Just picked up a Venture

[charlesd]

When I saw this truck online, I basically fell in love with it. The body style and layout really caught my eye. The only problem was finding one. They are out of stock everywhere. The one place that has one (RC Mart) has a shipping charge of 120$usd to Canada !! Pretty insane ...

I then talked to my local hobby shop to find out he had one in his personal collection that he ran once in a snow bank. It's brand new !

It's now sitting at home waiting for a few parts I ordered. I'm changing the servo, installing RC crawler links. Because of the price I paid for the (used ) Venture, I also managed to pickup an extra body and an HPI Venture SBK from Ebay. So with my project budget I'll have 2 Ventures !

[M1tch]

Good to hear. Venture is a good driving truck, just a shame it has had a bad history. Hopefully they will be around for a while yet.

[QuesoDelDiablo]

Excellent, welcome to the club!

I love my Venture so much that I bought an SBK just to keep for spare parts...

Sounds like you've already been doing some research so you know that the stock servo is NFG, I'd also strongly suggest you delete the servo saver - I don't know what HPI was thinking when they spec'd a servo saver in a crawler. To do that, you need to shim the servo down in order to maintain the steering geometry - the servo saver stands about 5-7mm higher off the servo than a metal horn. I could send you some printable files for spacers if you want.

The other thing that can be highly beneficial to this rig is moving the battery forward - if you (or anyone you know) has a 3d printer, I designed one that works really well (I sold them for a while and I still believe my design is the best on the market but I'm too lazy to market it), I'd be happy to send you the printable files.

I also strongly recommend aluminum c-hubs and steering knuckles. There's some decent ones on eBay.

Oh yeah, you're in Canada so shipping might not be too insane. If you need those parts I mentioned printed, pm and maybe we can work something out.

[charlesd]

Hi QuesoDelDiablo,

I just sent you a pm.

I'll be using the servo horn that comes with the servo. It's an aluminum servo horn so I'll have to get creative or use the spacers.

Moving the battery tray forward sounds logical.