Manda’s (Amachan) RC Adventures

While driving around yesterday and rolling around on the ground, some damage happened to the exhaust stack on my car as you can see in the picture above.

It didn’t take long before it broke off.

For a while now I have been thinking of wanting to change the exhaust stack as I had a feeling it was going to break at some point. This kind of forced my hand in making a change.

First I removed the exhaust stack and the box it mounts on. Those aren’t glued together as they are both fixed to the body with screws. I wanted to go for a more factory stock exhaust that hangs under the body. So I sawed most of the stack off, drilled a hole and widened that with a craft knife. I smoothed the hole a bit and then blued it in the exhaust box.

And this is now the new exhaust on my RC truck.

I am aware that the exhaust might start grinding on the rear tire under full suspension compression, but I think it will be fine. I am rebuilding the shock early next month anyway and they should be a lot stiffer then. I will just have to see how it goes.

I thought I’d show off one of my favourite RC crawling spaces. It is pretty steep and the roots offer a great challenge to climb or descent and it is less than a 5 minutes walk from my house.

I forgot my actual camera, so phone pictures will have to do today which struggles a lot more with over exposure from the sunlight, but here are some more pictures from today.

Went out driving earlier this week and one of the wires feeding power to the motor came loose. To be fair the bond looked pretty weak when I got this car anyway. So I had to buy a soldering iron and solder it back on. I haven’t soldered anything since my school days and I think I did a pretty good job, it feels pretty solid and everything works again. I am going to leave it to the soldering experts to judge my soldering and hopefully give me tips for the next time I have to solder.

On a side note, I am definitely tanking the rear spare wheel off again. The centre of mass and thus the weight balance is so much better without it. It may get a lot better when I rebuild the shocks, but for now, it’s coming off.

That is the front drive and steering axle done the same way as the rear axle. I found a couple more scruffy bearings that will need to be replaced. The shocks still need to be done as well, but I need shock oil first, so those will have to wait for a bit and hopefully I can get some bearings at the same time. So that’s the spring clean for now, but I should hopefully continue it next month to finish off these loose ends. In the mean time, let’s enjoy some crawling and getting it all dirty again.

I was planning on doing both axles, but one axle was more work than I expected, so I just cleaned out the read drive axle today. I got all the bearing cleaned and coated with white lithium grease and put some more grease around all the cogs in the differential. Unfortunately I found 2 bearing that were rolling a bit scruffy, I don’t have any replacements right now, but I took note of it and will replace them in the future. Despite that the axle and diff are running smooth now.

The gearbox went through the same cleaning as the transmission box went through yesterday and is running smooth. Now the motor is a different story. I cleaned off all the dirt on the outside and then proceeded to blow through electrical contact cleaner until it ran clear. When that was dry I lubricated the bearings with some white lithium grease, put it all back together and it is running smooth.