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Thread: The Maxx Project - Pt. 2

 
 
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Old 11-08-2022, 09:14 AM   #1
I wanna be Dave
 
Join Date: Sep 2011
Location: Douglassville, PA
Posts: 4,030
Default The Maxx Project - Pt. 2

Crawling has gotten too easy.... you can just walk into a hobby shop, plunk down some money and walk out with a very capable machine.

Remember back in the day when people were out hitting the trails with whatever they had? There were some funky builds/conversions back then - I call it the TLT era since that's what kicked it of for me.

Anyway, I don't really post builds anymore, my SCX/TRX/Enduro/Marlins are pretty much just like anyone else's. I do like to post out of the ordinary stuff though, and I think this counts. I've been strolling down memory lane a lot lately, and am on a Maxx kick. Not the new Maxx, heavens no. I'm talking 1999 Maxx's, which I've discovered are dirt cheap and all over the place. I've been messing with a 1/5(ish) conversion, just restored a 1999 Pro .15 for fun as it was my favorite nitro of all time, and picked up a third to scratch some of the trail/crawl itch that came up when working on the other two. I picked up the last 2 trucks, fully complete, for all of $240. Not bad.

So anyway, taking full advantage of the "Maxx" Crawlers section on this site, let's build something! It's been a few weeks of "let's throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks" and I've been wrenching on a little of everything. I debated tearing my 1/5 down and rebuilding it closer to standard size, but what fun is that. Enter this filthy animal... late 2000 T-Maxx 2.5 with literally a pound of dirt on it. Anything nitro realted and usable will be stripped off and thrown in my spares pile for the nitro truck, and the rest? Well hells bells, lets get started.

As it arrived. Complete sans radio and utterly and completely filthy. "Nitro grime" is just nasty, this thing was caked so bad, it actually dyed the grey plastics shades of brown. I've never ever let my trucks get this nasty. My wife would never let me bring it into the house!




Tore it all down and gave it all a good long soak and scrub. Turns out that under the muck everything was in pretty good condition - a few bent screws in the bumpers and two bent hingepins, but all in all in pretty good shape. I was debating on a flat chassis, but I wanted to keep a higher breakover, so I bent up a steel plate roughly into the same shape as the lower chassis supports.


A cheap $20 3 gear trans will work, and hopefully bring down the gearing into the trail/crawl zone. I decided to flip it, and it took a little drilling to get the input shaft facing the right direction. I used an old axial mount plate ilo the stock one since it is directional. Gave the gears a good coat of R&T and mounted it pretty much in the center of the chassis. Used the stock spur for now with the smallest pinion I could find, I'm thinking some 32p gears are in my future eventually.



A bit of head scratching trying to get the 5mm outputs to mauch up with the 6mm inputs on the diffs. The stock traxxas trans outputs are 5mm, but they are so big they rubbed the spur. Not to mention I wanted a bigger spur eventually. After some thought, I realized I could jam in pede shafts to the old maxx shafts. So a dab of CA and some press fitting and I've got hybrid shafts. They feel super strong, but we'll see how they hold up.



For the upper chassis, I initially tried to use the nitro chassis... hacked out s spot for the transmission and it all fit - but some of the nitro cutouts were right where I needed some mounting locations, so I decided to bite the bullet and make a new one out of 2.5mm 6061.



Much better! Lopped off where the motor and gas tank would be since it was no longer needed.


Keeps the motor as low as possible too, pretty happy with how it came out.


I needed to tie the 2 chassis plates together, so I found some black ABS rod in my stash....cut out some 25mm sections, drilled and mounted. Very happy with how the chassis came together, it's solid as a rock and fairly low CG.


Enough mock up, it's time to assemble for real. Pulled the chassis apart and did some cleanup/speed holes on the upper plate and just painted the steel plate black.


As of right now, I'm waiting on some parts - diff lockers front and rear, as well as some stock driveshafts - the ones on the axle were fairly twisted, so I splured the $6 and ordered now ones.
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