Excellent crawl spot with kids... For campers only.

Last weekend we set off on a short camping trip to try out our new caravan. It turned out that taking along our crawlers was a good idea.We didn't want to go far from home, as it was only a test run for the caravan. So we ended up at campsite "D'n Mastendol" in Rijen, the Netherlands.

RC Dork Jr.s Carisma SCA-1E Lynx ORV in action

As autumn is finally starting to set in here in the Netherlands, there weren't a lot of people at the campsite. So there were very few kids playing at the playground, which turned out to be an excellent crawl spot. A few grassy hills, with a couple of steep climbs, some cut down trees, loose sand, a little stream with clean water and a whole bunch of rocks in different sizes.

Green Man (My SCX10-II based Axial Deadbolt RTR) getting its wheels wet

It was the perfect spot for beginning drivers. Plenty of challenges, varied surfaces and not a lot of distance in between so no whining about being tired from walking 😁 And if the next generation needs a bit of variation in their activities, there's a whole playground available.

The only downside is that it is located on the grounds of the campsite. This means that it is only accessible to campers most of the time. For others, a small entry fee is asked, this is ok if you plan to spend the day there and use all of the facilities, but as an adult crawler, don't expect to be entertained there for more than an hour, maybe 2. Also, I recommend visiting outside the holiday periods, otherwise the playground might be swamped with kids and as they are the primary target audience of this place, they shouldn't be bothered by a bunch of adults playing with their expensive toys.

RC Junkies / RC Crawler Scaler Groep meeting October 13-14th 2018

Today I visited my first trail event. I've been to other meetings before, but they were either more impromptu crawler sessions or at a track, like the meetings at Speedway Tilburg earlier this year.

It was a 2 day event, but I was only able to visit on Sunday. I asked RC Dork Jr. if he wanted to come along, but he thought that he would need a bit more practice first and decided to stay at home. Looking back, that was a good call, because it probably would have been a bit much for him. Anyway, the weather forecast looked awesome, my batteries were charged and I was looking forward to the event. So with all my gear loaded in the car, I set off on the 45-ish minute drive. There was very little traffic on the road, so I arrived perfectly on time. In the parkinglot I immediately ran into another member of the RC Crawler Scaler Groep. It was good to see a familiar face, so we headed to the assembly point together.

After the usual meeting and greeting and a short explanation about the 2 trails that had been set up for us, we set off for our first trail (a.k.a. Route 2). A short walk along the public road took us from the meeting point to the start of the trail. And right off the bat, the loose sand of the dunes proved to be quite the challenge for some. And once again, the importance of tire choice became obvious. Even though the Axial Ripsaws on my SCX10-II were far from optimal, they held their own on nearly every part of the route(s).

So... much... sand...

The routes were clearly marked, but the markers were scale-sized too, so sometimes it was easy to miss one. Also, at some points it was a little confusing. When driving a 1:1, you usually turn when you pass the sign, in this case, you had to turn before the sign. Not a big deal, but it took a little getting used to. The crew had really put an effort into the routes, adding some nice scale details here and there.

They could have fixed the bridge though...

There were a few pretty steep climbs and descents in route 2, the loose surfaces didn't really help in remaining in control either. So I did end up flipping my rig a few times. But not quite as often as my buddy Riny, who at some points seemed to spend more time rolling than driving 😁. The added weight down low on my rig seemed to work well, but there's not a lot you can do when the surface under your wheels keeps sliding out from under you. But we made it to the end eventually.

Made it!

We arrived back at the meeting point, and while admiring other folks rigs and exchanging tips and tricks we had lunch. The amount of detail on some peoples rigs was downright amazing, and it was good to finally see some of the faces that go with the screen names on the RC Crawler Scaler Groep forum.
I'm pretty sure I could have filled the rest of my day chatting about the hobby, but it was time to set off on the 2nd trail of the day.

Route 1 started off with a few big climbs, and the surface seemed even more loose than on the other trail. A couple of them I was only able to conquer with wheelspeed, there was so little grip. But there was only one climb where I needed to use my 2nd gear.

