Couple o' pics and a vid of this thing out in the wild
It looked much better outdoors than in. That being said, I'm just about finished the new front form's mold, and should start pouring it this week. I started refining the rear form, just some light sanding of some minor imperfections. There's some divets that I think I need to fill, but not really sure of the best way. I'm thinking using some wood putty, then coat/soak that with a very thin "finish" epoxy, then sand a little. I just don't want to create waviness by trying to sand down some of these and would rather fill, then sand. I could try filling with the slow cure epoxy, but I really worry about that just oozing around, unless I have the form propped so that the fill area is 100% flat. There isn't that much to fix though on that half.
So how did the body perform? I had one full pass with it, that I would call "conservative", not because of the body, but because the new engine was putting down a lot more power than the road could hold. From the videos, the body looks good and stable, didn't see any flapping/wobbling. Thanks to the snug body brace in the front that's on my chassis, the nose never dug into the pavement either.
Speaking of the engine/chassis. This was the first I've run all the new stuff. Earlier in the morning I tuned the car and was doing some launch testing without the body on. The car was launching very hard with even just a small amount of throttle applied - slamming the wheelie bar down and the wheels off the ground. I tried the trans brake a few times. It blew the tires off and nearly flipped - definitely couldn't use that on this road/day. I really didn't have time to program a new tune in the radio, so I just decided to use my KE25 tune, and some throttle control. This was the result:
That slight hesitation at the start is me on the trigger, not the car, little bit of twitch when the light went green, then giving it some gas, which gets the front wheels up and it bounces hard on the wheelie bar and then back down. I never squeezed more than half throttle on this run! In fact, I eased off once it was in second gear and I saw that I had the race won (which in hindsight was a little risky because my teammate's car has a lot of top end actually). And I really have to give it to my teammate Dino for just balls-out-sending his car and trying to win. His car btw, if anyone is curious, is a lightly modded nitro Slash running a
TRX 3.3 and 24/66 gears.
This is an older pic of it, he's removed the EZ start in favor of a pull start now.
It's a super clean, precise build, and what has shocked ALL of us, is that the thing is pretty darn fast! He's changed his slicks out for these Dotek tires -
https://jconcepts.net/dotek-drag-ra...BgFxEqb2IxKxcfRj-MnBK_g8AoedaPjSwgsBiRWwTz8Vw and he's been hooking up very well and extremely consistently running mid 2s hits since he got rid of that EZ start. He really had low expectations for the car, figured he'd be at the bottom of the list, but somehow he's hung on to the #2 spot. I just love his build.
Now he's building another car, but this time he's using one of my DR Viper chassis and a Proline Vette body (going to be Batmobile themed!). He's putting in a Novarossi Legends .28-8 in that one - and that thing will surely contend for the top spot on the list.
I know I've posted these pics in another thread, but I gotta also give a shoutout to one of my other teammates, Big Moe, who has already built a DR chassis based car, and it is equally beautiful.
This one is running a Novarossi .21 and it's a super clean, precise build as well. He had some bad luck with it though - he crashed it during warmups, which cracked the rear bulkhead (which I've since decided I'm no longer going to print those, just modify the stock ones), and also broke his transmission case where it mounts to the engine mount. The broken trans case wound up causing him to eat two spur gears during racing. He was pretty disappointed, but still had a great time.
Another teammate, Mark, already purchased a chassis and is currently building it, and another, Jose, plans on buying one shortly. After posting our pics/vids on some FB No Prep groups, there are a ton of people interested in building nitro SE cars and buying these chassis. I've got four blanks to put together this month, then I'll put them on eBay.
