Dusting off an old but modded Clod.

[DavidH]

In '87, when these came out, I just had to have one. Watching the factory guys at a display at a car show blast around a temporary dirt track was really cool.

Now that my son is old enough to do the maintenance and repair of hobby-grade RCs, I have handed over to him my old Clod (among others) that I have had on the shelf for all these years. The truck has seen little use in the last 20 years, usually just to bash around in the first snowfalls.

Back to 1987: out of the box the truck needed some work, and as things broke, I set to modifying it more to my liking, starting with the full bearing set. Bearings were expensive back then.

As the control arm pivots broke out of the frame, I cut the centre out and replaced it with an aluminum pan, but raised the lower mounting points up (or lowered the upper chassis mounts down) to allow the use of standard (for the time) "long" shocks.



This also allowed for a lot more articulation than the factory chassis with its travel-limited "shocks".



In combination of the (lowered on the chassis) Bolink Lexan Camaro body, this greatly lowered overall COG so the truck was no longer tippy, and light enough that only one spring at each corner was necessary. 8 lbs being 'light' for a Clod, lol.

As the c-clips holding the pistons in the shocks were not up to the task of bashing, I made one shock at each corner into a travel limiter using the shock "piston-shafts" from the original kit. The other four are oil-filled.

As I no longer used the hard body, I reversed the chassis, which moved the battery rearwards, taking the weight off of the admittedly sad steering system.

To fix the steering, I bought the latest (at the time) Futaba 3 channel radio with the rear-steering mix feature and two mini servos; the mini servos were installed in parallel to control the front steering, and a larger servo in the rear for the back tires. Now the truck could handle and steer (almost) like a buggy. The amount of rear-steer can be dialed in as needed. You could even dial in a bit of in-phase steering (1989 Honda Prelude 4WS anyone?) if you wanted to.





To add a bit of power and keep the runtime up, I used the Trinity forward and reversed motors developed for dual motor trucks (fixed cans with optimized timing) wired in parallel.

My son refreshed and repaired all of the shocks, and we took it out the other day, and found that the rear (reversed) motor is low on power, and that it really can't crawl much without locked diffs, so this will be a winter project, along with upgrades to allow it to use our new LiPo batteries.

We have spare motors, and my son is painting up a spare body (I bought three back in the day, but only painted the yellow one shown, and it is pretty banged up).

The old Clod next to my son's new Summit. Some advancements have been made in 20 years.

[DavidH]

Pictured here next to the recently purchased Summit.



Just for fun, I took the Clod out to onto the rocks to see if it still performed like I remember it.

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