Wheels & tires
Again, not much to say about this, just put the inserts in the tires, put the tires on the wheels, make sure they're on straight and glue them. Just like on any other RC car. Then after the glue has set, mount them on the car with 12mm hex adapters, pins and a lock nut. The replica Method Mesh wheels that even come with center covers are a nice touch. The 1.9 BFGoodrich All-Terrain T/A KO2 tires in R35 compound feel sticky enough out of the box. I can see these working well on rocks, but there's not a lot of those around here. Sandy forest trails and slippery tree roots are what I expect to encounter most. But tires are easy enough to replace and these may just surprise me.
Let's Roll!
There's still work to do on the cracked motor mount and shocks, but with the wheels installed it's time to take it for its first spin around the livingroom. This immediately brings attention to another issue. With the electronics in their current setup, the motor is WAY too agressive, it's like driving a drunk, angry short course truck. But it runs and I feel confident about being able to solve the remaining issues, one way or another.
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| And we have a working crawler |
Body
I'm not a big fan of the Jeep Cherokee, but it'll do until I find something I like better. I decided on doing a dark blue paintjob with black accents. I started with cutting and drilling the body. The manual recommends drilling after the painting, but I prefer it this way as there's less (well, none really) chance of damaging the paint when drilling. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the hard plastic grille of this body. While it looks nice and gives you great options to add realistic lights, cutting the hole for it is a pain. There's just too little material left under the grille, and it snapped under the stress of being only slightly bent by a pair of brand new ultra sharp lexan scissors. So I cut it away completely. That works, but doesn't look nice.
After that, I masked all the parts I didn't want black and degreased what remained. The body is quite big and I have fairly small hands, so holding it while painting was challenging, but I managed to get the black on without other problems.
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| Black paint and masking, a little more work required |
After the paint had set, I removed all the masking and put on the window masks. Cleaned and degreased the rest of the body and painted the rest of the body blue. I'm used to spraying multiple thin coats, but due to the size of the body, one can of Tamiya paint was enough, but only just.
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| Cue Eiffel 65 |
I don't like to stick a ton of decal on my RC cars, so with this kit, I kept it to a minimum too. And as I like the whole scale look, but am performance oriented too, I decided to install the door handles and side mirrors, but not the roof rack, as it wouldn't do the center of gravity any good, especially if I would actually use it to put stuff on.
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| All done... For now... |
Conclusion
There were a few things I didn't like.
First of all, I don't have much love for the included hardware. The quality of the screws would have been acceptable for a sub €100 store brand kit from Hobbyking, but not for a €400 kit from a leading brand*. I really hope Axial will use better hardware on their future releases.
Second, the cracking screw hole on the motor mount. I checked, double checked and triple checked if I screwed up (pun intended) myself. But no, I didn't use the wrong screw, I didn't drive it in at an odd angle. There was nothing I could have done to prevent this from happening other than not screwing in the screw. This is not what I expect to see on a kit at this price point**.
And last, the part of the polycarbonate body along the underside of the hard plastic grille is simply too thin. It is too easily cut, which is not beneficial for the scale look of the body. A small design-change or a pre-cut grille opening would solve this.
But overall, I found the kit easy to build, and had a lot of fun building it. The only real difficulties I encountered were due to my (poor) choice of tools. The manual was very clear, the fit and finish of the parts was excellent. And the rig the build results in, is really a quite capable machine when paired with the right electronics.
* I have ordered a kit of torx screws for the SCX10-II from RC-Schrauben, this makes a huge difference. I'm replacing the screws with those from this kit whenever I replace of upgrade a part. But if I was to build another SCX10-II kit, I'd order another one of these screw kits and use that right from the start.
** Now I could have just been extremely unlucky, but when installing the replacement motor mount that was sent to me by the vendor of the kit, the same thing happened, but on the other side. Again the screw hole for the spur gear cover cracked. So it seems to me that Axial does need to improve their quality control.
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