Marui Shogun Restoration

[Coelacanth]

The Last Samurai? No...the last car Marui built back in 1988 wasn't the Samurai, it was the Shogun. To my knowledge, it was Marui's 13th car, so perhaps unlucky number 13...at any rate, I was looking for an RC car to help me continue working on my OptiWTF franken-beast build and came across a Kijiji ad from a guy about 3 hours away. The ad had 4 pics of mostly big toy-grade RC monster trucks, the guy was asking $80 for all 4 RC's, but this particular pic showed something a little more intriguing:

I know a little about Marui, working at a hobby store in the mid-80's, and having built a Hunter for my cousin, a Galaxy for my bro, and then many years later, resto-modding my bro's Galaxy to give back to him as a gift...you can see the build in my Gallery. Of course, everyone knows about the Samurai, but Marui's later offerings were kind of weird, like the Ninja. I knew these later cars were pretty rare, and the guy's $80 asking price was pretty good, even considering there were 3 or 4 crap Radio Shack-type toy-grade RCs in the ad, but I wasn't really looking for a project... Plus he was a long drive away. I offered him his $80 asking price plus $20 if he'd bother to drive up and deliver the car. He replied he would get back to me later, if they hadn't sold yet, he was planning to drive up to Edmonton before Christmas. I left it at that and never expected to hear back from him.

A week ago, he calls me up saying he's making the drive and if I still want the cars, so I say sure. I paid $100 and got 3 Radio Shack monster trucks, each in pretty good condition but all of them having something wrong with the radio gear so as of yet, unable to even test-drive them...but the Shogun was the kicker. Here it is as I received it:

The mismatched wheels were disappointing, the antenna was just hanging loose, stickers were peeling off the otherwise fairly decent-condition body, other than a badly butchered rear body mount, and the underside of the ABS plastic chassis was as you'd expect, some good scratches and gouges.

[Coelacanth]

The obvious problems with the car are that the red shocks are probably from a Ninja, not the yellow ones from the Shogun...and it's probably a design flaw, but the springs bind a bit and scrape briefly on the bottoms of the shock bodies when the shocks are compressed. The body was trimmed quite well with fairly straight lines, which was a nice surprise, and has little damage other than the bad job of trimming around the front shock mount and rear body mount. I have some plans to fix those issues.

The wheels are going to be near impossible to replace because Shogun-specific parts are practically unobtainium. Fortunately the Shogun shares 90% of it's parts with the Ninja and Coors Melling Thunderbird, but even those parts are hard to find and can be quite pricey. Luckily after tearing down the car into sub-assemblies, much of it was in very good shape.

When you see parts held on with electrical tape, however, you know something isn't right. Check out that MSC and resistors/heatsink tape-job.

Another nasty surprise happened when I unscrewed the steering servo and it didn't want to come out. Slipping an X-Acto knife beneath expecting to have some double-sided tape presenting a minor annoyance, to my dismay I discovered it was glued on with CA glue. This turned out to be quite the headache. With an ABS plastic chassis tub, you can't simply dissolve the CA glue with acetone as it will melt the plastic too. The only way to remove the servo was to carefully and painstakingly cut through it as best as possible with the X-Acto knife, prying up ever-so-gently, hearing it crick and crack bit by bit, and hope to hell it doesn't crack off a chunk of the chassis along with it. I consider myself really lucky that I was able to get the bloody thing cut out.

[Coelacanth]

Another issue I'll need to get really creative to fix is one half of the plastic tabs on the rear gearbox, that bolts down onto the rear underguard, is snapped off. This is an engineering brain-fart. Why Marui thought it would be a good idea to have the rear bumper bolted directly to the gearbox with these silly tabs is beyond me; it's totally stupid. Well, I bet just about every plastic-fantastic RC car built back in those days had brain-fart design flaws just like this one (*cough* Tamiya). I have an idea to fix it but it will be a challenge to fabricate a little piece of aluminum to bolt onto the top of the gearbox.

Both front & rear gearboxes looked okay, gears were in great shape despite there being very little grease inside. My fingers got dirty disassembling it but that's about it.

