Monster Truck Madness – Building the TLR Tuned LMT

Hey all and Happy Thursday!

I wanted to share where I’m at with my TLR Tuned Losi LMT kit and share some overall build impressions thus far.

In my 30+ years in the hobby, I’ve somehow never built a Losi kit before. Kinda wild when I think about that, but it’s true!

The instructions are nicely laid out, and each step of the build has everything enclosed in pertinent bags. Each piece of hardware needed has a scale to size drawing in each step, and this is very nice to use when pieces of hardware can be similar in size to each other.

The fit and finish of the carbon fiber chassis is absolutely trick. I had thought about painting it with a faint candy red to match my eventual paint scheme, but got spooked because the CF just looks too good to mess with IMO.

I did paint the four link bars in Tamiya TS Red, with no primer. I should’ve primed it first as the feint gray on the machined links took a lot of red to get the color to pop. The end result looked good though!

A note on the diffs- I actually did not fill mine with 100k oil as is included and recommended by Losi. I used Cow RC Udder Butter as a grease. The reason being is like I my front and rear diffs open for racing purposes and I feel the truck just handles better like this (my RTR version has open diffs with no oil), but it’s all personal preference (hey, that’s why you build a kit!).

A couple tips for those of you building one of these-

• Open up every baggy for a given lettered step and arrange things this way.  Once you complete a lettered step totally, do this with the next one. Some hardware is split in different baggies and it can be a bit confusing otherwise. This alleviates that.
• Make sure the hex driver you are using is a good one with no rounding off of the tip, as several of the chassis screws will put up good resistance as you thread them in, and you don’t wanna strip a screw. I was using an old wrench and found this out the hard way.

Alright, back to the building and (soon) painting!

April 2nd is my first race day of 2023 so the truck will need to complete by then. Full report and build details after that!