The blue beetle build - a Buffalo with Beams!

[TooOldForThis]

Long after I decided monster trucks are cooler than crawlers and sold most of mine off, Proline went and released their I-Beam conversion kit for the SCX10 platform. I had been praying to the RC gods to bless us with an I-Beam truck, so starting a new project around this kit absolutely had to happen. Being a Gmade fanboy, I knew there were many similarities between the Axial SCX10 II and the Gmade GS02, so with no old Axials to convert that's the route we're going. Adventure!

Meet the Gmade Buffalo GS02F; we're looking at the box art because this particular truck will never exist as intended.




And ta-da, the assembled chassis. This thread will just be a short build review but stay tuned for some details about the advantages/disadvantages of using the GS02F chassis.

[JatoTheRipper]

Nice! Very cool you put the I-beam kit on something other than an SCX10 II.

[TooOldForThis]

Everything at the front of the chassis bolted right up, very easy. The Proline kit re-uses your steering knuckles, and the Gmade knuckles were a tight fit on the suspension arms, but you can make up for it by sanding down the knuckle bushings. Or you could get fancy and buy aluminum Axial knuckles as upgrades, but that's not necessary.

Things got slightly more interesting at the rear, but it still wasn't bad. Gmade's frame rails are further apart than Axial's in the rear to make room for Gmade's cantilever suspension on the BOM. This meant using spacers and longer screws on the six mounting points for Proline's battery box to make up the distance. I used plastic spacers from my priceless collection of RC junk.




Lastly, the hole spacing at the middle of the chassis is different, so Proline's forward mounts for the trailing arms didn't bolt up perfectly. I trimmed off the front of the Proline mounts and got creative with a screw coming down from above. It's solid, but you could probably come up with something better.

[Speedy-Triple]

nice build so far ... I dig what you are doing and that body will look cool with the beam kit under it. watching for some interesting updates.

[TooOldForThis]

Originally Posted by JatoTheRipper

Nice! Very cool you put the I-beam kit on something other than an SCX10 II.

Thanks, I think we're gonna see a lot of creative uses of this Proline kit.

So on to the positives and negatives of this application. The biggest negative is the forward-mounted motor of the GS02F. For prerunner-style trucks you want a rearward weight bias to help float the front over bumps, so this Gmade layout is not an improvement when compared to Axial's center-mounted motor.



(Side note: I'd like to see someone put the Proline kit on an Axial chassis and mount the steering servo towards the rear somewhere and rig up a long link link to the front, just to make the front as light as possible.)


The biggest positive is the gear ratios of the GS02F. It comes with a 2 speed transmission and first gear is pointless, but second gear is HIGH. I'm running the biggest pinion that will fit (15 tooth), and with a simple 27T silver can brushed motor it's pretty quick on 3S. I would estimate 15 mph or more - enough to have some scale fun with a truck like this. Contrast this with the much lower gearing of an Axial, which from what I understand requires a fast brushless motor to get it moving.

[TooOldForThis]

Originally Posted by Speedy-Triple

that body will look cool with the beam kit under it

I bet you're right!

...but someone else will have to do it because I decided to save the Gmade Blazer body for an LMT I'm building. Instead, we're gonna go with the Proline 12.3" Beetle body









If a straight axle under the back of a Volkswagen is wrong, I don't wanna be right

[TooOldForThis]

So a few tips:

First, with minimal hacking the front bumper from a Kyosho Outlaw Rampage can be made to fit. That bumper also has a skid plate (not pictured) that really suits the prerunner style, but I left it off for now because you can see more of the Beams without it.






Next, a CEN swaybar is just barely wide enough to fit the rear, and I imagine the narrower Axial frame width would fit even better. This swaybar came off a CEN B50 monster truck, but I think the same thing is used on the CEN Ford F-450 trucks as well. IMO these CEN swaybars are a much nicer design than the bent coathanger style used on Axial's SMT10 and such.







Finally, these wheels are dirt cheap 1.9" steel Injora beadlocks, available all over in a bunch of fun colors. They have a ridiculous offset that really widens the stance, which helps when you're sliding a top-heavy truck around sideways (although if you want the tires to tuck inside the fenders, these will probably be too wide even with a wider body).

