Project Mulligan

[suicideneil]

It's been too long since I last drove the Big T, and boy, did I make up for it...

So, arrive at the bash spot and give the new(ish) 4 wheel steering a thorough bit of testing, works like a charm- regular steering, incredibly tight circles & bizarre crab steering all possible with the flick of a couple switches, that turned a few heads at the park. Then I decided to test the speed out since I had the room- crazy fast but acceleration takes a little while, not that surprizing really all things considered. I drive the truck as far away as I dare and them give it the beans to get the speed up as much as possible ( geared for 45mph ), truck goes sailing past me but I just clipped the tyre of a van which was parked at the side of the park ( some fireservice / coastguard open day thing with all the appliances parked around one end of the field. Truck spins round and then as I try to bring it back to me it becomes apparent the steering is knacked, very knacked.

Turns out I mangled one of the knuckles and snapped the end off one of the steering rods; carp. Luckily as I had rear wheel steering still I was able to zip-tie the front knuckles straight ( lots of toe in but anyway ), swap the motor wires around & put the shell on backwards = good as new, sort of. Went back at it for a few minutes and noticed that the slipper was screaming alot so I tightened that up a good couple turns and then went to blip the throttle to check it; truck flips on it's lid like it weighs nothing

So, I then put on an awesome display of crazy torque for the 'orrid tourists who were watching, just had to blip the throttle as I rolled along gently and the truck would rear up, hit the shell on the ground and then the front wheels would come crashing down- so much power it was just stupid fun, but couldn't really ride a wheelies very well as the balance is totally off. Was doing that for a good 10 minutes or so and then I suddenly couldn't wheelie anymore; rear ( actually front ) diff had gone- not surprising really considering I'm putting about 5-10 times more power to the axles than they were designed to take. I could still drive the truck for a few more minutes but then my transmitter started beeping like crazy at me as the voltage was down to 4.0v ( runs on 4x AA batts ). Couldn't ignore that really so I had to call it a day, but it was loads of fun and nice to drive my trucks again after so long.

At the moment I need to tear the axles down and see what part has stripped & if it;s worth fixing, or going with an after market axle setup of some sort; I will have to do some pricing-up and see if it's viable to buy the RC4WD alloy Madforce axles + internals + rig up some suspension linkage mounts, or if it might just be easier to run some truggy front & rear ends with the arms locked out straight & mounted to the lower axle guards that I would rather keep ( since they are go impossible to get hold of from NewEra ). Project within a project- I'll upload some damage photos later on...