Page 2: Upgrades!
The very first thing I did was to add some foams to the insides of
the tires for additional support. This made it handle my rough
road a lot better.
When I saw this aluminum conversion kit from Yeah racing I was sorely
tempted. I knew that adding a bunch of aluminum parts to this
simple chassis probably wouldn't make it much better, but it looks so
cool! So I tool the plunge and spent more on an upgrade set than
the original kit. The image on the right shows the huge pile of
stuff that comes in the box. Besides the aluminum parts it also
comes with a full set of ball bearings and a fan. This upgrade
pretty much entailed tearing the whole model back down into kit form and
rebuilding from scratch.
Wow, look at this crazy thing! The left hand picture shows the
front suspension. You can see the new upper and lower arms, the
steering hubs, the wheel hexes and nuts, the shock tower, and the bumper
support. The shocks also came with the upgrade kit and they are
really nice. They are quite similar to TRF shocks in assembly and
detail. I was impressed for the price. They even came with
multiple sets of springs in different rates. The right hand image
shows the rear suspension which has a similar list of parts. The
weak point in the upgrade is the upper links. They are turnbuckle
type so you can adjust camber, but the threaded turnbuckle part is very
weak. I buckled one the first time I hit a bump. Since the
part is retained with set screws, I was able to substitute a fixed
length of smooth stainless steel rod which has worked fine. The
set screws hold it at a set length.
A few more views of the upgraded chassis. In the left image you
can see the battery retainer and the center drive shaft. The
outdrives are nice CVD units. There is also a little heat
sink. It is intended to be used in a pair to support the included
fan, but the fan was so loud I couldn't stand to use it and reverted to
the original plastic scoop. In the second image you can see the
nice steering linkage supported by ball bearings. It helped a lot
with the steering slop. I did not use the spool that came with the
upgrade kit since I prefer an open differential.