Oh and speaking of sliding sideways, honorable mention goes to adding a cheap gyro. I see some guys building these I-beam kits with an open diff for more traction, but a gyro makes it controllable even with a locked rear. And drifting is fun!!!

[Ballistic17]

Awesome looking build. Love the bug body.

[smog]

Yup, looks ready to tear through some dunes. Nice job!

Sent from my SM-G990W using Tapatalk

[themountain]

Originally Posted by TooOldForThis

.... just to make the front as light as possible....

Why would you want that..??

[bgredjeep]

Originally Posted by themountain

Why would you want that..??

Because it's not a crawler any more. It's a 2wd prerunner.

[B-MOW71]

Yelp, the Beetle Bug body did it for me! This build looks awesome and just another reason why I' going to have to build one of these I-Beam fun rigs!

I like everything about this. The cheapy wheels fit the look well.

I'm interested in hearing and seeing how it does out on the dirt!

Oh and I almost forgot to mention the rough looking paint job. Perfection!

[TooOldForThis]

Thanks for the kind words guys

I think these RC4WD 1.9 Sand Thrasher tires would be perfect for an I-Beam build if you had some sand near you. They appear to be discontinued / hard to find / spendy, so I'm probably not gonna attempt it, but maybe someone else will.



Weird coincidence about the blue and red, I wonder if this picture was floating around my subconscious when I chose my colors

Probably the best tire option is the Kyosho Outlaw Rampage tires. I've already seen someone else do it and it makes a lot of sense because the style is right and they are nice and firm. The Gmade tires don't look bad but honestly they are too soft for this, and the wimpy kit foams don't help.

[TooOldForThis]

Suspension fiddling

See how much less suspension droop the back has compared to the front?



I spent a couple hours screwing around with this. There are two mounting locations for the bottom of the shock on the rear trailing arm, and using the one further away from the axle will give you more travel for a given shock length (pictured is mounted closest to the axle). But to mount it further from the axle you also have to move the upper shock mount forward, which is a problem for me because the shock towers hold the body mounts, and the body holes are already cut. But even after mocking up some brackets to extend forward off the shock towers, if I made it so the rear wheels drooped as much as the front wheels, the rear shocks would run out of up-travel before the axle went all the way up. So I put it all back as it was to maintain a somewhat low CG.

TL;DR: ideally for the rear you would use longer shocks and have the ability to fine-tune the upper shock mounting points. I imagine the same would apply to the Axial platform as well.

[themountain]

Originally Posted by bgredjeep

Because it's not a crawler any more. It's a 2wd prerunner.

Sorry...still makes no sense

[TooOldForThis]

Originally Posted by themountain

Sorry...still makes no sense

When you say it doesn't make sense, I understand you to mean "I don't like it", but just in case I'm wrong and you've never seen high-speed desert racing before:



This is a truck made by Brenthel Industries. They hang a 97 gallon fuel cell and two tires behind the rear axle to keep the truck from landing jumps like a lawn dart at 100+ MPH. The same principle scales down, it's the reason why Proline went through the trouble to include a battery tray that mounts as far back as possible in the Beams kit.

[themountain]

No offense but that is a real world vehicle with a complete different weight bias than a rc car. Do you want to wheelie 90% of the time?? Ok...then that will work..

[TooOldForThis]

Originally Posted by themountain

No offense but that is a real world vehicle with a complete different weight bias than a rc car. Do you want to wheelie 90% of the time?? Ok...then that will work..

The 1:1 doesn't wheelie all the time so neither will the 1:10 if you have a similar weight bias. I've already ran a couple battery packs through it and what do you know, wheelies are not a problem.

I can see you're not actually trying to understand, you just don't like the thing, so how about you stop shitting in my build thread

[bgredjeep]

So what would make sense to you? Enlighten everyone please.

That truck pictured might be 55% (or less) rear biased with a full fuel cell. Why can't a similar distribution work on a 2wd prerunner style rc?

[ferp420]

if you have never experienced sand ether watching cars in the sand up close and personal or driven in the sand I could see not understanding how vehicles handle in the sand

look at dune buggies there rear engined with nothing up front they don't even have front breaks they steer with the cutting breaks when under power the only time the front wheels do anything is when putting around camp