Budget WPL C24 Build

[WhiteHound]

New to the forum, so let's dive in!

I originally posted this build and ongoing modifications to the Scale4x4RC forums so if you're a member over there you might have seen it already. I'll be copying and pasting most of the first few posts over.

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Welcome to my super budget WPL C24 build.

Some of you old-timers might remember my teenaged misadventures with a purple, and then yellow, balsa wood bodied, tummy tucked TL01 Range Rover. And then I tried to build an electric 1/5th scale baja truck from my old Savage 21. And a few other things. Back in the days when everyone got super excited about the TLT announcement - finally a scale front axle! Man things have changed.

Anyway, ten years down the line I now have a partner, a dog, and a mortgage so I have to keep things cheap and simple. Can you get much cheaper than a WPL?! I also have a Helion 1/18th truggy thing from which I'll be stealing the electrics (ESC/receiver/servo combo plus battery) and any other parts which seem appealing.

General plans are to keep it as scale as possible, paint it up as realistically as possible with some weathering, and try to make it as capable as possible with suspension articulation directed mods.

You all know how a WPL goes together so I won't bore you with that. My first issue was with the stock shocks binding up almost immediately. So I nicked the shocks off the Helion truggy thing and got to work. The rear shocks went on pretty simply:



At some point I want to go back and go with a separate spring/shock to add to the realism a little. Articulation is reasonable enough for a "scale" truck:



The front end had me stumped for a while. I didn't want the shocks leaning like they are in the back because live axle trucks definitely don't have that setup up front. Plus there's no room to do it the same way that I did in the rear anyway. So I whipped up these brackets (actually they're version three or four, but I got there in the end) which juuuust about squeeze the front shock mount between the axle and the drag link:



You can see them a little better here. They simply bolt under the screws holding the axle halves together. I might make a new bracket one one side at some point to incorporate a panhard rod mount and switch to three link front suspension. I also want to switch the knuckle that the drag link goes to to make it longer. Should be able to entirely eliminate bump steer and make the steering much more responsive, but I'll hold on that for now. I also hate hate hate the reverse Ackermann steering geometry which is something that seems to plague a ton of live axle RC trucks. Like, I get it, it's cheaper and simpler to set them up that way. It just looks awful at full lock. Again at some point I want to reverse the steering knuckles and run the drag link behind the front axle (correcting the Ackermann geometry), and fabricate an arm in front of the knuckle to run the drag link to.



The shock top mount aint pretty but she'll do for now. I'll whip up something a bit more elegant further down the line. I just want to get the damn thing running first!



So after four or five hours of hiding in my garden shed multiple evenings after work I have a running chassis! The rest of it should go together in an hour now, it was the suspension fab that slowed me up. Really looking forward to putting a battery through her before tearing everything back down to paint and weather.



In the meantime, did anyone else have problems with the diff and pinion binding in the axles? I'm having the same problem front and rear. With the screws holding the pinion carrier to the pumpkin fully cinched down the axle will barely turn. It's like the pinion carrier needs to be shimmed back away from the axle case to give me a little gear lash. Any ideas?

Cheers guys, I hope you enjoy my foray back into RC!

[TheSubaruJunkie]

did anyone else have problems with the diff and pinion binding in the axles? I'm having the same problem front and rear. With the screws holding the pinion carrier to the pumpkin fully cinched down the axle will barely turn. It's like the pinion carrier needs to be shimmed back away from the axle case to give me a little gear lash. Any ideas?

Yes. I had the same problem. I had to take the screws that hold the diff cover on, and back them off about 1/2 a turn each. This gave the gears enough space to spin freely.