99 Cherokee XJ Build

[Bizboy]

Hey everyone!

I've been browsing the RCC forums for about a year now, and back a couple months in November I thought "Hey I'm on this site enough that I might as well register". Now, after ghosting for almost a year looking at everyone's sick build threads and scale accessories, I'm thinking I might as well post up my own build. Hopefully Ill help, inspire, and/or entertain someone and hey, I might learn a thing or two myself. 8)

Anyway, without further ado, Here is my (very) slow build. I hope you all like it so far and please let me know your suggestions, they are greatly appreciated. :mrgreen:

I started with this:

After one whole Sunday spent in the dark, cold confines of my garage neglecting to take build pictures, I ended up with this.

Of Course I hadn't purchased the electronics or the paint for the body yet because I rushed on getting the kit :mrgreen: after a few days I got the body all painted and the electronics installed. At this point I went for cheap just to get it running so I went with this stuff:

Traxxas waterproof servo
Traxxas 21t titan 550
traxxas tqi with receiver
Holmes Hobbies torquemaster brxl (awesome BTW)
Venom 2s lipo 4000 mah

Then I ran it with some friends a bit at work during our lunch breaks. Here is some footage that was taken with a go pro 2 Axial Wraith Lunch Break 1 - YouTube After this and some of my own escapades I think I caught the scale bug. :ror: I went out into the back yard and took some rocks inside, washed them off and set them up on my old tv and posed my dingo on it :mrgreen:

I guess ill stop this post here for now since im playing catch up to where I am today. All the above happened before I registered here :roll: but just to give a quick teaser...

Thanks for looking!

 

[Bizboy]

Alright some more progress in catching up. I got the body taped off and painted to try and match my actual Cherokee's paint. The Tamiya paint I used isn't quite spot on but it was the best I could do at the time.

After I got it trimmed and installed it was time to take it out for a spin.

Alright now that I've finally gotten the body sorted out next I had to change up those wheels. Bring on the arthritis!

Some Rc4wd Baja Claws finish up those fantastic VP wheels IMO. However, because the Baja Claws are significantly larger than the ripsaws, mini jeeps flex is limited by the tire hitting the body.

That was about as far as it would flex until the rear tire came off the ground. Some trimming of the fenders do the trick although I'm sad to see them go. But I guess that just means that Ill have to make some custom ones in the future since my goal for this build is to make it mostly street legal yet still perform well. ;-)

 

[redjeeper]

Looks good!

 

[Bizboy]

Once the new tires were on I took little jeep out on the rocks again.

Now however, I had a dilemma. I had started out with the battery in the rear then moved it to the front for a while and finally moved it to the back again this time I went out. Overall I decided I liked the weight balance of it in the front but it drove me mad that all of the electronics were covered up and inaccessible. So I thought a little bit and looked at the chassis for a while and came up with this:

Its not very clean but it moves all the electronics into one place and it was super easy to fab up. All I did was measure and cut a piece of plastic I had laying around then mark and drill holes into it that lined up with the stock rear battery mounting screw holes. Then I threaded in some screws I had lying around and epoxied my receiver and plastidipped light controller on it. For the ESC I just shaved a little off of a zip tie so it would fit between two rows of cooling fins.

After the electronics relocation, I started on my first metal fab/brazing project; a front bumper. Ill be the first to admit that it looks like :shock: (in a bad way) but hey you have to start somewhere right?

Then I got the headlights in. For the actual headlight buckets I decided to try my hand at styrene. I got some measurements and made a little box then found some thin shiny metal (no idea what it is) and cut some strips out to line the inside. After that I drilled some holes into the back and inserted the lights. Keeping the LED's in, is another story entirely but I started out just using the little plastic part that goes on the back of the axial buckets. (As of the time of this writing the lights have been disconnected for quite a while do to some glue errors, and mounting failures but I've got an idea on how to fix it.)

Lastly I attempted making a fender flare out of styrene but my design was intentionally not very strong so I have yet to come up with a new design.

From this point to the present not much has changed. I de-glued the ripsaws from the stock wheels and gave them another try only to be surprised that they performed 10 times better than the Baja Claws and my body has started ripping in a few areas due to the light buckets i made. Other than that the only thing that has happened in the RC side of my life, is that I bought my dad a Ridgecrest for Christmas and since then I've been making some videos with my dad. You can find those here: https://www.youtube.com/user/EdgeRacingRC?feature=mhee

Now for the future...
I've started to turn towards the scale side of crawling and after a little bit of thinking ive come up with a list of things I would like to see on my little Jeep.

- A Uni body design (has anyone done that before?)
- A hard body (metal or plastic? what do you guys think?)
- An interior of course ;-)
- A full mock engine
- Fender wells
- leaf sprung rear
- separate coil and shock front
- front engine mount
- usage of an actual T-case instead of the hybrid trans/t-case
- VP Currie axles or maybe the normal ones (again what do you guys think?)
- Proline 1.9 super swampers
- Actual nice looking front and rear bumpers, and rock sliders
- Metal roof rack
- Tons of lights
- Winch
- Last but not least an a$$ load of scale accessories

I'm not quite sure on the axles because I want my little Jeep to be a scale version of my big jeep and on my big Jeep I'm planning on getting these bad boys http://www.dynatrac.com/products/jk/ProRock60.html but the currie axles just look so realistic.



Ive got a lot of work to do...

 

[Bizboy]

Looks good!

Thanks!

 

[scxscaler]

Nice. I turned my honcho into a jeep to but mine is red.What i want to do to mine is almost the same as yours but not as detailed.

 

[Bizboy]

Nice. I turned my honcho into a jeep to but mine is red.What i want to do to mine is almost the same as yours but not as detailed.

Nice! Keep at it! "thumbsup"