shaft kit (Element again) from which I can salvage the longer sleeved 'outer'. Combined with the extender kit this will get me a long enough drive shaft. Arguably though, there are better options out there.

Couple of pics showing the finished bumper. Only thing now would be lights..... With work/covid/dark evening etc though I'm yet to even drive the darned thing 😞

Minor update: Best laid plans and all that. So, a delightful idiosyncrasy of the element RC chassis/Stealth X trans is that the motor needs to run CW for the truck to move forward. Naturally, CCW is the 'norm'. Ordinarily no issue. You'd just swap the motor wires on a brushed/sensorless brushless rig or program the ESC in a sensored rig. But wait... the 10BL120 has no motor polarity reverse function. So, turns out, not really an ideal choice for this project. That said, there's not a lot of other choice out there without importing a MambaX from the US. I'm also not a huge fan of the AXE combo's for non-crawling applications. Tried one in my Wendigo and it was terrible. So, to make this work I 'think' I can just lift out the whole trans, and drop it back in rotated 180 degrees. This should reverse the motor direction. Unfortunately this leaves me with overdrive on the rear axle (very bad) but I have some spare gears that I can use to convert the trans to have no overdrive (which I think makes more sense on a pre-runner anyway). If I want to add overdrive later, there's a conversion shaft that Element sell. Only question is, if this works, why Element didn't make this the stock orientation in the first place? It would save quite a few headaches down the line for the truck to run with a standard motor direction.

Baws to it. Had a beer and ordered the 10BL120. Let's see what it does.

Was thinking something along these lines for paint but with the wheel arches and bumpers picked out too: Next call is motor/ESC. I don't want this thing to run too fast but it'll want to be faster than stock. I already run my Enduro Crawler on a 2800kV AXE540 with the stock pinion and maybe a hair faster than that would be ideal. One thought I had was to go with a HW 10BL120 and sensored surpass motor. maybe try a 13.5T motor (~3000kv) and gear up slightly form the stock pinion. Sure the 10BL120 is not a crawler ESC but this won't really be a crawler. I gather people have been successfully using the 10BL120 in Wraith's for years too. Any ideas happily received.

Following on from the idea that @A J had below, I've decided to pick up the baton: My own approach is somewhat 'on the cheap' although it's still far from a budget build. The basic premise is that the Kyosho Rampage Outlaw Pro shell looks great and sits pretty nicely atop the enduro chassis: So, I got myself all excited and ordered the following: 1 x Element Trailrunner 1 x KORP shell (flat rear bed version as the cage is out of stock everywhere) 1 x Element Trailwalker rear roll cage 1 x Element gatekeeper arb 1 x Element wheel base extender (basically a longer drive shaft) 1 x Axial Bomber rear trailing arms 1 x Vanquish bumpers (cause they work with everything) Couple of items are out of stock till Feb so there'll be a bit of a delay but, the project is now a goer. I've not gone for the ERC trailing arm conversion because the KORP shell will require a longer wheelbase (13") so I'll need to figure out some bracketry of my own making. I'm curious whether I might just get away with moving all the link mounts back along the chassis rail by 'one hole'. Just need to start thinking about a colour scheme....

Sorry to hear that, it looked really promising. As to my own idea (perhaps obsession) of combining a crawler chassis with the Kyosho Outlaw Rampage Pro shell, I ended up buying a KORP so, interest re-kindled, plunked its shell onto my Enduro crawler chassis: I was delighted to note that the front body posts lined up perfectly and the axle width is about right. The chassis' wheelbase is too short for the shell but there's loads of ways to extend that. Also, these tyres are way to skinny for the correct look and the body posts are set too high (easy fixes). All told, I'm struggling to resist buying a new Trailrunner and Kyosho shell and getting to work.......

As above, has this project stalled? I'm still considering a similar project myself so am curious if/why it might have hit the buffers. Cheers.

Thanks. Really pleased with it. I've trimmed the rear bumper down now so it tapers with the mudguards and it looks spot on. I've also bought a matching spare wheel (really just so I'm not tying up one of my enduro wheels as a decorative spare). Last job is to find some lights but the TRX6 has this weird light box thing with a non standard connector that I need to figure out first.

