Product Review –RC4WD Straight Axle conversion Text & photos by Troy Morris (Cheapjeep2)

While crawling at my office I took a nasty tumble down a flight of concrete stairs. As you can see by the picture below the rear steering lock out took the full force of the stairs.

As I break something on my TLTs I tend to upgrade them so that particular problem does not happen again. I decided try RC4WDs straight axle shafts (x-0288) and straight axle adapters (x-0005).

The straight shafts replace your current shafts and the adapters replace either your stock TLT axle Cs or your Fat-Rock axle Cs. As already had the Fat-Rock Cs this was a simple conversion with no further modification of the axle. If you have stock plastic axle Cs you’ll need to cut them off and trim the axle with a dremel tool. Here you can see the axles side by side for a comparison.

The shafts are machined quite well and RC4WD reports that they are made of a hardened material so they are suppose to be stronger than stock shafts. The only difficulty I had when assembling the axle was when I was putting the bearings in the adapters. Due to the black coating the fitting is quite tight. I had to use a ball-peen hammer to gently tap the bearings in to the races.  The support for the axles is very solid and it appears with this setup these axles will be much less prone to bending as the stock outer stub shafts are.

The other thing I noticed with setup is that since there are no more stub shafts there is no slop between the rear axles as you get with the stock style setup.  The other item to note is that the straight axle adapters (x-0005) will work with CVDs and stock axles.

I am really please with this setup it is holding up and performing well. If any of you know 666 (aka Patrick) you know he abuses his rigs heavily. He as also been running this setup and has reported no problems.