Sorry… Highlander RC, April 13, 2024April 13, 2024 Hello folks. How’s tricks? Hopefully some of you are still floating around in cyberspace waiting patiently for me to update this. The last two weeks have been a bit of a nightmare if I’m completely honest with you. Falling into old habits doesn’t help, nor does Covid… Covid… I’ll start off with the main cause of the issue. F**king Covid…Again… I swear this is like the 5th-6th time I’ve had it since October 2022. The first bout absolutely ruined my sense of taste and smell for about 4-5 weeks. That was the worst part of it. All I could taste for that few weeks was sugar and salt. That was it. I had the usual fever etc for the first couple of days, and that annoying cough that just doesn’t seem to engage all of your lungs. If you’ve had it, you’ll understand what I mean. This time around though, it hit a bit differently. It started with the usual cough you can’t clear, before progressing into a full blown fever, which thankfully, settled with in a day. I just felt like shit afterwards for a good few days. Luckily, I had a week off work already booked, so I could suffer at home. As I mentioned before, this one took a bit more of a toll on my lungs. The usual cough slowly progressed into more of a chesty cough. Thank f**k. The only downside to this was that I got out of breath quite quickly and easily. Just walking up the stairs was enough to f**k me. Then the rattling started. I was lying in bed one morning, about 5am, when I noticed it. As I exhaled fully, there was a horrible, bubbling/crackling noise coming from my lungs. It sound like fluid in my lungs. Yay. This went on for a good few days, and thankfully, has cleared up without needing to take a visit to the doctor. Well, i did try to make an appointment, but the nearest I could get is Tuesday this coming week. Anyway, enough of that. I’ll survive. Last weekend It was a bit of a funny one. We never managed to get a full day’s crawling due to other commitments. Saturday was short and sweet, and we never made it out until late on Sunday afternoon. On the Saturday, we took a trip up to Glenmore to take on the dried up river bed we had been to previously. All was fine and well, until Tacticools son’s Fury 2.0 decided to pull one of it’s driveshafts apart. I think it had been installed wrong the last time it fell off. This then prevented the shaft from extending as the suspension moved up and down. It was wedged in pretty good. It eventually gave way and pulled the metal yoke straight out the plastic shaft. And with that, leaving the Fury with only two wheel drive. Not much fun. Once we had done our usual up and down, we decided to have a little look along another track, but unfortunately, it didn’t really lead to anything exciting, soooo, it was back to the car to head home. It wasn’t until later on Sunday afternoon that we managed to get upto our usual spot for a few hours. We had batteries to burn. The joys of Lipos being so sensitive, and with neither of the Bashers working, we had to do something to get them down to storage voltages. My charger has a storage option on it, but it won’t discharge the battery. Bit of a pain, but I can live with that, given it is a dual charger. Typical Scottish Weather The weather was a bit of a mixed bag. One minute it was glorious sunshine, with the usual south-westerly winds. Gusty at times, but nothing to major. Then there was the rain. It literally came out of nowhere, and with it, a bit more wind. Luckily though, we happened to be near the big gnarly tree up the top. It’s a strange specimen. Over the years, it seems to have accumulated decades worth of fallen pine needles in the lower branches, creating a huge shelter underneath it.Either that or something has built a very large nest in it. We were able to take cover underneath it while the rain passed over. The only concern was the wind. This thing was swaying back and fore. The tree was creaking and groaning constantly. Needless to say, we stayed towards the outside edge of it. Rainbows for days I’m not gonna lie, I love a decent rainbow. That Sunday seemed to produce them one after the other. I’ve never seen so many in a day. As soon as one faded, another appeared on the opposite side of the valley. Then that would fade and another would appear further north. In between the spells of rain, the odd spurt of sunshine would get through. Sadly, I wasn’t quick enough to get the camera out to get a few snaps of the rig’s. I got 99 problems, and a diff is one… Soooo, I finally pulled my finger out yesterday and attempted to fix the Raptor. I’d say it was an easy fix, it was the taking it apart that was the issue. Well, not an issue, more of a ballache considering what needs to come off to get to the main gearbox. Essentially, the whole backend of the car needs to come off, and then be stripped down. I had it sussed this time though, and I managed to get it all apart without having to take loads of parts off. Long story short, it was the diff locker that had created the issue. That blue plate you see in the pic above, has two grub screws in it. They had managed to work themself loose. This then allowed it to rotate around the metal shaft when the wheels were in contact with the ground. Basically, everything in the gearbox could was rotating around that one shaft, and it wasn’t transferring the power to the wheels. After I figured that out, I slapped a load of threadlock on the grub screws, and tightened it up to the high heavens. It seemed to work fine after that, until I snapped another driveshaft end while testing everything. Too much power? And with that, it looks like I’m going to have to swap in the stock differential when I’m using it on tarmac. I’m not paying upwards of £70 for hardened driveshafts, just so I can run a locked diff. At least not at this moment in time. I might do a bit of digging and see if there are other brands that offer similar products that might fit, but the officially branded Traxxas ones are just a bit to much for my liking. Don’t get me wrong, they do the job, and have performed well on Tacticools Slash VXL. Thankfully though, I would only need to buy one set for mine, as it is only rear wheel drive, not all-wheel drive like his. And that brings us up to date So yeah, that’s everything up to date I guess. Hopefully, it will be a return to normal service now. not really sure what will happen this weekend, but we are hoping to get out tomorrow for most of the day. We really need to do a little bit more scouting locally to find some more crawling spots. I’m currently in the middle of writing up a review for the FTX Hi-Rock, so hopefully, that will be on here midweek. I just need to sort out a few more photos etc, which I will get tomorrow. And with that, I bid you good day. Thank you for sticking around once again. As always, please feel free to leave a comment below, or let me know what your weekend plans are. Until next time, take it easy! Kev Post Views: 26 Days out Friends of Highlander RC