A Tamiya Clodbuster is a fantastic monster truck, but it’s handling leaves something to be desired. It tumbles over at the slightest turn and the stock all wheel steering setup mostly results in the back steering more than the front. To mitigate the tumbling I decided to install a 4 link suspension kit and ended up buying a CPE 4-Clod set.

This set by itself can’t be mounted on a stock Clodbuster chassis, but CPE’s website clearly states what you need to completely assemble the set. The bag in the top left of the picture are the additionally required parts and the other object is a program card for the brushless speed controllers I have mounted in the Clodbuster chassis to replace the original brushed ESC.

There were no instructions including in the set, so the first thing to do is figure out how to attach the links to the chassis. Turns out it’s not that hard. First thing to do is figure out what’s needed to attach the link to the chassis.

The bolts and nuts are not included. I used standard M3 bolts and nuts.

After a little while I had the lower links attached to the chassis like this.

On the inside of the chassis sits a little metal plate where the stock ball ends were screwed into. This plate has M3 screw holes in it, so the bolts drive into it nicely and make sure the links are held tightly in place.

The upper links are slightly more difficult to put and keep in place.

Here it’s necessary to screw the nuts on the bolts to keep it in place, but there is very little room to do so. But as you can see I made it and now all links are securely attached to the chassis.

After that I mounted the stock shocks to the upper links using the clamps from one of the additional parts bags.

The bolts that came with these clamps were American M3 hex bolts and those are not compatible with standard European M3 hex drivers, so I replaced those with the same M3 bolts I was using for mounting the links.

The upper links can then be attached to the C-hub on the Clodbuster axle. The lower links, however, cannot. For the lower links a hole has to be made in each C-hub to mirror the holes that are already there. After a while it looked like this.

With both axles mounted it turned out that the stock steering link is a bit too short for this suspension setup.

But this problem is solved by mounting a larger servo horn at a 45 degree angle. For now the end result looks like this.

No Comments »

Just like I’ve added some lights to my Sand Viper, I’ve now added some lights to my newly acquired Clod. This, however, is a little different.

The Clod’s standard body has light buckets in it’s front, but no other light buckets. The original (fake) light bar on it’s top broke off after an unfortunate roll and has been replaced by a functional light bar with 5 leds. The light buckets have been equipped with leds that came with the light unit that I have installed inside the body.

The head lights actually burn at just 50% when idle or reversing, but light up to 100% when going forward.

As you can see, these pictures where taken before the body was mounted on the chassis.

The unit also provides functional signal lights and brake lights.

Unfortunately the body does not have light buckets other than the head lights, so I just drilled some holes to fit the leds in at the right spots.

These pictures don’t quite give the full effect, so I’ll be recording a short video soon and post that as well. Stay tuned.

No Comments »

Only recently I have driven my first ever RC race and I drove it with my Corally CCT chassis. However, at the time I didn’t have a body for it, but fortunately I could borrow an old body from a friend so I could still enter the competition. This body, however, was for a Corally C10 and not for a CCT, so it was quite a bit too wide and it looked kind weird, but it was still cool that I could use it for this race.

Now it’s different. It took some time to arrive, but finally I got the body I wanted for my CCT. A HPI Saleen S7R 190mm body unpainted. I painted it red and black using the same red paint as on the body of my Tamiya TA-05ifs. But instead of coating the body with white coating paint, I sprayed the entire thing over with black making the red tint much darker. It’s now nearly brown and I think it looks pretty great. I also got the limited version of the Saleen S7R body with 3D headlight buckets. The manual actually gives you the choice to simply paint the entire body and put on the normal headlight stickers to finish it, or you can cover the headlights with the headlight covers to prevent paint from getting there, then paint the headlight buckets and apply stickers on that and then put those inside the body. I chose the last option and I must say that it looks really great. Much better than just your normal headlight stickers. These headlights are true colour and 3D, just like fish. Even the CCT’s standard wheels look quite good, beit a bit small, under the body. So here are some pics.

1 Comment »

I know I haven’t been posting a lot and that while I really want to post more… There is simply so many things that have more priority than bloggin, but anyway, I have some time on my hands now, so I thougth that I’d post something about my website stats.

Against all my expectations, the number of visitors keeps growing even when I don’t post in weeks. Allthough the numbers aren’t shocking by any means, ther is a positive line visible in the number of unique visitors that come to my website eacht month:

When looking at march this year, I can conclude that monday, tuesday and wednesday and the most busy days as where saturday and sunday fall behind. The average number of visitors each day was around 63 which isn’t all too bad for just a personal blog site:

Other stats aren’t really surprising, like most visits originate from the USA and the most used operating system is Windows, followed by MAC OS which is then followed by the various Linux distributions and even FreeBSD pops into the list. Fedora is the most used Linux distribution to visit my site, followed by unkown distributions (that means, distributions that aren’t recognized by the statistics software) and the last distribution that lifts itself above 0.1% is Ubuntu Linux with 0.2%. Debian Linux is also in the list, but with 0% because the software rounds of at 1 decimal and it doesn’t reach 0.1%.

Also the used browsers don’t surprise me, first place is Microsoft Internet Explorer with 52.9%, second is Mozilla Firefox with 34.7, third is Opera with 6.9% and fourth is Safari (MAC browser) with 4%. 0.6% of the used browsers isn’t recognized. Netscape is being used by 0.3% of my visitors and Mozilla is the last one with a usage above 0.1%. Some other browsers that people were using, but not even reached 0.1% are Galeon, Konqueror, OmniWeb, LibWWW and K-Meleon. I believe all of these are Linux browsers.

Now when I get the time to post more often, I hope to see the upward curve continue in the future.

No Comments »

I have a few updates planned for the near future and I’m actually planning on posting a little more often in the future. But as before, I do need stuff to write about if I’m going to post anything and that stuff to write about appears lacking to say the least. Anyway, that’s not what this short post is about.

Ever since I moved to the .eu domain from the .us domain, the site has been partially broken. It was untill about 2 weeks ago that I noticed that something was wrong. Images on older posts were not showing up and I noticed that the links to them were wrong. They were referring to directories that didn’t exist or the relative links were broken.

I have now fixed all those broken links and all should be ok now. Except for 4 posts. 4 posts still contain pictures that aren’t showing up, but that’s because they are simply missing. I should have them around somewher, probably on SlashDev, but I currently have access only to Centurion.

Which brings to even another points… I still have to make a page for Centurion and edit the pages for SlashDev and Tiger…

No Comments »

Hello world! Welcome to my brandnew site!

As of today my new domain www.pingwing.eu has been registered and activated. It’s not that I really need my own domain or something, but my former host (www.wordpress.com) was a little too restricting. Having your own domain and hosting area grants you access to a level of customization that wordpress.com doesn’t.
Read the rest of this entry »

2 Comments »