Okay, bit of an update: Got the body assembled, disassembled, masked and sprayed. For the cab I went with Tamiya orange backed with black with the wheel arches and bonnet highlight masked during the orange coats. I then cut and peeled away the overspray film and added a coat of matt lacquer over the black areas on the outside of the shell. For the rear I went mainly black with the diesel tanks sprayed on the inside with Tamiya red and then backed in black. As usual I failed to apply enough coats of colour before spraying the black backing. If I'd wanted the orange and red to really 'pop' I should have done a couple more coats (I did 5 think coats) or backed in silver and then black. The result is that the orange and red look darker and murkier than I'd anticipated. That said though, I think I accidentally got a better result than I was planning for. The slightly dowdy orange colour looks spot on for a Unimog and the darker/shadowed areas serve to pick out the body shell detail and give it a slightly grimy appearance. The fuel tanks look fantastic, almost like they are coated in a film of dirty diesel. So, got lucky basically. I then cut a sheet of scale checker plate for the rear bed which I think looks properly good. Here's a few shots: Obvs the spare wheel is not yet mounted but there's an easy spot to run a bolt so that should be pretty trivial. Only bit that required any thought was how to mount the body. Here's a couple of photos to help explain: The Axial UMG10 uses these downward pointing body mounts that fit through a couple of mounts screwed to the rails at the front of the truck: Unfortunately, the rails sit a fraction lower on the TRX chassis so I needed to figure out a DIY mount. Ultimately, dead simple, just an aluminium plate bolted to the front bumper with a couple of holes drilled to accept the body posts: So, the body posts (shown below with clips inserted) just pop through those holes and the front is sorted: The rear was A little fiddlier as the UMG10 body actually hinges off the back of the chassis. This is not possible on the TRX . So, instead, I trimmed the cag down (as shown previously) and added a pair of downward pointing body posts (these are the incredibly useful Traxxas 3727A mounts). These body mounts then pass through a couple of holes that I drilled in the TRX chassis' built in mudguards and clip from below: Not a lot to it frankly but a bit fiddly getting everything lined up. Looking again at the photo below I think the rear bumper is too wide and sits to far back. As a general comment, even with most of the TRX6 shell's bumper trimmed off and the original chassis bumper replaced with the Vanquish one, it still got hung up all the time. So, I'm going to remove about 1.5cm of the chassis rails at the back and pull the bumper further in. I'll then trim the width down to better suit the Unimog design (I think the UMG10 actually tapers to a very narrow bumper). Not sure what is next with it after that. Possible ideas: 1. Mount the rear wheel. Do I want a matching wheel to the rest of the truck or is it better having a mismatched spare? I'm undecided. 2. Throw a bit of scale luggage at it. 3. Add a longer rear bed over the back of the chassis? Again, I'm not sure. the exposed chassis looks pretty good already. 4. Do I want to add a sound box to emulate engine noise? I have always thought they are pretty cheesy but I think it might work on this rig. Any thoughts/ideas welcomed.

It's been done a few times before but there's rarely much method covered in any of the posts I've seen so thought I'd cover it here. Firstly, why? The TRX6 is great fun but the body is very more 'mall crawler' than 'crawler'. It's just not my thing. Okay, why not buy the actual Axial Unimog 6 wheeled crawler? Two reasons, it's not as good at the TRX6 and it's not nearly as good looking as the 4 wheeled UMG10. Okay, nothing too subjective there then 🙂 Let's move on. I bought a used TRX6 last summer. It's good crack but, like I say, I reckon it's pretty ugly. I did a ton of cosmetic mods to mine but I still don't love it. The 'finished' result is shown below, forgive the dust. I've not been out with it for a couple of months: Summary of mods: Trimmed the mudguards, trimmed/removed the bogging front and rear bumpers before a rock did it for me, added vanquish bumpers front and rear, lowered the body mounts, added sheet aluminium in the rear 'bed', added a cheap interior and stuck on a few bits of scale trim. It works much better (doesn't get hung up constantly) but I still don't love how it looks. After a bit of 'youTubing' though I found these and decided a more utilitarian Unimog styled design really appealed to me: Both of these appear to have been built around the Axial UMG10 body so I gradually accumulated all the parts needed. Getting parts was a challenge, Axial only seem to release one of the four body parts at a time (cab, rear cage, rear sides, interior). I actually haven't been able to get an interior but I'll either use a cheap generic one or just smoke the windows. Either way, I have enough parts to kick off the build. Basic proof of concept: Literally balanced the cab on the chassis. Immediately liked how it looks: Started assembling the cab (I'm planning to use the hidden body mounts) and trimmed off some of the rear cage to get it to fit: Test mounted the cab, rear and sides onto the chassis: Finally added the 'visor' from the original Merc shell. This does give it a slightly less 'scale' look but also gives a bit of protection to the front of the cab. I'm 50/50 on it for now but I've drilled the holes so it's already a keeper 🙂 I think it will look a bit more 'balanced' once the cab is painted. It all fits together surprisingly easily. The front body mounts should screw onto the chassis rails with a small amount of modification and I think I should be able to get the rear cage to mount to the chassis mudguards without too much fuss. The front of the cage sits neatly on the chassis so it's all pretty robust. That's it for now. I'll add updates as I have them.

