Wreck it Sideways

Techweek, time to put my chassis in the picture.

Last summer I bought a Tamiya TA05 Eagle Racing conversion for testing. I’ve been trying it on several meetings and demo’s since, but it couldn’t convince me to retire my former chassis which is a HPI Pro4.

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The Pro4 was my competition chassis througout 2010/2011. In this past one and a half year I drove it with much pleasure because it was perfoming very consistant.

Up untill the Mega Drift Battles at the end of last year I never thought my Eagle could give me the pleasure the Pro4 gave me. Tijs convinced me to give the Eagle a try on this Battle day, and guess what…., I ended up on second place that day!

Now proven it has potential I decided to use the Eagle as my new competition chassis.

Let me start by showing you how I started out with the chassis and how I modded it to fit to my standards.

This is why I’ve chosen this chassis, it has 45+ degrees steering angle!

I didn’t modify it to zero ackermann, because I’ve never had any problems using the original setting.

Speaking about original…. The Tamiya CVD’s can’t cope with such amounts of angle, so they had to be changed to TA02W universal shafts. It was a bit of an expensive mod, but they’ve proven to be very reliable. Thanks to Tijs for the tip!

Front view with the Eagle one way diff.

Because I’ve been expirimenting with Countersteer for about a year now, I gave the Eagle a CS conversion with an overdrive of +/-30%. I’m afraid more overdrive is just not suitable for me yet..

Center drivetrain with an Eagle 18T pulley that drives the rear belt, and a Tamiya 16T center oneway pulley that drives the belt to the front.
At the rear I used a 32T TA04 pulley fitted to the differential. This gives me a total of 27% overdrive.

When I bought the chassis I’d also bought some parts that I found important.
-TRF hardcoated dampers, using a soft setup in the front and a harder setup in the rear.
-Eagle Racing alloy bulkheads to add the extra blue..And offcourse more stiffness.

During the build there were two problems that occurred.
The first one was the most irritating one…..
My Speedpassion Sportsman 9.5T seemed to be too big to fit in motormount, so I had to space the whole chassis from its lowerdeck to fit the motor, as you can see below.

The second problem is the quality of the screws Eagle uses. After tightening them a couple of times they just didn’t fit the screwdriver anymore, so I had to replace all of them. But as always, when I buy a new chassis, I also buy a complete new set of screws from ‘RCScrewz’, so this problem was fixed in no-time.

The start of the 2012 RC drift season has begun and, with the first practiceday coming up, I wanted to try some new parts. Today I installed an original Tamiya TA05 oneway diff to see if it adds a rougher handbrake to the car.
One the left side the new original diff, and on the right side the one I’ve used since the beginning, an Eagle TA05 imitation oneway, which has done it’s job quite well ’till now.

I’ve aplied modeltrain grease to the outdrives for a smoother run. Modeltrain grease is very thick, so it sticks to the joints quite well.

These have been my mods to the chassis so far.

Next up;
– Exchanging the 3racing suspension mounts for original Tamiya mounts
– Exchanging my current motor setup to a Hobbywing Xtremestock with a Speedpassion V3 10.5T to add turbo timing
– Try and find the right spur/pinion combination for a more powerfull car.

Speclist:

Wheel Offset
Front: 7mm
Rear: 7mm