Some thoughts on 'Big Bird'

The purpose of this post is to have a look at someone else's approach towards converting a 1/6 scale New Bright Hummer H2 truck into something better than it previously was. This owner, known only as vsci79, has elected to construct a new custom made (sub-) chassis made from aluminium, and has attached this to the main floorplate of the existing truck. His design utilises swaybars which act as paired lower links attaching to the bottoms of the gearboxes, and a more conventional pair of upper links which then correctly constrain the movement of the tops of each of the same gearboxes.

There is a whole thread pretty much solely devoted to this work here at the Scale 4X4 R/C website with very good photos, just a few of which I have taken the liberty of reproduced below (with the usual apologies for not asking permission, and thanks for posting them there).


The first image shows the completed truck side-on. The new chassis is clearly visible below the truck. This design doesn't steal quite as much ground clearance as it appears to do here because the original truck had a large plastic box-like piece of sub-structure here, which added considerable rigidity to the rest of the floorpan, whilst also locating the front steering arms (etc) and clamping the rear trailing arm assembly into position.

The second picture shows the new custom chassis, this is constructed from what looks to be either 5/16 or 8mm square aluminium bar, along with a number of standard Axial AX10 green anodised upper links and/or crossmembers, these being identical parts in any case.

The third photo shows the mounting location of the new chassis and gives good idea of the truck's new wider overall track/width. Extra green crossmembers appear to have been added beyond those shown in the other images, almost certainly for extra rigidity.

The fourth and last picture gives a slightly better view of the new chassis in its new position. My only real criticism of this design approach is that this chassis directly attaches to the relatively flimsy brittle (and easily crackable) floorplate. In fact this particular floorplate is actually much stronger than mine, because the detailed version of the truck has the seat bases and other interior detail moulded into it, whereas my undetailed version has a much flatter profile (the 'cleaner bottom' mentioned in the last post) as well as a couple of fairly large holes in it.

What I don't want to do here is to directly copy someone else's ideas, which in any case might not necessarily work as well given the differences between the two versions of the truck. My next post, coming up fairly directly, will consider the original construction of my own New Bright H2.