Tamiya has a good range of colours for polycarbonate named PS. But sometimes a RC project demands a specific tone that is not available. What to do?
Using our favourite search engine revealed that it is possible to spray other types of paint over PS-55 Flat Clear. We gave it a try and the results was excellent.
Last year we bought second hand Tamiya M01 and M02 cars. Both cars were in excellent condition. However, on both car the plate that secures the battery was missing.
A few weeks ago we bought a cheap second hand TT-01 because LANE Boys Snr. wanted to have a 10th scale touring car for relaxing in the local park. Along with the TT-01 came another box: A semi-vintage FF02 Alfa Romeo 156. The body shell had been used quite a bit and was heavily damaged. The chassis was incomplete, but in excellent condition. The front uprights were stripped where the king pin screws go in; turn buckles, servo mounts and a drive shaft were missing, but the rest of the vehicle looked like the car was never run before.
So we've set out to rebuild the car to its former glory.
Many Tamiya kits available on sale today still come with the TEU-104BK ESC. This ESC is perfectly fine for running brushed motors, but does not contain a BEC and its low voltage cut-off is too low for LiPo batteries.
The missing BEC is easily dealt with: either use "high voltage" compatible servo and receiver, or a cheap external BEC.
Fortunately it is also easy to modify the ESC to have a LiPo compatible voltage cut-off -- assuming you are able to solder a tiny surface-mount resistor.
It took a while as other projects were interrupting, but now our Tamiya M1025 Hummer is finished and ready for the trail.
With the body in good shape it was time to rebuild the chassis of our Tamiya M1025 Hummer. Like all Tamiya kits one begins with the differentials.
With all parts stripped and cleaned, it is now time to build the vehicle up again. First we were dealing with the body.
Having finished our XR311, it is now time to get its brother, the Tamiya M1025 Hummer, back on the trail.
In part 5 we look at the electric power consumption of a 1/10 scale 4WD drift car.
The test subject is our Tamiya TT01D. We obtained the car second hand quite a while ago. It was originally an Expert Built set but has been substantially modified by the previous owner. It has the obligatory aluminium propeller shaft, a carbon fiber upper deck, a front one-way differential, sway bars, and a HobbyWing EZRun 60A brushless system with a 5.5T motor. The tires are well-worn HPI T-Drift. A 4600mAh 2S 30C LiPo provided energy for the car.
In this blog post we look at the power consumption of the Tamiya CC01 Unimog.
For my Tamiya XR311 I needed one of my DIY RC Light Controllers. If you are not familiar with it, please refer to my blog post: DIY car light controller for 3-channel RC
The XR311 is a small car and does not have any lights attached to the chassis, only to the body. So there was no need to have a full blown light controller on the chassis like in our Dingo, but I still wanted the convenience of having only a single servo extension wire between the chassis and body.
The HobbyKing HK-310 radio system I am using does unfortunately not have a PPM output on the signal pin of the battery connector as some receivers do, so this route was out of the question.
So I came up with the following solution: use a stripped down light controller in the chassis, serving as kind of pre-processor for the steering, throttle and Channel 3 signals. Since only one chip is needed for this function, why not add it directly into the receiver?
Over time all CC-01 suffer from this: the steering rod that goes through the chassis wears out, adding a lot of play to the steering. This makes the handling of the car very unpredictable, even at modest silver-can speeds.
To fix this one can either do a DIY repair job as described in https://www.tamiyausa.com/articles/feature.php?article-id=499. or use a simple to install repair kit from GPM Racing Products. For us the GPM kit was the better route as we would otherwise have to buy parts for the DIY solution.
Recently we acquired a Tamiya M1025 Hummer. It came RTR (ready-to-run) with an old Acoms 27 MHz radio, a rather new NiMH battery, a charger and this vintage car that was first released in 1995.