This trail had a few more man-made elements. A couple of steep climbs up pairs of narrow beams proved too much for the Axial Ripsaws, that were now nicely covered in a thin layer of sand. This was the kind of stuff I tackle in my backyard with ease, but here in the sandy dunes I had to admit defeat.

But then, there it was, the piece de resistance, I had seen a few pics from day 1 pop up on the forum, but in real life, the meters long hanging bridge seemed daunting. The wind had picked up a bit, and people where impatient to try and cross the bridge, so it was not exactly stable, but I got across. It was nerve wrecking, as I stood on the wrong side of the bridge and wouldn't have been able to catch my rig if things went sideways. But I kept my cool and didn't have to watch my rig tumbling down the 25m of sand dune under the bridge.

Just keep swinging, just keep swinging...

The next part of the trail was in many aspects quite similar to the other trail, of course, this is to be expected when both trails run through similar terrain. By now, Riny was out of luck, and out of batteries. His back-up pack failed and he only got about 10 minutes of runtime out of it. But he tagged along for the rest of the trail.

After a while, we seemed to have missed a marker, because the trail seemed to end. There was a bench, so we decided to take a break. Not much later, the next group showed up, and we tagged along to get back on the trail. Only a couple of minutes later, we came across a pond, where if you wanted, you could cross by RC ferry. As I still need to give the waterproofing of my rig some attention, I decided not to cross by ferry.

Cool little markers

After a short break at the pond, we went on our way again for the last part of the trail. It was nice weather, so a lot of people were spending their day in the dunes. But apparently, some people thought it was funny to (re)move some of the markers, because after a while the markers made no sense. We decided to take a shortcut back to the meeting point.

Not the best shortcut though, because it involved going straight up the highest of the dunes. My knee didn't like that very much as it was pretty close to being overloaded as it was. And (as to be expected) it turned out that for the shortcut, the climbing of the dune wasn't needed at all.

All in all it was a great event. The good folks of RC Junkies & RC Crawler Scaler Groep put a lot of work into setting up the trails and that really showed. Therefore I would like to thank them for their effort.

See you next time!

Speedway Tilburg track maintenance & layout update

It's not all about crawling. As I wanted to do more than crawling the backyard and go to the occasional crawler meet now and then, I decided to join a local RC club last month. Yeah, they have a crawler track too, but the main focus of the club is the faster off-road stuff.
The club really has quite an interesting history, from a couple of friends that shared a hobby, to a club with their own racetrack. And a track needs maintenance, so a bunch of volunteers sacrificed their free Sunday for 2 weeks in a row to get the work done. I wasn't able to join on the first Sunday, but yesterday I was there to support my fellow racers and help out with the work.

Almost done

And while I feel like I did very little (I mean, all I did was do some digging, cut some Astroturf*, carry some rolls of the stuff, think of some ways to put the pieces together on the track and make some smartass comments), it really felt like it was appreciated.

It was cool to see how a group of people that share a hobby can come together and work their asses off, have fun at the same time (the only thing faster than the RC buggies were the wisecracks flying around). And the ultimate reward was that, at the end of the day, the first laps around the updated track could be driven.

So thank you to all the people who got their hands dirty. I'm looking forward to trying out the track, even though my China Special buggy will probably look like a joke compared to the other vehicles out there... But then again, I like a good joke...


*Astroturf as in not necessarily actual Astroturf, but just using the term to illustrate the type of material as it is still early and right now I can't think of the English generic name for the stuff.

Axial SCX10-II (AX90046) SSD-RC 2-Speed gearbox

It has been a while since I actually performed this upgrade, but as it was an upgrade on my main RC, I still wanted to do a write up on it.

For fathers day, my wife and RC Dork Jr. got me a SSD-RC 2-Speed conversion kit. I put off installing it, because I wanted to wait for some other parts to arrive (RC Schrauben torx screw kit, GPM 57t spur and a Axial 11t pinion). And then replace the motor mount with the cracked screw hole and the spur gear cover that can't be taken off due to a stripped screw.

