Money pits Highlander RC, April 1, 2024April 1, 2024 Hello folks. Who would have thought that thrashing RC cars around vast open car parks would come back to bite you on the arse? Or cost you a fortune in spares, month on month. We’ll read on and you’ll find out! Saturday update Just a quick update from Saturday incase you were curious to know. At this moment in time, I am no further along with my Traxxas Raptor. I still haven’t gotten round to stripping it down. My gut feeling is telling me its a stripped idle gear, or drive gear, both of which are around £4 each. If it’s not that, then it it’s likely all that 3S power has shredded the teeth on the diff housing. If that is the case, then I’ll be putting the stock differential system back in. Either way, it should be an easy, and cheap fix. Hopefully… Now, it turns out that Tacticool’s Slash might not need as much work as first thought. Upon closer inspection at home, it turns out that he managed to lose one of his steel drive shafts. Not what you want to hear when they cost a small fortune. Thankfully, he did manage to recover it earlier today, not far from where it all went to shit. That takes me to the next problem…but we will get to that in due course. Sunday Servo Drama’s Sunday. A day of rest for some, a day of more misery for us. After the usual pitstop at Cabin Coffee Aviemore, we decided to take a wee jolly to a spot to the south of Newtonmore for a spot of crawling. How we managed to get parked there I’ll never know. We didn’t think it would be that busy as it was quite cold that morning. The spot is apparently quite popular with climbers. Anywho, we decided to have a little look around one of the lower paths. It didn’t throw up much in the way of a challenge for the rig’s, and it was incredibly sedate. Yawn. About 10 minutes in, we decided it wasn’t going to be. That’s when the steering servo on the Hi-Rock decided it had had enough. On the descent back to the car, it started acting strange. At first I thought it was struggling in the soft mossy ground, but moments later, it gave up the ghost completely. I originally thought it was a transmitter issue, or it needed rebinding. Nope. Everything worked apart from the steering servo. I tried a few things in the vain attempt that it would miraculously spring back to life, but nothing. Thankfully, I didn’t have to carry it to far back to the car. It’s worth noting that at this point, Tacticool’s Bronco was also working fine… Once back to the car, I remembered that I had a broken Slash servo sat in the toolbox. Normally I wouldn’t have taken it with me, but after the dramas of the last few weekends, I’m glad I did. Long story short, I plugged in the Traxxas servo and it whirred into life…sadly, I couldn’t use that one… Who needs the RAC? At this point, we decided to head back home. Tacticool had to drop something off at work, so I headed home to rob the steering servo out of my Traxxas Raptor. The original servo died on me a month or so ago. It would only turn right before finally not turning at all. I’m not sure what happened, but I think it chewed all the gears up inside. The joys of plastic gearing. It still works, just needs the internal gearing replaced. At that point in time, it was cheaper to buy a stronger, metal geared servo than it was to buy the upgraded metal gears. And by that, I don’t mean a souped up version of Metal Gear Rex… Bad jokes aside, it proved that the FTX servo was dead. Luckily, the replacement one I had bought for the Raptor was in fact exactly the same as the one fitted in the Hi-Rock. Score. After about 20 minutes of fighting with servo horns and wire routing, the Hi-Rock was back in action. It was now around about 2PM. Still plenty of time to play, or so we thought… Fix Or Repair Daily Ahhh, the good old Ford acronym. But I can’t comment on that because I’ve never owned one, unless you class a Mazda 5 as a Ford. I believe it’s a Ford chassis, and shares many Ford parts. I think…Who cares? Anyway, back to the matter at hand. We arrived at the usual spot, chomping at the bit to actually get out and do something. It was at this point that we learned the Bronco wasn’t feeling to well. With no response from transmitter inputs, it sat lifeless on Tacticool’s tailgate. Having worked perfectly well less than an hour ago, it gave no hints as to what issues lay within. Upon opening the receiver box, there was a small amount of moisture inside it, and that’s when we noticed it wasn’t receiving power. Uh oh… We tried a few things. Moved wires around, tried rebinding the transmitter, resetting the throttle end points, but nothing. It was officially toast. Well, at least for now. Maybe an overnight stay in a bucket of rice might dry it out and save it, who knows? As we all know, the world works in mysterious ways. Funnily enough, his Slash VXL was still lying in the back of his car. It also used the same receiver setup…Now, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure the next part out. Roadside repairs By now, we were all just sick of how crap the day had gone. We probably should have called it quits and gone home to lick our wounds, ready for another day, but no. We were fully committed now. It was all or nothing. And with that, the donor receiver was in and working. The Bronco was alive once again. It probably wasn’t far off 3PM by now. The day was still young. Finally…it’s crawling time! Finally, we had achieved what we had set off to do at 11AM that morning. A day out with the crawlers. The sun was shining, minimal wind, and at times, clear blue skies. But most importantly of all, three crawlers that all worked! As mentioned earlier, we went back to our usual spot. It’s the perfect micro environment for 1/10 scale crawlers. It just works. Every time we go up there we end up taking a different line. It’s awesome, and never gets old. By now the sun had dried the exposed bedrock that had been previously covered with the mornings frost. This would be the first time we had attempted this area in the dry, and boy did it not disappoint. Routes we had battled with in previous wet conditions, were easily conquered with a bit of brain power and technical driving. The crawlers were finally in their element. On a couple of occasions my Hi-Rock managed to outclass the Bronco. There were even a few occasions where the little Fury 2.0 put us both to shame. The low down weight on the Bronco did hinder it at times, but at other times its performance couldn’t be matched. It’s almost comical at times. The weight on the Bronco seems to act like a self-righting mechanism. Home time It was now about 5:00PM. We had just moved onto our second batteries on the descent back to the car. The sun was slowly starting to set behind us, and a really nice light started to settle over “The Range.” I can’t wait to be able to get back up there in the summer months, especially when its as nice as it was yesterday. The only downer is, it will likely be an adder ridden, midge infested hell hole. Oh, and don’t forget the possibility of ticks. Urgh, f**king hate those things. Anyway, that’s a problem for another day. It was time to head home and get the dinner on. I was starving. To much excitement for one day. Post Views: 36 Days out Friends of Highlander RC