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I've been watching ebay over the last couple of months waiting for a steering rod for my Maxxum to pop up and it hasn't happened yet. I could buy a thick wire from my hobby shop, and bend hooks on each side to slide in to the steering linkage and servo saver, but I'd rather have a threaded end for a cup and ball stud. Any ideas on what I can do to make this work?

If you need to make one, I would suggest piano wire and solder on some threaded ends. Kimbrough made some long long ago, they show up on eBay often. The kimbrough are hollow so the wire passes all the way thru. The aircraft ones are not very stout. They slip on and are brass so they bend and snap easily. The aircraft area of the local hobby store should have some pre threaded rods but these also bend very easily. That's why I recommend the piano wire. The maxxum requires a few bends, and that will be the weak point for further bends

Why not use a very long turnbuckle with ball ends?

if you are only looking for thread on one side check out these...
http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/uh_viewItem.asp?idProduct=28824

hobby king have them as a push rod.. i have bought a few for such cases..

as sdrob said - typical hardware for RC planes, shouldn't be that hard to locate in a properly shelved LHS

(if such things still exist )

Nice Maxxum!

Paul

EvolutionRevolution wrote:Why not use a very long turnbuckle with ball ends?

That's my suggestion too, it's what I did to upgrade the steering rods on all of my modernized Optimas.



Another idea is to get some 3mm threaded rod, which you can bend to get it to reach the steering arm, and attach ball-cups on each end. I did that to upgrade the tie-rods on an old Marui Galaxy. The stock wire rods are dinky little 1.5mm rods and bend very easily.

that's a VERY clean Maxxum by the way, the first I have seen, interesting FWD system. . I have seen other similar designs, what is the pros and cons of FWD as opposed to RWD?

Should go with a beefier setup to make it really standout and be strong not to bend.

What I do is get 3mm / 1/8" diameter rod (stainless or chrome plates), thread both ends and use them with your choice of rod ends/ball joints. Its always handy to keep a collection of dies and taps for threading. When the rod/shaft is too hard a material, you just heat the ends to red hot and let it slowly cool down, it becomes soft enough to thread.

If you don't have dies to do all this, get threaded linkages that are close to what the maxxum requires.

I am very intrigued by titanium tie rods, lightweight and strong as steel, if you can get them, go for them!

ron wrote:what is the pros and cons of FWD as opposed to RWD?

About the only pro of FWD is perhaps driveability on a smooth or road track. On virtually any other surface--bumpy, jumpy, loose material--FWD performance will suffer. If you see videos of FWD offroad cars on gravel (I've seen a Nichimo Spirit FF vid), all they do when you accelerate is spray dirt & gravel everywhere. They actually seem to accelerate better in reverse than forward, just as if it was a RWD car--go figure. The engineering of FWD just isn't well-suited to offroad conditions, but CAN work quite well on an on-road track.

I think there are massive clearance issues with the steering on the maxxum. Standard sized ball ends and turnbuckles are probably too big. Maybe very small captured ball ends with a thin threaded rod would work?

Fwd was competitive with rwd until the rules were changed making fwd compete in 4wd. At that point development pretty much stopped. You have to keep in kind the tracks of past versus now, and also that there were few fwd cars that were really even race worthy. The Maxxum and A-Main Bullet were about as close as it got to a race worthy platform that were sold. The Coyote wasn't terrible, but did not hold up well. The Nichimo Spirit was more of a entry level platform. The competitive cars were hand built cars like the Ryuz

Here is a good thread on FWD
http://www.rc10talk.com/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=13192

I like the way the FWD system looks, on a road car you can not really can not tell until you remove the body, but with buggies, the design change is so much that it really does look diff and unique.

Nice Maxxum

The original rod is unthreaded and just has z bends on each end to connect bell-crank to servo-saver, you can download the manual from the competitionx.com, here is the link.

http://www.competitionx.com/rc-manuals/cars-and-trucks-f-m/kyosho-manuals/

Here is a link to an ebay seller who has the linkage set N.I.B.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Kyosho-MA13-Maxxum-FF-Linkage-Set-MA-13-NIP-/290906686606?pt=UK_ToysGames_RadioControlled_JN&hash=item43bb63c48e

I like the design of the maxxum when I look at the manual, they used to make some really cool designs. One thing is certain when it comes to FWD, strength wise it has the right design, the fronts are beefed up with A arms, while the rears are lightweight, simply bobbing along. Its always the fronts that take the majority of the humps and bumps on the tracks, the rears just float over them in this case.

I can see on page 14 of the manual that the steering linkages are already beefy but the tie rod linkage is 2.5mm at the most.

You have the 1.5mm or 2mm servo to servo saver linkage, is that what you want to change, you can put a 2.5mm shaft there and 3mm on the steering for that right scale look.

The steering rod on the Maxxum is a balancing act because it can't be too thick. Traxxas has some really long 3mm turnbuckles, but it may be a tight fit because (1) the tur buckle has to be below the battery and (2) the turnbuckle can't be too low...or it will be below the chassis.

Also, the bell crank is mounted very close to the chassis and isn't that strong. So if there was a front impact, a strong turnbuckle would only transfer the stress to the bell crank.