So I have finally gotten around to rebuilding my first "hobby grade" RC car. I started searching for a rebuild candidate about a year ago, and couldn't find any at the time. Then I missed out on a pretty good deal on a pair of them. Then it just seemed like the great car never came around. Then it seemed like I started to see a few come up, and I bought a couple passively, never really thinking about them. And then, about a few weeks ago, I decided to get serious and build a FX10. I grabbed the tub of vehicles I had picked up, which I was sure was about four cars, and there was ACTUALLY like 6-7 in there.
They were just like ferals; they showed up and I took them in.
So my original plan was to try to make one very good car from whatever I had, but once I realized what I actually had, the plan became to make two cars, and then three vehicles! Surely I could make three vehicles from the ~6ish I had! So, I went with 1) shelf queen all stock, 2) a semi-shelfie truck conversion made from second-best parts, and 3) runner buggy made from the best of the rest. The plan was to build all of these kinda at the same time, sorta assembly line style, but timing and parts availability threw that out the window pretty quick.
From the crop, the one front and center is the alpha. Everything that is there is unused (including a set of wheels / tires not shown), but it is incomplete and the tub has multiple orange stains on it. With quite a bit of sanding on the outside portions, and lightening of the inside portions, the tub came together quite nicely. And since a good portion of the rest of the car was there, with the addition of a few more parts and cleaning up quite a bit of electronics, the complete chassis of this one came together pretty much before the builds of 2 and 3 even started. It was so fun building this car knowing that I skipped school about 34 years ago and did the exact same thing!!!
So, to start into the other two, a quick lesson was re-iterated: if you have a few mediocre cars, you will end up with loads of mediocre parts!
The plan was to smooth out all of the tubs and make them white as stock. Reality is there is no chance of that happening. After looking at LOTS of pics of truck conversions, it hit me that the chassis should be black for the truck, so I would paint that one. Then, it didn't take long to convince me to paint the runner tub also. The fact is, with old FX10 tubs, the plastic is relatively soft, and it doesn't take much to put a few deep gouges in them. Once they are there, you can try to sand them out (which they are often 75% as deep as the material is thick), or you can fill them and keep most of the original material there and paint it to whatever color you want. So, with some sanding and filling with Mr. Hobby filler, tubs 2 and 3 are hanging in the garage with hopefully final coat of primer on them. They should be in color this weekend.
I build RCs like people would have done back in the '90s ..................................... if they had 3D printers.
Who else has put together three FX10s in such a short timeframe in the past thirty years?