Thanks. Really pleased with this one. It's my first Kyosho and, while I gather spares may be an issue, I'm really impressed with the quality of the kit and the design of the truck.

I've been hankering after one of these for a couple of years. It just looks to be the ultimate scale trophy truck. I know many will bemoan the 2WD MOA design but they just seem to move really nicely over scale terrain and 2WD isn't such an issue with a gyro. They do go in and out of stock though so I kept missing my chance. Last year though I manage to pick one up and built it up over the xmas break. They call it an 80% kit which means the chassis is pretty much built up out of the box with only the electrics (not included) and shocks (included) to mount. The body though is provided unpainted (though at least trimmed) with a basic decal set. Part of the reason I wanted one of these was after seeing this guy's videos on Youtube: I just thought the design was great. He was also kind enough to answer a couple of questions on how he did the paint. So, because I lack the imagination to design my own scheme, I decided to try and produce a replica (an homage if you will). Below is a simplified build/paint thread and finished result. Really, you're just looking at a fairly complex (at least for me) masking job. In the end I was really happy with the look and managed almost no runs or bleeds behind the tape. The red ended up a bit darker than on 'the original' but I still think it looks pretty good. The interior is the standard cheapo one from amazon. I didn't even bother adding detail this time as it just seems to look okay as is. Definitely the best looking paint job I've done on an already fantastic looking truck. Really love the Americana styled trophy truck with some added Japanese flare. How's it drive? Surprisingly well! I'm running it on a 17T, 3 slot brushed setup with the HW 1080 crawler ESC. I'd say it runs at ~20mph on tarmac but it never gets close to that on grass because the rear wheels spin so much. On frosty grass it's a total hoot to drive provided you have a gyro. Without, it's a bit frustrating. What's it for? Well, looking this good for starters. Beyond that, I'd say it's a weird sort of mixture. Definitely not a truck for real hard bashing or for real high speed/power driving (the chassis is great but the gears will strip). Instead, controversially, I might agree with Kyosho when they called it a 2WD crawler. Sure, it can't climb for toffee (especially with the stock tyres) but maybe see it as a 2WD, mid speed trail truck and use it for that on appropriate scale terrain (any footpath really). It has epic scale looks and the suspension is ridiculously plush. On the move it looks just like the real thing with that awesome tail happy takeoff and leery handling. For the money, I haven't enjoyed a build more and I'm left with an ideal back yard truck (which is very handy these days).

Thanks! No idea how I failed to spot that info on the proline site. Turns out my family are right, I am cr*p at finding stuff 🙂 Cheers.

Thanks! Yeah, I had a good look at that but I didn't think it's quite 'tall' enough. If you have time, would you be able to measure the height and width of it? I can't seem to find its dimensions listed anywhere. Cheers.

Yeah, not sure what happened with it. Obviously it's been warm lately but this was 9pm so the temps had settled down to about 16 degrees. The truck in question is just a bone stock Arrma Kraton so I don't think I was pulling too much current. Only thing I cna think of is that part of the route we were driving was on grass (short mown though) or that maybe I need to set the cuttoff voltage to 'high' (though I think it's there already). Cheers.

I have a Turnigy Graphene 4S battery that I use in my Arrma 6S cars. It's only had about 20 runs and is always 'storage charged' after use (using 'storage mode' of my charge). Friday night I took it out for a quick blast and it worked really well (as usual). Tons of power and a great run time. When I went to remove it from the truck though it was just everso slightly puffed up. It felt more like there was air trapped under the outer plastic coating of the battery than actual puffy cells though as you could 'move' the puffiness around by squeezing the cell and it felt perfectly solid once you'd displaced the 'puff'. Having cooled down, it seems to have more or less returned to normal. Is this battery done? What does a 'puffed battery actually feel like if you give it a squeeze? Ta.

I'm looking to convert my TRX6 from it's mall crawler look to a 6x6 Unimog. There's a good few examples of this on the web, probably my favourites are the ones in the videos below: I've already picked up an Axial UMG10 Cab but the issue I've found is that Axial aren't stocking the rear bed and roll cage parts until October. The truck in the second video seems to use an alternative cage but I can't figure out what it is. Anyone got any other idea for an alternative rear cage that might work? Quick pics below showing the cab simply sat on the front of the TRX6 chassis. I reckon the proportions are just spot on: Ta.