<rant mode on>
At this point, I would like to point out that I will never do business with Toemen, the supplier of the pinion, again. I should have known better to begin with (read the reviews, you'll know what I mean), but as they were the only dutch reseller that said they had the pinion in stock, I took a gamble.
I ordered an Axial pinion. But when the package arrived, there was a Corally pinion inside. No big deal if that's a honest mistake, but the shipping documents showed that they had scratched out Axial and replaced it with Corally. So they did this on purpose. The way the pinions are built are quite different between these brands. So they are not equal. The Axial is more beefy, the Corally is lighter. Guess what I perfer for a high-torque crawler. Now if they had contacted me to tell me the Axial was out of stock and asked if I wanted a Corally as a substitute, it would have been a different matter. Then it would have been my choice. But they didn't, and now I had payed for shipping, which was half as much as the part itself, for a product that I could have just picked up from my local hobby shop at no additional charge. Returning the part for a refund would mean more additional costs to send it back, so I decided to use the Corally pinion for now. And I'll try to see it not as an expensive pinion, but as a cheap lesson not to do business with this company again. This way of working is totally unacceptable to me and judging by the reviews on the internet, not uncommon for this company.
<rant mode off>

Now, back to the 2-Speed gearbox. Installation was easier than expected. Taking out the annoyingly long screws of the gearbox housing being the most difficult part. There's a couple of attention points though, first, you need to swap the spacer on the axle for the shorter one that was supplied with the kit. Second, don't forget to take out the piece of plastic that's used to close off the opening for the shift fork rod. Other than that, it's just a matter of swapping/installing the gears from the 2-speed kit, sliding in the shift fork and reassembling everything. On reassembly I used the torx screws from the RC Schrauben screw kit, which made a big difference. While I had everything apart I replaced the motor mount, pinion, spur and spur gear cover as well. But guess what, on the new motor mount, a screw hole cracked. Please look into this Axial Quality Control!

After I put the gearbox back in my rig, it was time to install the shift servo. I used the HPI Racing SF-10W waterproof servo that had originally been in my HPI Racing Bullet Flux monstertruck. It's pretty weak as a steering servo, but as a shift servo, it'll probably be just fine. For the installation you need additional servo mount parts that were supplied with the Axial SCX10-II kit, the required spacers for the mounts are included with the 2-speed kit.

Now that the physical instalation is completed, it's time to hook up the electronics. The Y-cable for the lights that was connected to Channel 4 of my RX has to go, as the 4th channel is required for the shift servo. That was easy enough to do. Configuring the channel on my transmitter was a little more work. The shift action needs only very little throw from the servo, so I had to limit the end points quite far to prevent the servo from continuously fighting against the stall point. It took a bit of experimenting, as the servo had to be at an angle to make it fit, so the endpoints had to be set assymetrical, but I got there in the end.

Axial SCX10-II (AX90046) SSD-RC Pro Aluminium parts and brass axle weights

It has been a while since I actually performed this upgrade, but as it was an upgrade on my main RC, I still wanted to do a write up on it.

The improvement in traction that the wheel upgrade gave me, made me wonder if there would be more to be gained in that area. I experimented a little with adding some improvised weights on the axles and that seemed to improve traction even furter. But my improvised solution didn't do a lot of good for the ground clearance of my rig, so was removed again.

I did some research and ended up ordering a few goodies from SSD-RC.

SSD-RC parts & Yeah Racing hex adapters

Their Pro Aluminium C-Hubs, Steering knuckles and rear lockouts. Plus two sets of their brass axle weights (and a set of Yeah Racing hex adapters).

First I needed to do some disassembly, so off came the wheels, hubs, hex adapters, steering links, steering knuckles, c-hubs and rear lockouts. After that I had to pry the hex spacers out of the hubs as they were hopelessly stuck. 

