Introducing TL-01 'Black Truck'

I now have another running (or should I say - crawling) TL-01 truck:




The HPI Wheely King gearbox conversion works fine, although there turned out to be one complication I hadn't foreseen. The mounting holes on the gearbox are not diametrically opposite relative to the output shaft. This means that, as it turns out in practice, the motor shaft is closer to the spur gear by the equivalant of four teeth on the drive pinion.

The effect of this is that with gearbox fitted to the 23 tooth mounting holes on the chassis, the drive meshes perfectly with a 19 tooth pinion fitted to the combined motor and gearbox assembly. This is in fact very good for this particular conversion because it gears the truck down even further.

I did the build with the 'speed tuned' gear set incorporated into the rear gearbox, this combination now gives me very good wheel-speed for the low speed driving that the truck is intended for. This set-up also means that I still have the option of swapping out the speed-tuned set for the standard items if I want to gear it down further again.

The bodyshell comes from a Nikko 'Street Beast' (see picture in sidebar), as found at a car boot sale minus its controller for £1.50. I'm going to need to reinforce the truckbed where the bodyposts come through it because the material is a bit thin here, but otherwise it's a pretty good fit. The wheelbase of the chassis is a bit longer than that of the shell, which possibly spoils the aesthetics slightly, but at least this keeps the whole thing as short as possible to reduce hangups caused by the rear of the body grounding out etc.

I'm also going to need to do something in the front bumper area. The original item locates and retains the 'U' shaped bar which holds the front arms on (on TL-01B Baja's only - narrow track touring car TL-01's have screws here - just like on the back ends of all of them). As it stands the bar is free to completely pull out in a forwards direction if it gets caught up on something whilst driving in reverse. I did though have a pair of Baja chassis end plates kicking about, so these are now mounted on both ends.

(If you haven't come across these bits before (maybe because you've only seen TL-01 cars and they don't have them) they look a bit carbon fibre-ish and they clamp the major chassis/gearbox halves together on the rear of the buggies - they fit the fronts of any TL-01 just the same - if you trawl down the page a bit you can see one in the photo below the one of the cracks - it's lying in the box in front of the chassis.)