ECX Barrage Doomsday - Upgraded budget crawler

[Jim85IROC]

Like a lot of other folks, I jumped on the $99 Barrage Doomsday deal from Horizon. I'd had my eye on the Barrage for a while, but at the $200 price point, I just didn't feel that it was as good of a value as other options. Now that I've pretty much already bought all of those options, the Doomsday deal came along and now here we are.

Right out of the box, the Doomsday had a Mad Max monster truck kind of look that would have really appealed to me if this thing was actually fast enough to be used as a monster truck. Since it's crawler slow, the Mad Max vibe didn't work for me. Driving it was really surprising though. Those rock hard monster truck tires (mounted to short course style wheels) climbed surprisingly well. I've got a dirt hill that very few of my vehicles can get up without a lot of wheel speed. The Doomsday is the only truck I have that got up the hill without that wheel speed. On the rocks the stock tires are less capable, but still more capable than you would expect.

While I Was waiting for new wheels & tires to get here, I wanted to address the awful approach angle with the stock front bumper, as well as to de-Maxify the body.

So, the stock bumpers came off the truck. I liked the rear bumper, and thought that it could make a decent starting point for a new front bumper, but then I'd be left with no rear bumper. Ultimately I decided that the rear bumper was big enough to do both! I cut the bumper in half and reshaped it to match the v-shaped grill on the body. For the other half of the bumper, I flattened it out, transferred the mounting holes, and countersunk them. I'm pretty happy with how the front grill came out, but I'm not totally sold on how the rear bumper looks. It looks like a comb, so I may cut the "teeth" off of it. Time will tell.

To get rid of the Mad Max vibe, I pulled off the side pipes, pulled off the roll bar, and got rid of the window netting. I used side cutters to remove all of the webbing, but kept the frames. I sanded them, and reinstalled. While they were off, I masked and painted the window areas black.

The approach angle with the new bumper was much better, and I think the body looks a lot better too:





The next thing that I did was to re-arrange the electronics, and to upgrade the servo. For the electronics, I moved the ESC/receiver tray to the back where the battery tray was. I mounted the battery tray to the front, but discovered that having the 2nd crossmember in the front interfered with the servo, so I had to try something else. I made an ABS mount that screwed to the factory crossmember, and positioned the stock battery tray behind the shock tower, as low as it could go. It's not as rigid as I'd like, and I may install another crossmember beneath it to make it more rigid, but overall it's working very well.







As you can see in the last pic, I also lowered the body mounts one hole, which required some minor trimming of the posts to prevent interference with the tops of the shocks.

Lastly, the new wheels and tires came. The wheels are very cheap ebay wheels, but I'm pretty fond of how they look. They came with orange anodized beadlock rings, which I hated, so I hit them with some Easy Off oven cleaner, then cleaned them up with steel wool, and painted the oval details with black model paint. I only painted 4 of the rings in case I didn't like them, and honestly, I'm not real fond of it, so next time I have them apart I'll probably flip them around.

The tires are cheap Austar Dick Cepek clones. The tires are nice and soft, but they're not very sticky. I used the foams that came with them. These foams are generally way too soft, but on this light weight vehicle, the tires don't have ANY compression at all, so I think they'll be fine.






For the servo, I robbed the JX 6221 out of my Clone Hammers. Originally I had the stock servo from my Gen7 in it, but that servo died on the first drive. The 6221 has all the power that this little truck should ever need.

I don't have a lot more upgrades planned, but I do have a couple. I need to get substantially softer springs, and lighter shock oil. Eventually I'll want a nicer body, but other than that, I just want to drive it. I'm planning to keep this little truck right in my 1:1 truck so that if I get a few minutes to take it out, I'll have it with me.

[hillbillyrc]

Looks good.

Try some losi mini t rear springs. The top spring cup needs flipped since the mini t springs are a tad short but with that top cup flipped it makes up the difference.

[Jim85IROC]

Thanks for the advice. I was thinking about trying the "pen spring mod" that I've seen some guys on FB do, but I'm concerned that the spring will contact the shock shaft and scratch it up enough to make the shocks leak. Using a more conventional spring would definitely be more appealing to me.

[hillbillyrc]

Not with barrage shocks, but with others I've used pen springs. Its hard finding one that is stiff enough to work well sense the spring is much finer. I found any added weight just collapse the spring. But I was also running them inside as droop. The outside might be a different story.
Maybe an rc4wd internal springs might be enough give and take if that make sense. The stock springs are definitely stiff.

