Hi guys,
This car and a bunch of others like it inspired me to recently build one of my own.
I've wanted to build something like this for a while now.
Here's a post I made on this project on another forum...
Inspiration...
The project was inspired by buggies like these...
Always thought they looked extremely unusual in a cool way and according to what little information there is on the internet they didn't run too badly either. FWD supposedly offered advantages on loose tracks as they didn't spin out. Kyosho produced the Maxxum FF buggy and while I never drove one of those many didn't consider that a "race-inspired" design like some of these purpose built buggies.
Unlikely to ever get a chance to buy one of these so I decided to try my hand at building my own.
The plan...
When designing the car I wanted to do a few things differently though...
CG : Most of these cars I researched mounted the battery on a lower deck and all the electronics went on an upper deck. Possibly electronics were bigger back then... but with today's smaller electronics (and availability of saddle pack batteries) I wanted to try to position the electronics all on one deck for a lower center of gravity.
Steering : Many of the buggies also used direct steering setups like on cars like the Frog / M03. I suspect probably this was also because of space constraints. With about half length of the car being the rear wishbones, everything else needs to fit in the remaining space... we're talking gearbox, steering assembly, servo, esc, rx and battery! However, such steering setups typically result in a lot of bump steer, so I wanted to try to use a more established bellcrank type steering in this buggy.
Donor parts : I like the RB5/RT5 transmission so I knew that'd be my gearbox of choice. For the front suspension I decided to try to adopt something from a current 4WD buggy. The Tamiya DB01/501 suspension was chosen as I had significant spares for that and it was also metric. These arms have also earned a reputation of being strong so it seemed like a good choice. All the parts to mate the two together and the rest of the car would have to be scratchbuilt.
The Result
The whole buggy took about 2 weeks to design and build... and after all that it's still just a prototype. G10 was used for the main chassis to try ideas as I could always redesign and reproduce them in CF later. Some parts that needed more rigidity were cut from CF straight away while shocktowers, rear wishbones and other little odds and ends were made with Delrin.
I tried to incorporate as many tuning options as possible in my design as I really have NO IDEA what would work and what wouldn't - so for example the rear wheels alone have full camber and toe adjustment available, there are a variety of shock mounting positions, even the transmission height is adjustable...
Enough text though... here are some pics.
Oh... the shell is a donor too until I can decide on something nicer to use... but I don't think it looks half bad.
Testing at the Local Track
Car might look wierd, but man can it carve a tight line around our technical track.
Now I need a name for the car... any suggestions?