For the installation of my new parts, I started with the rear end, the fit and finish of these SSD-RC parts is excellent and everything is playing perfectly nice with the original Axial parts. 

SSD-RC Pro Aluminium rear lockout & brass axle weight.

One point of attention is, that if you use locking hex adapters, you need to install them next, as adding the axle weight will block access to the locking screw. As you can see in my pic, I did it the other way round and had to take it back apart to correct this. After that, I could install the wheel hubs and put on the wheels.

Perfect!

Once the rear was done, I continued with the front. One attention point is that with the Pro Aluminium C-Hub mounted, it becomes impossible to undo the lower shock mounting screw.

SSD-RC Pro Aluminium C-Hub installed. Close fit.

Next were the Pro Aluminium steering knuckles. Again, perfect fit, zero problems installing them as long as I payed attention to the straight insertion of the bearings.

SSD-RC Pro Aluminium steering knuckle

The installation of the axle weights on the steering knuckles is the same as installing them on the real lockouts. Hex adapters go first, then the weights go on. After that, the wheel hub can be fitted.

SSD-RC brass weight & DC Chequered flag wheel hub

With all four wheels back on, I take my rig for a testdrive around the backyard. Wow... The difference is HUGE. So much grip, and the center of gravity is quite a bit lower too. I really have to give it my best to get it to tip over.

Axial SCX10-II (AX90046) Wheels & tyres

It has been a while since I actually performed this upgrade, but as it was an upgrade on my main RC, I still wanted to do a write up on it.

After the huge improvement caused by the shock rebuild and motor/ESC upgrade, I wanted more. And I had all kinds of upgrade plans. Put some extra weight on the axles, get some better tyres, put on a set of beadlocks so I wouldn't have to glue my tyres anymore, and I had plenty other ideas too.

I was looking at cheap beadlocks on AliExpress, so there would be a little more budget available for the tyres. But you know how these things go. Yes, I came across a set of bronze colored Roost II beadlocks from DC Chequered Flag (a.k.a. Team DC).

Sigh, so pretty

They were only 4 times what I was planning on spending on wheels, so I did the only thing I could possibly do. I ordered them. After the motor/ESC upgrade and the trouble with the spur gear cover, I decided to order a new cover too, as it wasn't going to impact the shipping charges. I thought about getting the very nice looking DC Chequered Flag aluminium cover, but with most of the budget being blown on the wheels, I decided to go with the original plastic part from Axial (but that's for future use).

The wheels were shipped from Austria, so I had to wait a few days. In the mean time, I decided to hit the crawler forums, looking for advice on non-destructive ways of removing glued tyres from rims as re-using them would save me some money. In the mean time I had figured I needed an external BEC if I wanted to keep my shiny new ESC alive, and after a visit to my local hobby shop to pick up said BEC, I had enough budget left for 2 tyres without foams.

When I got home and was trying to find info on the various tyres I had seen at the hobby shop, I stumbled across an add for 2 pairs of Axial Ripsaws in R35 compound, including foam inserts, from a guy that lives less than 6km from the hobby shop I hat just visited. They were only very lightly used and at a good price too. So I dropped him a message and a little later I was back in the car to go pick up my new tyres.

When I got home from the second parts run of the day, I rinsed out the foams and tires (there was some water left from the previous owners last visit to the Ning in them, and rust from his wheels 😜). DHL track and trace showed that the tyres and foams would have a few days to dry before the wheels would arrive.

More work to do

A few days later, my new wheels arrived. And they looked even better in real life. By now, the inserts had fully dried and I could start on installing them right away. Cool, I was going to meet some other local crawlers later, so I would be able to try them out.

Installing the first tyre on the beadlock wheel was a bit of a pain, but I soon discovered the best way to do it and the other 3 together wheels took me the same amount of time as the first one by itself. Now for the next challenge, fitting the wheels to my rig. These wheels didn't have the axle go through them and fix them with a single locknut. No, these came with a wheel hub that was fitted that way and then the wheel was bolted to the hub with 6 tiny bolts per wheel. Ok, not such a big deal, a bit more work, but great for scale looks. But, with the Axial hex adapters, the axle stuck out too far to fit under the wheel.

