Losing grip – New shocks for the rocks

G’day folks! No physics lesson today, but an update on my heavily upgraded SCX24. A wonderful little car it is, suitable for indoors, capable enough for outdoors, small enough to fit in a backpack with room to spare for coffee and biscuits. A lot of bang for the buck, and durable too – it hardly weighs anything, and it certainly doesn’t jump forty feet into the air. Two ingredients that makes for longevity.

As it comes, it doesn’t really need any immediate upgrades, but we all love upgrading even if we don’t need it. In this case, I was lucky to have amainhobbies supply me with both a car and a heap of hop ups, altogether making quite a difference. Also adding quite a lot of weight to it. While bronze knuckles and wheels doesn’t change how the suspension works, the larger motor, servo and such certainly do. My SCX have been sitting heavy, the original suspension not quite able to handle all the added weight.

A shout out to amain has seen this problem fixed. A set of aluminum shocks from Hot Racing arrived in record time (thanks!) and then spent two weeks on the shelf, with me first skiing and then sneezing.

Now I’m back, I’m fine, and they’re mounted and looking ace. Mounting them was a breeze. They’re friction dampers, so only needed a tiny amount of silicon oil for smoother movement. They come with soft and hard springs, the hard ones being the obvious choice for me. My SCX24 now not only sits higher, but moves smoother than before too. I might have been able to get a smoother movement with the original shocks just by greasing the shock shafts, but seeing as the main problem with them was that they couldn’t carry all the added weight, I never bothered. But should you have an SCX24 without a couple of ounces of upgrades above the axles, I think you should consider a tiny amount of diff grease on the shafts.

Come to think of it, a friend of mine has a 5-year old kid who got an SCX24 a while ago, on my recommendation. He brought it along last time they visited and we had some fun on the rocks with it, but suspension movement was rather jerky. Next time he comes by, I’ll grease the shocks for him.

PS. Did you see the Losi Hammer Rey? Awesome! I told you there was an IFS shaped hole in reality. Brian, you need make someone send one this way.

To read another column, hit the link. Want to drop me a line? martin at bigsquidrc.com