Lessen's R&D stock car

[Lessen]

Well, I attempted to remove the tabs but I'm afraid my soldering iron just isn't gonna cut the mustard here. I've been having a bear of a time with it the last few times I've used it. I think it's going caput so this will have to wait until I can get a new one.

 

[Lessen]

Today I've decided it's about time to do some wheel/tire gluing. I've never done 1:10 touring tires before so it tooka couple attempts to find the right technique. First I need to put them together...

As you can see there tires do have a belt molded into them. Very cool if you're new to TC's.

Fold the foam into the tire and assemble.

My first pair of tires glued didn't go half bad but I knew I could do a little better. I'm used to doing truck tires in which I usually fold the entire bead back onto itelf, put glue into the groove then unfold the tire bead back into the wheel groove. That's basically impossible here. I've come to the conclusion that the easiest way (and once you get the knack of it, it really is EASY) is to simply use your thumb to pull back a section of the bead just enough to expose the outer edge of it. Allow one drop of THIN CA to fall onto the bead and let it run down the bead. One drop will make it completely around the bead. You just want to work it a little by rolling the tire within your hand. If you keep th tire upright all of the glue will drain to the bottom-most section of the bead and you won't get much adhesion at the top, so make sure you work it a little and let it rest face up. After a couple minutes I go back and tug around and add another drop where necessary. You end up with a VERY clean glue job.

Here's a shot of a well glued tire.

 

[Lessen]

"It's Alive!"

OK, so it's not really alive, but it is standings in it's own shoes now

Just a couple shots of my wire routing. The Servo wire comes from behind the servo and coils up to the receiver. I added a little tab of servo tape to keep it from moving around too much. Of the 4 possible configurations to install this particular battery pack this is the best fit. It works out rather well.

 

[Lessen]

Spring Coding

So I have A LOT of option springs. I think I have every option spring for both the JRX-S and Type-R versions. They come as soft as 10.5 lb. and as heavy as 70 lb I think.. maybe just 60. Anyways... They are ALL black. Fortunately, Losi provides these little tab things to wrap around the coil so you know what is what. Unfortunately, they don't seem to stick very well. You can see in the first picture it is nearly completely unattached. Straight off the backing they would come unattached. I tried putting a piece of double sided tape on them and that didn't help. However, when I removed the double sided tape and just went tab to tab again it seemed to help a lot. Obviously some of the sticky residue from the tape was left on the tab and helped with adhesion. Still, I'm somewhat not set on this method of tracking. So I got out my box of model paints (enamel) and started my own coding. No, not colors. When you have 7 or 8 different rates that becomes just as confusing. I'm going with dots. It's simple to do and I don't need a conversion chart to figure out what is what. I'm very happy with this and enamal paint should prove plenty durable to handling. I used the tip of an .050" hex driver to apply the marks.

 

[neobart]

Good idea, it's like an old time abacus.

 

[Lessen]

Good idea, it's like an old time abacus.

Thanks! Yeah, same theory I guess. I wanted to be able to "read" what they were without a cheat sheet. I went ahead and did the rest of my springs this morning as well as all my sways.

Springs:

10.5, 12.5, 15, 17.5, 25, 30, 35, 42.5, 50, 60, 70 (both 20s are on the car)

Sways:

.030, .040, .050, .060

 

[Lessen]

Sway Bar Installation

Again I'm taking a stab at setup so I'm just going to go with the lightest bar for both front and rear. Feeling the torsion on these bars is kinda making me second guess a couple of my spring choices, moreso the front rates. Anyways, here we go...

First off I'll assemble the links. Nothin out of the ordinary here. I assembled all four links to have a total length of 0.35".

There are two mounts available for use. One is for the .030 and .050, the other is for the .040 and .060. Obviously I'll be going with the one that is suited for the .030 bar. Additionally I've decided to mount it such that the .030 groove is oriented downward. When the car is at rest, the sway bar is significantly more level.

Although the swaybar mount screws do tap into the carbon fiber tower, the kit still came with a washer and screws for assembly. I decided to go ahead and use them.

Finished assembly.

 

[Lessen]

Ballistic Motor Mod

Been a while since I've worked on this but I was at a standstill in need of a hotter iron. I finally ran out and picked up an el cheapo 60W but it got the job done.

Here is the motor with the endbell off in stock form.

After desoldering the 3 tabs from the winds this is what I am left with.

The outer tabs get turned over and swapped. The center tabs simply gets flipped. Resolder the tabs to the motor winds and reassemble.

And finally here is the motor mounted. You can see the clearance gained by flipping over the tabs.