[dacaur]

When I switched the electronics to the rear of my doomsday, I just used one crossmember in the front, and left out the second one (actualy I moved it to the rear after discovering the issue, so that I didnt need any extra hardware to attach the shock mounts, explains why it only has one in the front stock). The battery is attached to the one crossmember in the rear, and sits on top of the frontmost cross member in the front (where the bumper attaches). Gets the battery weight a bit further forward than having it mounted crosswise like that. Of course if both front shocks were to compress, like in landing off a jump, the servo would hit the battery tray, but in crawling, that will never happen, and this thing aint jumping....

I too was amazed at how well the stock tires crawled.... But replaced them with proline bfg ATKO2's....

For bodies, you can get a traxxas stampede body, already painted, for $20 off amazon. Improves the looks 100%. Thats what I did at first. Then I got a proline sumo body, which I think looks even better, downside is its $40 and you have to paint it, plus you need new body posts if you dont want to do a crapton of trimming.

[Jim85IROC]

I can't really get into that Sumo body. I really like the Vaterra C10 body, but I'm too cheap to spend that much. Most likely I'll end up with a Stampede sized Silverado body.

I thought about mounting the battery in the forward position. Like you said, you don't really need that much suspension compression up front, but that puts the battery weight a lot higher, and with it that far forward, switching between larger and smaller batteries will have a huge impact on the truck's balance. Putting it in a more central location will let me run a larger pack without it having a massive change on how the truck drives.

[Jim85IROC]

This past weekend I took the truck out for a crawl in a local rock divider (it's all stones between travelled lanes at the entrance to a local housing development) & drainage ditch. This stuff is too small to be much fun with my Bomber or even my Gen7, but it proved to be perfect for the Barrage.

In addition to the cheap tires mounted to aluminum beadlocks that I have pictured above, I brought a second even cheaper setup with me that just arrived recently. With the tire setup pictured above, grip was pretty poor. It did ok going up larger smooth rocks, but trying to climb through the smaller rocks between lanes, and especially in the sandy, miscellaneous material in the drainage ditches, these tires really struggled.

After a while I popped the cheap ebay wheels/tires on. These are a glue-on style wheel, but the tires aren't glued on. Even like that, these tires surprised me. Performance on large smooth rocks was pretty much the same as the other tires, but over the smaller rocks and in the looser stuff, these tires were fantastic. You could hear the tires gripping the rocks as it crawled lines that the other tires couldn't do without a bunch of wheel speed. The only time I ran into trouble was when they got bound up, and then the tires would slip on the wheels. Honestly, with plastic lockers and no slipper cutch, that's not really a bad thing.

cheap ebay wheels:


I also really like that these wheels have a shallower offset, so the tires tuck in closer to the body. Now I want to find a nice cheap aluminum beadlock with a shallow offset to mount these to!

Here's a link to the wheel/tire combo for anybody that's interested:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/4x-1-9-Rubb...72.m2749.l2649

[Jim85IROC]

Oops, I realized that I forgot to post pics of the Cepek tires and the aluminum wheels. Post 1 updated to add them.

[Jim85IROC]

Wow, I forgot that I made this thread!

I haven't done much with the truck since I posted this, but I did move those cheap ebay tires over to the aluminum beadlocks. The cheap ebay tires bite better than the other tires did, and being a bit more narrow, I like how they look better too.

Recently I travelled to Ventura CA for work, and the Barrage was small enough to fit into my luggage, so I brought it with me. I had a blast using it at the beach, and while I was there I made a rig rundown video along with getting some crawling footage at the beach. I have some pictures from the beach crawl that I'll upload when I get home. Below is the video. In the video if you look carefully, you can see that the right front axle spun in the plastic locker and stripped it.

Edit: For the life of me, I'll never understand why the youtube embed code works sometimes and not other times on this forum.
Direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eo6k5Rz_FFM&t=1s

I actually brought a set of metal lockers with me in order to have something to wrench on in my hotel room, so the night after I shot the video I replaced them in my room.

[Norton]

Just wondering if you know the dimensions of the original tires? Height, width and wheel size.


Thanks.

[WaterfordMan]

Originally Posted by Norton

Just wondering if you know the dimensions of the original tires? Height, width and wheel size.


Thanks.

Norton....I answered your question on the other thread. Let me know if you have any more questions.

Hillbilly's barrage upgrade bible!