Looking at the diff bevel gears of the front gearbox, something caught my eye and didn't look right; I thought some grit might've been stuck between two of the teeth but it turned out to be a rather significant casting flaw; I arranged them with the web flaws at the top in the pic below so you can see better. Even though the casting issue probably wouldn't affect function as the excess metal webbing only seems to be at the back side of the gears, I didn't like the looks of it and carefully removed the webbing with some needle files and X-Acto knife. I dug back into the bag with the rear gearbox parts to see if those bevel gears had the same flaw, but fortunately they looked fine; only 3 of of the 6 had the issue.

So now the rebuild process is on hold until I receive some bearings from Amazon. The Shogun manual mentions "ball bearings" but I've only been able to count two bearings in the entire car...that's right, only two--in the rear gearbox. Everything else is bushings. Sheesh, why even bother putting TWO bearings in the car? Well, the Shogun is a rare beast and I think it deserves a full bearing upgrade. The car takes 8 x 10 x 3mm bearings (qty. 8 ) and 4 x 8 x 3mm bearings (qty. 14).

[Coelacanth]

Here's the body, lazily painted all-black including the windows. About half of the stickers are peeling off or applied with bubbles beneath; the other half still look very good. I'll buy a sticker sheet from MCI Racing and replace the bad ones, and leave on the good ones. The Shogun really has a nice body, though it seems quite derivative of the Turbo Optima. You can see the butcher job of the rear body mount and the Turbo Optima-like front shock mount cut-outs, most people don't do a good job of cutting those curves and this body is no exception. I'll be cleaning that up as good as possible with a Dremel. It'll get a re-spray of black when I'm done to cover some areas underneath that scraped or chipped off, and weren't painted thoroughly, where you can see through the paint.

[Dadio]

That's a nice find and a good start on the resto ,surprised about the bearings , the Shogun was marketed as their flag ship racer .

[Coelacanth]

True, and with the red shocks, I thought maybe it was originally a Ninja, but it has the shock mounts and rear arms specific to the Shogun. I was definitely disappointed to see hardly any bearings in this car.

I bought some gold aluminum shocks to upgrade the craptastic plastic ones, and found 2 sets of shiny dogbones on AliExpress for the grand total of $2.34 per pair...with free shipping. I don't know how it's even possible for the seller to make money on those!

[XLR8]

This is another brand that I know absolutely nothing about.
Although... I do vaguely recall a smaller scale monster truck called Big Bear which I think was by Marui??
You're right about the body, it does look similar to a TO -- or something made by Kyosho.
Is the Shogun shaft drive? I can see a couple parts that look like bevel gear cases.

[Coelacanth]

Yes, the Shogun and its counterparts, the Ninja & Thunderbird, were shaft-drive 4WD.

You're right about the Marui Big Bear...if I remember correctly, this was actually the first RC monster truck, it predated Tamiya's Blackfoot by at least a few years.

Anybody getting into hobby-grade RC back in the early to mid-80's, who knew about the Grasshopper, Hornet and Frog, probably saw the Marui Hunter and Galaxy kits. The Marui kits sold for less than the Tamiya kits, but had arguably better technology...both of those buggies had oil-filled shocks and suspension that worked better than even the Frog's...but they skimped in other areas, there was a lot of plastic, pot-metal gears, "oilless metal" bushings, practically no nylon parts, and tie rods were hinky-dink little 1.5mm piano wires that bent very easily...but they drove surprisingly well, considering the price.

The Samurai is probably Marui's best-known RC, it looked and drove very well, and was a good step up in quality and performance than the aforementioned earlier models. I know very little about the later cars, I remember the Ninja just looking too weird to be taken seriously...but then, so did the Jetsons-like Kyosho Salute. LOL

EDIT: I just found this site, it's a good read on Marui's RC history...but I found the English quite awkward, sometimes with humorous, unexpected meanings.

http://www.rc4on.com/blog/?p=1705

[Dadio]

I've often thought that Marui cars were kind of not representative of their other products , the Marui airsoft guns were an industry standard and if not upgraded would virtually run forever , strangely their cars were a bit fragile or at least not made in the same way as the airsoft guns , in fact they were market leaders in airsoft for about 20 years , I kind of wish they would have another go at rc cars or re release them .

