u/lethally_fluffy

Water and glue 3:1 ratio in a spray bottle. Soak everything down, dump on the dirt, soak everything down again. Once it's dry, I can start making it pretty.

Starting to wear out my drop cloth/aluminum tape crawler coarse so I'm working on something a bit more durable now. Would've made a lot more progress, but I didn't realize this was all the spray foam you get out of one can 🥴. It's gonna have three panels plus the base for obstacles and one panel that's going to be a parking lot for repairs. The real challenge is making sure it can all still fold up. Trying to keep it as cheap or cheaper than the drop cloth coarse. So far I'm about $6 in. Another can or two of the spray foam, some Elmer's glue, and a few handfuls of dirt should do it.

Got these little wooden boxes for about $1 a piece at the dollar tree. Pulled off the little latch it came with and made my own handles out of some picture wire, craft sticks, and spare servo horns. Slapped on a paint job and glued some bb's to the bottom so that I can stick them down with magnets.

Pics in the comments show how to find the cog using the string method. I'm excited to get it out on some rocks and see if it actually helps me keep it planted at weird angles. Theoretically I'll be able to work out the rollover point on any given obstacles just by looking at it.

It's an emax servo same as the steering servo on my hauler. The servo on the hauler has a custom wiring harness that lets it get power straight from the battery so I just put in a y- splitter and glued it to the bed of the hauler. The hoist connects to that with a servo extender that shows away when not in use. It's surprisingly strong, but still mostly just for looks.

Now I have a toolbox to hold some scale accessories and an extra battery, magnets to hold the toolbox in place, a hoist to load/unload the toolbox, a badge winch to load up and tie down the crawler, and a battery charger. Now I just carry a small tool pouch in my pocket, a controller in each hand, and I've got all I need.

This is Kermit, my hauler/recovery truck. It started out as a spare parts build as I upgraded my gladiator. It's been made into several different combinations. I had a body printed for it, did a bit of painting and glued down some popsicle stick floorboards. I made a trailer for my crawler and ran that setup for a while with brushed motors. Then my dog ate the bed and the trailer broke so I took apart the hauler, grabbed a brushless motor and built a racer. The racer was a lot of fun, but it was going through metal spur gears like they were disposable and I hit the performance limits pretty quickly. Maybe eventually I'll get a losi micro or a drift car. Anyway now it has the printed truck cab, the trailer got recycled into a flatbed, a new homemade trailer, and the brushless motor doesn't even feel the weight.

This whole process got me thinking, which is more fun, building a capable crawler, or getting creative and turning a rtr crawler into something else entirely like a hauler or a racer? I probably put an equal amount of time and thought into both.

I know there are bumper requirements, but the rampcrab chassis doesn't really lend itself to chassis mounted bumpers, so this one is just glued to the body. It's got an emax servo, a brushless motor with portal axles and a bit of weight in the wheels. Pretty much everything else is a stock gladiator. This is my tow pig/spare parts build so I don't really plan on competing with it, but I like having some parameters to build towards. Makes the build more of a challenge imo.

I made a wiring harness to run my servos directly off the battery bypassing the esc. I'm using two emax 12g high voltage servos. From what I've read, they're supposed to be able to handle 8.4 volts. I'm using the injora T6 tx/rx. The plan is to plug the front servo into ch1 and the rear servo into ch6 so I can use a little knob to work the rear independently. The wiring harness will let me run the positive straight from the servos to the battery and a ground from the Rx to the battery. I ran them both to a single jst plug. My esc uses the ph2.0 and the batteries I use have a jst lead and a ph2.0 lead. So I should be able to plug the esc into the ph2.0 lead and the servo harness into the jst lead and it should all work right?

And this is with a low battery

Fun spare parts basher/trail build. Would a 4700kv motor increase my top speed? Thinking about grabbing a cheap one, if I can find one with a 3mm shaft that I can put a big ass pinion on. This is a 2400kv motor with a .5 mod 22t pinion, 33% overdrive rear, on 2s. I would need a new esc to run 3s.

Injora buggy on gladiator wheelbase. Front links are actually the lowers moved to the top and two steering arms working as double bend lower links for better articulation and stretched the front about half an inch. 58mm shocks stuffed up into custom shock towers in the front. Aluminum front axle, 4ws with the stock front axle on the back. Overdrive diff gears up front. All powered by the goup 2204 brushless motor and esc. Eventually I want to upgrade from these emax servos to something stronger, get some cvd axle shafts to get rid of these dog bones, maybe a paint job and some more lights. But for now, she's a killer. Gonna post some videos as soon as I get a chance to hit the rocks.

I have a tackle box at home for my main building and repairs, but these are perfect to stick in my pocket when I hit the trails