 

[NitroRC4Life]

that is some very nice work right there!! a+ plus!!!

 

[neobart]

Nice.

Must be a good feeling to solve such a problem without it becoming a hack job.

 

[Lessen]

Yeah, no doubt Neobart. My initial reaction was to make a motor shim which I wasn't all too keen on. Then it just hit me to see if it was possible to flip the tabs and it all worked out fine, thankfully.

 

[Racer 1966]

Very clean and neat - the perfect fix! Good work Josh :thumbup:

 

[Lessen]

She Drives, She Drives!

Now that I finally have the powerplant fitted it's time for one of my favorite aspects of a build. The wiring. I try to keep everything as tidy as I can without the use of a dozen zip-ties. Personally, I like to use coiling extensively. Coiling the wires takes up a lot of slack, looks neat and generally tends to hold it's position very well. If necessary I will use a little bit of foam tape here and there but so far I've only needed it in one place, and that is where the servo lead comes around the servo mount. The battery/ESC power leads are kept taught simply by selecting an appropriate mounting position for both the battery and speed control that gives me the best option for length and direction. The signal line from the ESC to the receiver is kept taught down onto the upper deck simply by the tension created by coiling and the relative height of the connected ends in comparison to the height of the deck. The power wires to the motor were slightly longer than needed but rather than cutting them all down like I did to the ESC power wires, I decided to utilize the fact that there are 3 wires and braid them. This does two things. One, it takes up slack in the length and two, it essentially creates one large wire that is stable unto itself needing no other form of securement.

 

[Lessen]

Cooling Fan Hardwiring

...and you thought the step-by-steps were all through...

The latest issue I have is that all together I have three cooling fans (1 on the ESC, 2 on the motor) and only 1 accessory plug at the ESC Obviously I can use a splitter (Y-adapter) to add more but I only bought one splitter and I would actually need two of them to do this the easy way. Besides, that's just a lot of wires going around. Even with the single splitter there is more than I'd like to see but this works out ok. Anyways, I need to hardwire the two small motor fans. Unfortunately, I cannot figure out how to dissamble these little fans without damaging them. The only other route is to splice the wiring. This is a bit of an intensive process and being that the wires are probably something like 24 gauge it is also very precise. Great care must be taken to ensure I don't ruin these puppies. On to the pics...

Two of these fans to start with

Inserting a couple pins into the plug thusly makes it a cinch to get the wires out. Eazy peazy.

Fan #1 will get the ends snipped off and stripped according to a length I've already determined.

Fan #2 is a bit more tricky. i learned this as a T-splice back in shop class. I've marked where I intend to splice the wires from fan #1. My wires strippers are crap so I had to strip these very very very carefully using a hobby knife. Did I say very carefully?

After a quick tinning of all the bare wires it's time for basic assembly and final soldering.

Obviously, both poles need to be wrapped individually to keep from short circuiting.

One more larger shrink wrap to give it a clean look. After retwisting the ends of fan #2 leads I simply reconnected the leads to the plug (in the proper sequence) and it's all finished.

Mounted.

 

[Racer 1966]

What else you got up your sleeve before you declare it done?
Looks like you're running out of real estate in there. :yes:

 

[Lessen]

It gets worse.

I'm currently working on mounting all of the telemetry sensors. Motor temperature, battery voltage, lap timing trigger and speed (this will be setup to show actual motor rpm).

I wasn't thinking ahead when I did my soldering work the other day because earlier I realized that I needed to break down my ESC power leads because it did not occur to me at the time to add the telemetry sensor leads to the plug when I initially assembled it. It's all good now, although I hate doing double work... especially soldering. I'll get a couple more shots up when the wiring is 100% complete. Then it's just a matter of painting the lid.

 

[ohmygahitscoby]

Everything looks great Lessen! Keep up the good work. Can't wait to see the lid.

 

[Lessen]

Build Complete - Time for paint

Well here she is in all of her naked glory. I know that looks like a birds nest of wires but there's A LOT of stuff there. You can see in a couple places I used the coils that were already ran as routes for other lines. I ran the voltage line through the ESC/RX coil and coiled the telemetry module lead around the other lines to get to the Rx. I also ran the temperature probe wire through the RPM sensor wire coil since it was on it's way back to the motor anyways. Enough chat, see for yourself...

BUILD COMPLETE! (almost)

 

[Lessen]

The homestretch..

Time to give it the right look. Kind of dark but I didn't want to much reflection off the clear lexan.

 

[Rolex]

Impressive work. I'll make note of the wire "braiding" for any of my future projects. I'm looking forward to another great paint job.