Axle/Hex question for you Mad Torque owners

[DeoreDX]

I was thinking about getting a Mad Torque for a build I want to do. I have a 1/6th New Bright Raptor I want to stick on top of a Mad Torque. I'm not planning on any serious crawling with this thing, the Raptor is my 5yo son's and it's pretty useless other than looking cool. It's just gathering dust now that he has his Traxxas Slash SVT Raptor.




The long wheelbase is perfect but the 14" width is a little wide for what I need. I've seen many a build adapting different hexes with less offset to the axle. How narrow do you think I can get the axel setup with a different hex? Do you think 12-12.5" is possible with a hex change?

Next thing was I was wanting smaller tires to minimize how much of the body I have to cut away for tire clearance. The 17mm hex makes it difficult to get a smaller tire without using a stadium truck or SCT tire. I looked at the spare parts available to get an idea of how the axel is constructed since there isn't a parts diagram available online that I have seen. The picture of working end of the axel in the spare parts page looks like this, threaded at the end:


Axles

But when you look at spare hexes that part number looks like it comes with new axels and the end of the axel is unthreaded like this:


Wheel axles (green)

Was your axel threaded or unthreaded? If it is threaded I think I can easily drop down to a 12mm hex that opens up wheel and tire options for me.

[2WheelFlyer]

Took some pics of mine for you, the axle is NOT threaded. If you wanted to fit a bigger wheel I think you can fit the 23mm. hex from the Maxtone 8 but smaller? Personally, I would not detract from the capability of the Mad Torque by putting smaller wheels, I'd rather trim the fenders on the Raptor body. You could just limit the articulation so the tires don't hit the fenders. Also, with a smaller wheel you risk that the tie rod end will hit the edge of the rim, depending on what pieces you use, and you will lose a lot of ground clearance at the gearcase. A smaller tire will have more torque multiplication and could be hard to modulate the traction, and you will lose top speed as well. Soon your kid will want to start banging it harder and then... you will want to go back to bigger tires.

[Crawl in Az]

Wow, that is a lot to cover, let's see if I can make all the stuff in my head make sense... Here's my go at it:

Yes I think you can narrow the width by about 1.5"

Originally Posted by DeoreDX

How narrow do you think I can get the axel setup with a different hex? Do you think 12-12.5" is possible with a hex change?

The stock hub hex pushes the hex out about 20mm.



By using a Traxxas E-Revo Hub you can narrow the total width by about 1.5" inches. (The E Revo hux hub ID necks down to fit the stub axle which is 5mm) Most standard 17mm scale Hub hexes are 8mm ID.

**** In order to go this route you will need to make a 3mm spacer between the Revo hex and the wheel bearing to keep the wheel bearing in the knuckle. (my spacer is orange and silver in the pic above)




Hex to hex with the Revo Hubs will be about 10.5"

Originally Posted by DeoreDX

Was your axel threaded or unthreaded? If it is threaded I think I can easily drop down to a 12mm hex that opens up wheel and tire options for me.

No the stock axle is not threaded. The threaded hex looks to be for the 1/10 scale Mad Crawler, and the non threaded are for the 1/8 scale Mad Torque. The gear boxes, tubes and knuckles all look the same so I think you will be good to change to this stub axle. Not sure if you will have to do a spacer I mentioned above, but probably not if you use their 12mm hex.


Last part to keep in mind though is going to a smaller wheel. You may have clearance issues with the drag link and tie rod ends if your wheel is too deep. The stock wheel is real deep and measures 2.5" on the ID of the wheel and slightly smaller where the ring bolts on.



The Tie rod hits the wheel when bolted to the outer hole of the steering knuckle. Out of curiosity I moved the drag link to the inner hole on the knuckle and it still rubs. If you didn't have the beadlock the setup would barely clear, but not sure about the other side where the tierod and drag link stack on the knuckle....




Hope I didn't over complicate it. Good luck!!!

[DeoreDX]

Thanks for the great info both of you guys. It's exactly what I needed to figure out if i can use the Mad Torque.

Here is a front view of the new bright on the stock New Bright chassis. The wheels are right at 6" in diameter and just a bit over 13" wide. I'm not so much concerned with speed or crawling performance, the Dingo and the Slash fill those gaps. I'm more concerned with just making this build look as good as possible, not a true scaler but I do want to get it to more lifelike dimensions. YOu guys did give me enough info to know that I think I'm confident I will be able to work with the MT. Now that I know some dimensions and have great info on how the MT is build I'm pretty confident I can come up with something that will work. Now it will be getting the MT on the table and getting the body on it so I can figure out what I want to do with it. I do know that after I get the chassis on the body the next thing I will probably do is go with a lower turn motor to get a little more wheel speed out of the smaller tires. Not sure if the ESC can handle two lower turn motors on 2S so I'm wanting to go with a dual ESC setup when I change the motors.