After lots of puttying and a tedious paint job, she returned to her former glory ready for more bashing fun!
The above pics were taken just a week ago when I brought the truck out for a run. It was a blast and the car handled far better than I expected it to. Maybe it was the slow speed of the silver can, but the car actually negotiated the track pretty well (see video in earlier blog post).
Unfortunately the joy was short-lived... note to self: take hard-shelled vintage car off track when high-powered modern 4wd buggy comes on the track. The carnage is as follows...
The bodyshell is shot.
After combing the track I find the remnance of the windscreen...
Oh well... you know what they say... crap happens. :)
Although a tad broken hearted, I went home with good feelings of how well the car ran. I decided that I wanted to see what the car could do with a little work - especially in the upcoming local vintage race, the NOOB CLASSICS event.
So off went the cracked up hardbody (to be glued together another day...) and on went a lighter lexan shell. I found the HPI Wheely King shell a perfect fit for the Mudblaster wheelbase. A custom bodymount had to be machined to fit the shell but that's all sorted now.
Also off went the standard chevron threads and in their place a set of JConcept Goosebump tires on HPI star rims. I found a set of these rims at the local hobby store but the fronts were in black chrome and rear were in gold. After a few hours of chrome removal followed with dying, I got all 4 rims a nice black.
Here's how Mudblaster V2.0 looked at the track test yesterday!
The shell's yet to be painted of course, but I think you get the idea of how the truck looks.
A pic with my other buggy I was track-testing, the Yokomo YZ834B RPS SE!
In this body-off pic you can see the custom body mount. I don't like hacking up stock parts unless I have to - moreso when they are vintage parts... so the mount was designed to fit without any modification to stock parts.
How did the truck do?
It ran great, tracked well, felt really good!!! For the whole lap and a half that it ran before I hit a pipe and well...
I thought it was strange that the knuckle would break so easily since it had taken worse knocks than this. I'm guessing either (1) it was one of those murphy law incidences where the angle of the crash managed to break this part or (2) the previous collision that totaled the shell might have damaged this part before this crash did it in.
Disappointed I loaded up ebay to look for the part only to find that it was going for a *mere* SGD80+... not to mention the 2-3 weeks of shipping time it would take to get the part. I was understandably simply "ecstatic"...
So out come the calipers, the autocad gets fired up and the ol' mill gets dusted off. Thanks in part to the very basic design of Tamiya parts of yesteryear I was able to do this...
A new steering knuckle machined out of delrin that has a lot more material for reinforcement than the standard part. I'm hoping that the slightly more forgiving nature of delrin plus the extra material will make this knuckle bullet-proof. I found the stock knuckle to be a tad on the aneroxic side and brittle too.
More testing to follow to see how this baby holds up to the rigours of offroad bashing...
stay tuned. :)
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