Highlands comp truck

Here are some pics of my new truck for the 2011-2012 comp season. Its still being modded and things changed around but she is getting close to being done. In her shakedown run right off the bench I was able to pull a second place finish for the day only 1 point off of a tie for first. I will post up specs also if anyone is interested.

Is that a axial xr10?

Oh no, no xr10 for me. I am running shaved and modded berg housings. We do have another club member running a set of xr axles on close to the same platform though and he does pretty good with it. I made some custom axles and tubes for the front though so I can run the xr outters and universals on it. I just havent got around to putting them on :.



Mine are the silver ones

Do you have a machine shop, or a lathe?

The ups guy brought me some more goodies for it today. My 2 speedos finally got here and I cant wait to get them in.

I do have a lathe here at home . One of my good buddies owns a nice machine shop and he lets me play when I need to. I do have him run all my production parts for me on his automated machines though to ensure top quality

Are those frames made by you or your friend?  Those axles look custom also.
Those look like Castle Creations parts, but which?

The chassis design is a T1e forward bias with some tweeks. They make a very nice chassis but I wanted a little more out of them. I custom made these ones for me and a buddy here at home. Mine are thinner, lighter, stronger, and have a little bit better link geometry 8). Im gonna cut some out of carbon fiber here soon for my team drivers, and those should be amazingly light weigh. I'm shooting for less than 2oz for the complete frame and skid. The axles have a ton of work into them. I have ran them through the mill to remove some unwanted material and given the whole case a smoothing out. Then i tossed them into the blast cabinet for a nice finish. The escs are actually the castle sc controllers. They are basically the same as a sidewinder and should work good for me. I plan to decase them and solder the 2 of them together in 1 tiny package.

This all sounds expensive.  You have a team?  Are you a company?

Sorry for the delay in really I have been super busy lately and haven't had a lot of internet time. It can get expensive real fast when you build a crawler sometimes. Its not uncommon for guys to drop upwards of $2500 into a full comp setup. I keep my costs lower by doing all my own work and making the majority of my own custom parts. I do a lot of trading and recycling of old parts if I can. When all is said and done with this one it will be less than a grand into it and I can take it anywhere in the nation and be competitive with it. We do have a small team with 4-5 drivers a season on it. Nothing major just a crew of buddies who run  together and all run some of my parts or trucks Ive built for them. This coming season I plan to be a little more serious with the team drivers and set some expectations and requirements though . I have a small bussiness producing various crawling related parts. Currently I only make about a dozen things but have more products coming when funding and time allows. I make everything from frames to wheels and a lot of drive train beefing parts for the axial based crawlers

Are the third and forth pictures for Axial axles?
Where do you sell your parts?

I am a vendor on ORCRC and do most of my selling by word of mouth. i am going to start selling on RCC here shortly also. The pieces you asked about are the long barrel lock out for the Axial axles. They serve a lot of purposes but most notably they keep the ends of the housing from snapping off on heavy trucks or during hard driving. I make a insert tube for the front axle that has adjustable caster. Here is a little video when we were still testing them

http://youtu.be/KWFtk4eax3g

I went looking for you on that website but couldn't find you. I did see they charge $20 per year to be a member. Do you know how many member they have?

I notice that there are still a lot of rock crawlers using brushed motors. I went brushless (Novak, sensored) on my AX10 and I think I have a ton of power and I cannot imaging a brushed motor has more power so what's up?

Power and speed are DEFINATLEY not the needed thing in crawling.  Brushless motors cannot compare to a brushed motors starting power or smoothness of starting, they are getting close but not there yet, second most brushed motors make power much further down than a brushless motor.  Think of it this way, a 600hp smallblock and a 600hp bigblock, the smallblock will make that power from 4000 rpms and up and use less fuel doing it, where the bigblock will make that same power from 1200 rpm up and use twice the fuel doing it, but when your pulling stumps torque down low is what you need.  Sometimes screaming around only gets you in trouble.

I am happy with my brushless system and I am planning to go brushless on my XR10 also.  I saw a bui;d video series by a guy who calls himself "Squirrel" on YouTube and he went with a brushless setup on his XR10 and I liked that setup. I don't remember what motors he used but I think he used Tekin ESCs.

http://www.dorkstarproductions.com/orcrc.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=101
That is the link to my spot in the vendor section. New things come and go and Im working to get a website together to show more stuff. You don't have to be a member on orcrc unless you want to compete in their events or just be a supporting member. Im not sure on the current paid members but there are 1800 users and about 200 paid members.

He used goat 3s systems and 21.5 ballistic motors. That is far from an ideal setup to use on an moa truck though. If you just like to play around and don't really care to much about crawling performance and real technical driving a brushless would be an ok option. Definitely money spent in the wrong direction but it would physically work and make the wheels turn. When it comes to competition driving and true crawling performance brushed is still king of the hill and will be for some time to come. The low end resolution and drag brake characteristics are 2 of the big factors that brushless just hasn't surpassed them on yet. The other drawback to a twin brushless is being forced to run twin speedos. Not all are will to take the dive and expense involved. The larger size and bulkiness of a sensored system makes for a very messy and heavy wiring job also in a world where every gram makes a difference. If you are looking for the best in performance for a moa truck something like  a high quality 5 segment arm in a nice 2 mag can is gonna be the ticket to the best control. Look to motor builders like Brood and Holmes for the ultimate crawling motors .

I am using a Goat 3S and 21.5 brushless in my AX10 with a ton of Vanquish products and MIP stuff.  I like the way it crawls but it's never seen a rock...only pillows, sofas and carpeting ha ha ha.  My girl has a Losi night crawler and I must say those worm gears work better than my center drive.  I get some serious torque twist in my setup and I ALWAYS lift the right front wheel under power forward and the left rear under popwer reverse.  This is why I got a XR10 MOA.

Ya know for pillow crawling and terrorizing the house that is a great combo. It sounds like you have some decent parts there but may have skipped the most important mod ... a frame. From your leg hiking torque twisting description it sounds like the stock frame or similar link geometry is being used. If you don't plan on competing with it there are a lot of little things you can do with the stock frame to make it drive really good and cost very little. The losi axles are pretty sweet. I ran a pair for the last couple seasons in the pr class against moa trucks and managed quite a few wins with them. All in all that was the nicest handling neutral truck I've ever built or driven. I miss that one a little bit.
Here are a couple pics of that one.

On another note I finally got my new front end into a rolling working form. I still have a few things to figure out and clean up but its general layout will be unchanged. It uses a berg center gearbox with custom axle tubes. On the end is axial XR10 knuckles and c's. The inners are going to be the last piece of the puzzle. I just got some 1/2" 4340 in today and will use that to make some new inners. I'm gonna try to press the axial universal apart and make a new inner axle portion the proper length with the berg tang on one end and the other end mate back to the Axial piece. The modded uni should be able to run smooth out past 60deg also



Here is the arms I made to make it all work. They are still being ground on and tuned in but the final will be very similar also.