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OSRC

And then there were 4! Sent my Ascender off to the great trails of CA and got a nice FJ CR01 in trade. I have a ton of hop up parts sitting around from my other three, finally am able to put them to good use.

This one came pretty much bone stock...I wanted to leave this one as close to stock as possible since I have three now very heavily modified. I wanted to keep the cantilevers, but the amount of play in them drives me nuts, so off they came, along with the springs....that's the only major change. The rest is in the details.

First thing is beefing up Tamiya's weaksauce driveshafts. Since Axial Wild Boar shafts are all but non-existent right now (due to Axial's supply chain debacle) I had to make do with the stockers. I drilled out the male end and sleeved it internally with brass for strength. Then I cut down 2 female sections, glued the male in one and cut down the other so that only a minimum amount of the male shaft was exposed. This should be much stronger than the stock spaghetti shafts. Time will tell!


Apparently the FJ kits came with the luster silver chassis. I would have never bought one as there's no performance benefit, but it does look pretty nice compared to the stock parts. Made some shock towers to match and bolted on some Vaterra shocks. Modded the pistons, limited travel by 10mm, and converted over to single spring. Super smooth!


Mounted up my 3 racing portals..they didn't work well with the aftermarket hubs before, but seem to fit much better on the stock parts. We'll see how they hold up.


Nice shiny bumper to match the chassis, and sleeved the stock tie rods as they were already bent a bit.


Weighted Tamiya rims and new Proline Hammers I've been holding on to. The tamiya wheels just clear the hubs, I've got about 1mm to spare. The challenge with the portals is to find wheels that have enough offset to clear the portals, but not too much that the axles look super wide. I just took this body off my SCX10, and they are a perfect fit for CR01 chassis...


In fact, I already have one. One is Tamiya Copper, the other is Pactra Fiery Orange...not sure which is which anymore, but they both look cool....


Side by side, you can really see how the modded one (right) increases the ground clearance. It's also far lighter! That one goes on the serious trail runs. This one will be for mild trail use and tooling around the backyard...