My Gen 7 "Family Truckster" Build

[CT Yankee]

I picked up a Gen 7 Sport last week as my first long wheelbase crawler.






Right away, I added a roof rack with lights, LEDs in the bumpers, swapped in a Spektrum receiver for my DX5C, and put on a deans plug for my LiPo packs.

[CT Yankee]

The look of this truck with the wood paneling just reminds of the Family Truckster from National Lampoon's Vacation, so that is how I refer to it.

I swapped the tires over to some aluminum beadlocks I had and did some testing at home.







Headed out to RC Madness with a few friends to check out their outdoor crawler course and give the truck a good test. I was very happy with its abilities, but frustrated with the weak plastic C hubs.

[CT Yankee]

My friend has spare aluminum C hubs from his Axial SCX10 that fit perfect with some slight adjustments.



That stopped all the extra flexing that was causing the dogbone to pop out which would over stress the plastic and break it. Since I also managed to finally strip a tranny gear in my Ascender, I swapped the Hyrax tires and heavy duty beadlocks onto the Truckster. This turned the truck into an absolute crawling monster.







I trimmed the front bumper to match the body width and clear the large tires, and also swapped in a 20kg metal gear digital servo.

[Jim85IROC]

Nice truck! One of your next mods should be to swap in a set of CV axles into the front, and to replace the plastic lockers with metal. Once you swap the CV axles into the front, you can do the free steering mods to increase your steering. Since the new trucks are shipping with high steer knuckles already, you basically just need a longer servo arm to take advantage of the extra steering.

[CT Yankee]

The new trucks already have all the steering you can get out of the truck. I was rubbing the lower arms with the stock tires right out of the box. Also, my CVA's should be here next week.

[Jim85IROC]

Originally Posted by CT Yankee

The new trucks already have all the steering you can get out of the truck. I was rubbing the lower arms with the stock tires right out of the box. Also, my CVA's should be here next week.

That would explain why everybody is breaking the C-hubs. The dogbones can't turn anywhere near that far. Even the CVAs start to bind before the tires hit the shocks and/or arms.

[CT Yankee]

Snapped the abused dogbone at a competition today, but luckily the CVA's arrived yesterday ahead of schedule. Swapped them in and also noticed that my wheels weren't sliding all the way onto the axles, so drilled them out to fit correctly.


Notice the wheel stock hex is not seated completely in the wheel


Much better