This is the home of my Truck model. I've owned it for about 2 months now, and drive it almost every day. It's a Tamiya 1:10 scale King Blackfoot, which is a rear wheel drive off-road monster pick-up truck. Mine is fitted with proper bearings, which I got at the same time as the kit, and a Schumacher electronic speed control. I often drive it round the University campus, in particular a car park which has a very dusty surface - you can tell when I've been driving the truck around there! :-) I once took the truck mud plugging, which was one of the messiest experiences of my life... The pictures show the truck mud plugging through a ditch at the edge of the University site. Unfortunately the pictures are not too clear...
The truck runs extremely well, depending how fast I drive it I can get about half an hour of running out of each of the two 1500mAh 7.2V batteries I have for it. Out on the dusty car park I can get a good 10 to 15 minutes of high speed running around per battery, which is good for something like this.
Tips for anyone thinking of getting a King Blackfoot
These tips are based on my personal experience with the kit.
First of all, buy some bearings for the kit at the same time as you buy the kit. The bearings reduce friction by a huge amount and also will not wear out if you look after them, unlike the kit's standard nylon bearings. Also, if you buy and install them straight away, it will save you having to take the model apart if you decide to install them at a later date.
Second tip is to modify the front suspension mounts. Parts X6 for the front shock absorbers should be modified, otherwise when compressed they will be pressed against their mountings on parts F2 and F3. This jams the front suspension in the compressed position and screws up the suspension geometry. The solution is to carefully file part of X6 off, so that there is plenty of clearance between it and F2/3. Go slowly, don't file it too thin, and test fit it regularly against F2/3 to see when it fits. If I can get hold of a camera with a decent close-up focus on it I'll take a photo of how I modified mine and post it here.
Third tip is to modify the steering. This mod is covered on the RCMT network board and is only possible if you use an electronic speed control, which I would recommend as they are far more efficient at low speed than a mechanical speed controller. The modification goes as follows. Ignore the first two parts of step 9 of the instructions and keep the parts. Look on sprue A for part no. 8 and cut it off the sprue. Fit part 8 in the chassis where the grey assembly goes in the third part of step 9. Buy yourself a servo saver for the steering servo, it must be the type with a rectangular grid of 6 holes on the output arm.
Continue assembly as per the instructions up to stage 16, except do not fit the steering rods in step 15. Fit the steering servo centrally in the chassis the opposite way round to how the instructions show it, ie with the output near the front of the chassis, not the middle. Fit parts MB13 and MB17 from stage 9 to your servo saver, in the same way as they're fitted to part E3 in stage 9. Fit the servo saver to the steering servo with the saver pointing towards thew front of the chassis, and fit the steering arms as per stage 15.
OK it sounds complicated, but really it's quite simple and will make the steering a lot less wobbly. It'll still wobble in reverse, due to the suspension geometry or something, but going forward you should be able to get it to run dead straight.
© Hairy Steve July 2K+1