Manda’s (Amachan) RC Adventures

During my RC crawls last week you may have noticed the rear left suspension not really working well….

So I took them apart and found out why.

I then checked all the shocks, the front ones were fine, the other rear was rather dirty on the inside, so I cleaned the rear ones out and refilled the front with a drop of oil. Don’t mind my very professional shock stand….

Put all the shocks back together and left them for a bit as I need to do something else. And about 1 hour later 1 of the rear ones has left a puddle….. Does anyone know how to potty train a shock absorber? I have ordered new ones for the rear by the way.

After some maintenance on the truck the last couple of days I cleaned all the tires, we can’t have that now can we? There should be a law somewhere saying that any off-road vehicle should not be allowed to have squeaky clean tires. So, off to the beach I went.

Also I have made a new Youtube channel dedicated to my RC stuff, so please subscribe. You can find it through the included video.

I apologize for any stutter in the video, I was trying a different camera so I can record video in 1080p it obviously didn’t work properly.

I went out for a bit of a crawl last Wednesday afternoon. Everything was going as well as you can expect on wet soil covered in leaves. Until I noticed something odd on the front left tire, it seems that the tire was coming off the wheel. On closer inspection the right one was starting as well. No biggie, just beadlock wheels that need to be taken apart and put back together again.

I went out and had a bit of drive yesterday. I have a tripod with flexible legs, so I thought maybe I can wrap those around the frame of the rear of my RC truck. And this is the result. It is not the best for performance or for the centre of mass, but it works.

Here is the footage:

Does it work? Kind of…. The ESC tends to go into LiPo low voltage cut-off while running on the NiMh setting with a NiMh battery. I think one of the soldering jobs I did on my bad day was not as good as I had hoped. So it may be getting a low voltage from that. Now it still should go into LiPo low voltage cut-off when running on the NiMh setting, but the entire programming of this ESC seems to be bust and it just uses whatever setting it pleases it I think. The ESC will need to be replaced, especially if I want to run a LiPo battery on it, this is most likely from the water damage it took from the swim it took early on in its life.

Is the suspension fixed, NOPE! The one shock that I was having problems with before I rebuild them was still not functioning well and seems to be leaking and lost a lot of oil by the feel of it. I adjusted the pre-load on the spring to compensate a bit, but I feel like these need to be replaced.

I can run it for now like this, although I will redo my soldering job, but then comes the question. Do I replace the broken parts and wait for the next ones that I may not be able to find replacements for to break or do I just hold on a bit longer and buy a new truck? I am leaning to buying a new one and it definitely will not be an FTX. I don’t think I will ever buy an FTX ever again.

All back together and ready to go out once the battery is charged….

I got my shocks all rebuild and refilled with a stiffer oil. They are really smooth now. All I need to do now is but the whole truck back together and I can go out with it again.