Sub-zero's Wraith Spawn building blog

[sub-zero123]

Hello all!! I've been out of the crawling scene for almost 7 years, but I've decided to feed the hobby addict in me and take the plunge. My area is heavily into scale crawling and trailing.

After doing a hefty amount of internet research and pouring over the threads on here, I'v decided to go with the Axial Wraith Spawn kit. I was looking at the RTR initially, but then found out that the kit version offers a few more performance upgrades and since I was going to be replacing the stock radio with a 3 channel (for dig), that's the route I took.

I placed all of my orders for the kit and the various upgrades that I'll be doing at the time of the build a couple days ago. Now for the hard part, waiting on deliveries. lol

I've decided to upgrade a few key parts right off the bat, for example:
Pit Bull 2.2 Rock Beast II tires
Alloy beadlock rims (vanquish knockoffs)
C.I. Double Deuce foams
Axial AE-5 ESC
Holmes Hobbies 35T Torque Master motor
Steel pinion and spur gears
Lipo 2s batt
Castle Creations BEC
Axial Dig unit
Tactic TTX300 with programable 3rd channel (for the dig unit)
Hitech steering servo (@ 200 oz. torque i believe)
Custom shark bite rings from Motoworx racing
Team Associated police light bar

That's all of the upgrades for now, but I'm sure that more be coming in the near future, as budget allows.

I really like the panels that come with the Wraith RTR, but since I went with the kit version, I'll be using the full size body. I have plans for that as well. I'm going with a zombie response vehicle theme, I'll be adding headlights and a police style light bar with flashing red and blue strobes.

The paint job for the body is going to be something that I've never tried before, but I got the idea from a fellow poster here on this forum. I'm going to paint the inside of the clear lexan body in a red oxide (rust color), then paint the outside of the body in a brushed steel color, and finally paint over the brushed steel with white. The idea is that this truck will be scraping and scratching on the rocks constantly, the first scrapes will eat through the white paint exposing the bare metal color below, and then even further scrapes will show the rust color under the clear lexan. I'm hoping that over time the truck will become more and more "realistic" looking in appearance using this method.

That's about all for now, but I'll be posting progress pics as the build goes...