[Lowgear]

The only Marui product I've ever owned was a Big Bear. I never attempted to run it as it was in too nice of shape. Plus yes, it seemed really fragile overall. The tires on them also dry rot easily. They are common but always command high prices. Even years ago when I had mine, they were going for a lot so I sold it for a nice profit. I wouldn't mind owning another as they are pretty cool with their hard bodies and all.

It's great that you're fixing up this Shogun. I've never attempted to restore any plastic R/C parts before. I just replace them if they're that bad.

[Coelacanth]

It's great that you're fixing up this Shogun. I've never attempted to restore any plastic R/C parts before. I just replace them if they're that bad.

Parts prices on these cars are ridiculously high, and that's only if you can find them. I'd love to replace the parts, but I'd be digging way deeper into my wallet to do this resto than I'm prepared to dig. I hope to do a good job of this car resto without much of a budget. I got the bearings today so the rebuild will begin tonight! I haven't worked on an RC car in years, but the itch is back.

[matt1ptkn]

EDIT: I just found this site, it's a good read on Marui's RC history...but I found the English quite awkward, sometimes with humorous, unexpected meanings.

http://www.rc4on.com/blog/?p=1705

I've never had any direct experience with Mauri, other than seeing a friends mint Big Bear a few years back. I've missed out on a lot of RC things over the years, due to my geographic location (and teenage years), and this site was a very interesting read for someone who is most always out of the loop. Thanks for finding it!

[Coelacanth]

Gearboxes rebuilt. Upon reassembly, following the manual to a 'T', both had major binding issues and I encountered one head-scratcher.

The rear gearbox's upper shaft drive unit would practically not spin at all once reassembled. The manual calls for a thrust washer to be installed between the bevel gear and inside bearing at the output shaft housing. With this thrust washer installed, it seemed to push the counter level gear too far out from the shaft and it wouldn't mesh properly with the rear counter gear; with the thrust washer removed, it spun nice and freely. I used a thinner shim instead.

The second issue with the rear gearbox was a head-scratcher. The manual shows the spur gear with recesses on each side to capture a bearing or bushing. However, the gear I had seemed to have no recess for the bearing on one side. I thought maybe there was originally a plastic bushing stuck in there that might've been fused to the gear by heat, but careful prying didn't make anything budge. Any further poking and prodding would risk gouging or scoring the inside of the gear, so I left it as is. Nobody in their right mind would want to make this a runner due to how fragile Marui cars are, and everything spins smoothly, so it'll be fine for a shelfer.

I had a similar issue with the front gearbox binding, when assembled exactly per the manual. The manual instructs to install not one (like everywhere else in the gearbox instructions) but two 3mm shim washers between the bevel gear and bearing. However, when built like this, the gears would hardly spin at all. With one of the shims removed, everything meshed and spun freely. Interestingly, the Marui Ninja manual shows only one shim washer being used in the exact same step of the assembly.

FrontGearboxIssue.JPG (49.35 KiB) Viewed 2929 times

FrontGearboxIssue.JPG (49.35 KiB) Viewed 2929 times

Ninja manual:

FrontGearboxAssembly-Ninja.JPG (19.57 KiB) Viewed 2929 times

FrontGearboxAssembly-Ninja.JPG (19.57 KiB) Viewed 2929 times

The last word on the gearbox assemblies for the Shogun is that it was more annoying than enjoyable.

[Dadio]

That is odd

[Coelacanth]

Indeed. I encountered similar issues many years ago when I first built the Marui Galaxy RS for my brother, it's actually funny that I still vividly remember this from way back in the early 80's. The manual steps for installing the front stabilizer referred to a piece of piano wire that had to be bent to match a diagram, and that piano wire was nowhere to be found in the kit. When I resto-modded the car a few years back, I used a piece of my own wire to fabricate the stabilizer. I think the Marui manuals can be a bit sketchy.