First I stole the hex adapters from my buggy, they worked on 3 wheels, but production tolerances were on the tight side, so one of the hex adapters wouldn't play nice with the hub from the wheel set. Of course, this was on the last of the wheels, so to keep it all balanced, I had to remove one of the succesfully installed wheels too. In my parts bin I found a couple of hex spacers and used those with the original Axial hex adapters on the front of my rig and added new hex adapters to my shopping list.
I was happy with the end result though, as it doesn't just look good, with the heavier wheels and grippier tyres, there was also a noticeable gain in traction.

Man, they look good

Axial SCX10-II (AX90046) Castle Creations 10A BEC

It has been a while since I actually performed this upgrade, but as it was an upgrade on my main RC, I still wanted to do a write up on it.

While doing research on tyres, I came across some interesting info regarding the current draw of servos. I decided to measure what my servo was actually drawing from the ESCs built in BEC. And that was a bit of an eye opener. The 20+KG digital servo was nothing like the servos I had used in my tourers in the past. Peaks of 7A under load were no exception. The little 2A BEC inside the ESC would never be able to survive for long under that kind of load. So I needed an external BEC.

I visited my local hobby shop and purchased a Castle Creations 10A CCBEC and a Y-cable to modify so I could hook it up without modifying the cabling of the ESC itself. When I got home, I couldn't believe my luck. There was an envelope from Castle Creations in my mailbox. The Castle Link USB programmer they offered for free with my motor/ESC combo had arrived. Great timing, because it couldn't just be used to program my ESC, it would work on the CCBEC too. 

The installation was a pretty straightforward operation. First, I hooked up the CCBEC to my computer through the Castle Link to set it up. I set it to 6V as that's the limit of my servo. Next I made a Deans/T-connector pass through, and soldered it to the input wires of the CCBEC. And then, I cut the + on one end of the Y-cable. Hook that end up to the ESC. Hook the other end up to the output of the CCBEC and plug the remaining end into the RX. There was no way that RX, CCBEC and Y-cable, and of course all other required (and optional) cabling was goint to fit in the receiver box. So I modified an old battery storage box, mounted the CCBEC in that, and ziptied it to the right side plate. Not the cleanest installation, but it works and I was planning on cleaning up the cabling etc in the future anyway.

Axial SCX10-II (AX90046) Motor/ESC upgrade

It has been a while since I actually performed this upgrade, but as it was an upgrade on my main RC, I still wanted to do a write up on it.

As you may have read in Part 3 of my review / build report of my Axial SCX10-II (which you can find here), the Surpass Hobby Platinum 3100KV motor and Hobbywing EZRun Waterproof 60A ESC wasn't ideal for crawler use. Even on 2S (which is what I run in most vehicles) it was way too aggressive for crawling. I got it to a point where it was usable by adjusting the settings on both the ESC and in my Radiolink RC3S transmitter. But while it was usable, it was far from smooth in the lower end of the RPMs. Well, that was to be expected from a sensorless brushless motor.

So, what was I going to replace it with? The fan on my EZRun was kind of annoying, so I knew I wanted a fanless ESC. And I wanted to have a good dragbrake which I could adjust to my personal preferences. I considered getting a Hobbywing Quicrun WP 1080 and a high turn count brushed motor. That setup would meet my wishes, no fan, 9 levels of drag brake. I wasn't sure about going back to brushed, but at less than €75 for all parts I needed, it sure was an attractive option.

Then I stumbled across a nice little combo from Castle Creations. A brushless, sensored, waterproof crawler-oriented motor/ESC combo, consisting of their 2280KV 1406 "Slate"-series motor and the Crawler edition of their Mamba Micro X ESC. This too ran without a fan, but what really convinced me was the additional AUX-channel, which when hooked up to a free channel on your RX, allows to adjust a setting on the fly. And the dragbrake was one of the settings it could be applied to. At €200, it was quite a bit more expensive than the brushed setup, and waterproofing the sensorcable would provide me with some other challenges. But I decided to go for it.

