RC4WD Bully II Project

I was interested in trying an MOA (Motor an Axle) rig mostly just because my transmitter had a mode for it and I wondered what it was all about.  Technically my Clod Buster has the motors on the axles, but they are powered together and it is certainly not a crawled.  Being able to control the drive of the axles independently allows for all sort of different strange things when rock crawling.  I did some searching and found the Bully from RC4WD.  This is not a scale truck at all; it is build specifically for rock crawling so I didn't know exactly what to expect.

The kit is very nicely made.  The axle housing are aluminum and stuffed with steel gears.  There is no central gearbox because the motors are on the axles.  I assumed it would have four wheel steering but it actually doesn't.  The "frame", or what passes for a frame, consists of two carbon fiber plates.  There is no body to speak of, just a couple of tiny curved panels.  The titanium four bar suspension is all that connects the center to the axles.  I used two separate identical ESCs, a dual brushed 5-slot crawling motors.  The wheels are just flat plates with no "dish" like normal wheels would have.  The tires are super sticky.  The shocks have a long stroke and internal springs.  All of this put together makes for an extremely light weight model with ridiculous amounts of articulation.

It is hard to describe the performance of this model because it is so dissimilar to anything else I have.  I've taken to calling it my "spider crawler" because it looks like an insect as it traverses just about anything.  There doesn't seem to be any relationship between the front and rear axles, each do as they like.  It doesn't have the charm of a scale vehicle, but it certainly is fun to challenge it with things that looks impossible to climb.

Update:  This model was destroyed in the 2022 fire.  It has not been replaced.