highwayracer wrote:I picked up this Mardave Meteor recently in order to complete my 2wd collection. I knew about Mardave from a UK RC mag that I picked up in 88, but I really didn’t know too much about them. I recently did some research and I think the car that fits in to the RC10/Jrx2/Ultima era was the Meteor. If anyone has more info on the company or car, I’d greatly appreciate if you can bless me with your wisdom.
The Meteor came out around 85/86, when it's competition was the RC10, Tamiya Frog and Fox and the Kyosho Scorpion. It was still around into the 90s though, with a few changes such as the long wheelbase chassis, long front wishbones and 2.2" one piece wheels.
If you look closely at the design you should notice it looks like an RC10 with a Scorpion gearbox, and this isn't a coincidence. When Wes Raynor was designing a replacement for the Apache the Scorpion was the best buggy on the market and Wes was designing a cheap copy of that with trailing arm suspension, but he took so long to get it to developed that the RC10 came out before it went into production. Seeing how much better the RC10 was the original design was dropped and the RC10 suspension was copied instead, keeping the original Scorpion style gearbox.
My own Meteor was one of the first batch of kits, so all the ball joints and front body post were black, and the servo saver assembly was natural white nylon.
Yours has also got a common modification racers did, the metal plate between the motor and gearbox. The Meteor bolted the motor to the plastic gearbox and the kit spur gear had no bearings, so when racing the motor heat would soften the gear case and contributed to destroying the spur gear. A ballraced spur gear and a metal plate bolted to the chassis acts as a heatsink to make the gearbox pretty reliable.