Page 3: Upgrades!
Time to install some upgrades! I got most of these just
because they existed rather than due to any necessity or improvement
they might offer. Since I had no experience with MST I wanted to
see what they had available. I was pretty impressed overall.
First I replaced the plastic cross members with aluminum varieties as
shown. I can't imagine the originals would ever have been a
problem, but this sure is cool. I also replaced the short upper
shaft between the gearbox and the transfer case with a steel version.
Next I replaced the plastic drive shafts. These steel telescoping steel CVD units are really nice
and reasonably priced. I can imagine sourcing them for other
projects in the future. Next I added a steel skid plate. This does
not replace the existing plastic version, it just sits over the top.
The shock kit is another story. The picture on the left shows the
new aluminum shocks next to the stock plastic shocks. The aluminum
versions have an ever smaller bore. In fact, the bore is so small
and the fluid volume so low that they provide hardly any damping.
This bothered me for quite a while until I realized you hardly need any
damping on a crawler and the diameter is more or less scale. They
come with 3 sets of springs in different stiffnesses. I usually
like my suspension really soft so I started with those, but they
bottomed out with the heavy body installed so I ended up with the
stiffest variety. The right hand image shows them installed.
The original wheelbase of the CFW-W is 300mm but I needed 313mm for the
Team Raffee body. I found this set of steel links from Boom Racing
which nicely converted the chassis to the right length. Sadly,
this meant the rear drive shaft was no longer long enough and forced me
to buy a longer version of my already upgraded drive shaft.
This project was starting to look so impressive that the standard
plastic wheels were not cutting it. I searched for some wheels
that would do it justice and found these from Locked Up RC. The
gold and red goes great with my Iron Man theme. I was really
pleased the quality here. These are compatible with Vanquish
SLW hubs. I started with 0.225" hubs but found that they rubbed
severely against the portal axle housing so I changed to 0.350".
I also added a set of scale center caps to the hubs. The right
hand image shows the final result. Subsequent to this I also
installed a Tamiya LED kit to fully make use of all the light buckets.
©2018 Eric Albrecht