The next day, my new toys arrived

I made the installation process a bit harder for myself than it should have been. I could have easily taken out the gearbox and work on it replacing the motor without anything else being in the way. But I didn't... To make matters worse, one of the screws of the spur gear cover was stripped (I might have mentioned the quality of the hardware before). by glueing a hex key in the screw, I managed to loosen it about 1.5 turns. That gave it enough space to carefully bend the cover out and flip it out of the way.

The motor swap was peanuts after that. Take off the pinion, loosen 2 screws, take out the old motor, put in the new motor, install the pinion, adjust the meshing, tighten everything up and done. Replacing the ESC was a matter of minutes too, as it is just stuck onto the sideplate with double sided tape. Cables were put in the receiver box and the ESCs AUX-channel was hooked up to channel 3 (VR) of my RX. A quick test to confirm everything works and then close up the receiver box and spur gear cover.

Cables need some cleaning up, but it works.

Wow, what a difference. So smooth, so much control in the low end. Not to mention the torque this thing produces. It was a big investment as it was half the price of the kit itself, but it was very much worth it.

Testing the RC Dork YouTube channel

At the moment, I'm trying to set up all aspects of the whole RC Dork thing I got myself into. One of them is a RC Dork YouTube channel and that now has reached the testing phase... So, this is a test... 😀

This video is just to test if my YouTube account is set up correctly. It's a bit of a pointless video, as I bumped the camera and the angle was a bit off. But hey, at least there's a RC vehicle in it.

This is "Green Man", my Axial SCX10-II Deadbolt RTR, going up RC Dork Jr.s slide and coming back down via the lids of his sandbox (which, as he is getting a bit big for a sandbox, will hopefully be dismantled and used to build a backyard crawler course).

At the time of filming, "Green Man" was completely stock. As the surfaces were very slick and slippery, some wheelspeed was required to get to the top. The drag brake did its job on the way back down, but the still very new tyres didn't have enough traction for a very controlled descent.

RC Dork: The RC history Part 9

Crawling into a new discipline of RC.

Yes, we saw a crawler video on youtube. It looked like fun to the both of us, it was slow enough for the offspring and I figured it would teach him a thing or 2 about steering and throttle control. So I bought a couple of FTX Outback Mini 1:24 scale micro crawlers. And it was an instant hit.

FTX Outback Mini, finally, my own pic :)

Now we weren't ripping up the livingroom, we were tearing it apart to create obstacles and try to get our little crawlers over them. We had finally found *our* RC hobby. My RC hobby had always been about the thrill of the speed, but this crawling, it was so relaxing. The crawler bug bit, and it bit hard. Soon I bought an Axial SCX10-II kit for myself followed by a second SCX10-II (Deadbolt RTR) a few months later. I also joined a local RC club, who have a off-road circuit and a crawler track.

My 2 Axial SCX10-IIs

And hey, whaddaya know, the kid liked crawling too. But I told him, that I wasn't going to buy him anymore RC vehicles for him. He had to want it enough to save up for it himself. He was reluctant at first, because the bar was set pretty high for him. But he stuck with it. To motivate him and to give him some more options to choose from, I told him I'd double his savings if he found the crawler he was going for and stuck with it. And he did it. One day I saw the Carisma SCA-1E Lynx ORV online. I knew my kid would like the styling and the chassis was quite affordable and got decent reviews.

My kids Carisma SCA-1E ORV (after I added some lights)

I showed him some pictures and he fell in love. He would have had to save up all of his allowance to be able to buy it in December, but as there is at least a chance of nice weather now, my better half decided to lend him the money, so he could still enjoy his very own crawler before the weather turns all nasty.

So, that's just about it for my RC story so far. I may have left out a few vehicles, but I'm sure they'll pop up in future posts at some point. I hope you will join me on my (and my kids) further RC journeys.


Greetings,

    RC Dork