Silver Case

1. Added lateral stablizer to my Axial Scorpion battery holder. Also countersunk the screws so the battery plate is flush
2. Custom-shortened electronics control wires on my Axial Scorpion. Resoldered and heat-shrunk them.
3. Replaced the Perfex radio in my Kyosho DST with a Tamiya. Now I can conmmand all my vehicles with my Tamiya controller.
4. Stripped and cleaned the crappy electrical switch on my Kyosho DST
5. Finished wood-puttying and re-painting my Den of Spies cabinet

RC cars have massive vibration issues. I’ve lost handfuls of screws to vibration. Of coursae I try to use loc-tite when I can, but stuff still escapes.

Kyosho parts tick-list

Thankfully Kyosho is Japanese, so I was able to download a full parts list of every bit of hardware used in their entire line of RC vehicles. I simply took it to Poey Huat hardware and said, “I want twenty of everything you have in this list.”

Bargain

The next day I went back and collected 150$ worth of screws. Exluding some sizes of E-Rings (snap rings) I have practically every screw I could need for any RC car in the forseeable future. It’s impossibly cheaper than buying it from a hobby shop too.

It was a great feeling, for instance, today to say, “I lost the exhaust manifold screw” and then walk over to retrieve exactly what I needed, a 3×25 hex cap screw. Bingo!

Now the problem is how to nicely store all this hardare without commingling it

I lost another drive shaft from my Kyosho DST Stadium truck. It just vanished. Presumably it had been bent mildly at some point which gave it enough wiggle room when I was driving it hard and maybe other things had loosened? (three screws had vibrated out of the undercarriage on that session [I have bought some loctite blue 424 to remedy that]).

Anyway, in inspecting the damage and looking for further problems the rear drive transmission seemed very stiff and full of friction. I couldn’t see anything clearly long, so I started disassembling the system looking for the culprit. I began with the rear differential. I almost immediately found the problem. One of the bearings was >80% shot. I could feel that it was full of grit and sand.

Dead bearing BRG008 Kyosho

Good grief. Replacement bearings are just over $15/two. And clearly they’re not sealed very well, because I ruined them after several water-dunks. Although I bought replacement Kyosho-brand bearings this time, for the future I am going to find a “normal” bearing supply shop, because these things (I think they’re 10/5 mm od/id) seem to be absolutely common sorts of bearings. Like the screws, it’s far cheaper to find them in the real world.

Any advice on buying bearings that can put up with a lot of sand/dirt/water/spilledFuel conditions?

Two days ago my steering servo died. Totally locked up. Immutable.

I had a spare Futaba servo, so I replaced the Kyosho/Perfex steering throttle with the Futaba.

Then today, my throttle was behaving really erratically. Working normally, then suddenly locked into a speed and I had no control over it. I eliminated possibilities like the transmitter and receiver.

But I don’t have any more spare servos, so I had to tear it apart.

Shorts eliminated?

I thought I was zeroing down to a gear problem when I realized that the pitch/angle I was holding the servo at was affecting the servo. Then I looked hard at the three wires feeding the pc board and realized it was very easy for them to intermittently short each other out. So I’ve done a crude job and resoldered them to the board with shorter, hopefully short-free leads. Would be nice if that solved the problem.

I just sprayed the living daylights out of this servo with electrical contact cleaner. Maybe it will remove this scum?

But prognosis is poor on this patient

The frozen steering throttle may be permanently dead. It is covered in a crusty white chalky film. Either from too much submersion in water or in nitromethane from one of my two major fuel tank ruptures. Going forward, I should seal up the wire-hole on these servos with RTV. That’s how the majority of the liquid encroaches. It’s hard to get past the servo horn on top.