Monster makeover part I

The Nikko Monster has had a bit of a clean-up, and the chassis has now been reassembled. I've given it a good condition RS540SH motor in place of the old rusty one, and performed all the necessary lubing duties.

A little bit of research shows the body to be a fairly good representation of a 1983-and-a-half year model Toyota truck, known as the Hilux in most of the world, but referred to as a Mojave in the USA.

For the time being I'm just going to rebuild it using most of the original parts. I'll leave off the superfluous exhaust pipes and the empty 'spare wheel' cover, and try to give it a military hue. The main jobs to do beyond repainting the body are to fill the hole in the bonnet, make a new headlight grille, and do something with the rather over-sized front bumper.

An interim minor-monster project...

Although work on the new Clod crawler continues at its own pace, I fancied having a go at doing-up another 1/10 truck in the meantime. I watched a fair few go through 't Bay, and even bid on a couple which I thought might go cheaply. In the end I won this one in a one-bidder auction, for the princely sum of 99p.

It's a mostly-intact Nikko 'The Monster', dating back to (I think) the early-mid 1990's. It's fairly complete, missing only its headlight grille and its bonnet 'blower' cover. It didn't come with a controller (which doesn't matter - see below), but it did still have its original instruction manual, which was still tucked away in a little compartment in its original but well-used box.

As trucks like this go, this one wasn't too bad in its day. It had a normal 27Mhz AM radio system with changeable crystals, a circuit board capable of running the RS540 silver can motor that powered it, carried a regular stick pack, and had a pretty good turning circle. A lot of the rest was of plain toy-grade construction, but it did sport a fairly nicely-made plastic hard-body resembling a generic Japanese 2-door pick-up truck.

Being as I have a transmitter that works with it, I was able to test it as soon as it got here. Although it was in a fairly well-used condition as received, I was pleased that it ran properly as soon as I powered it up. A subsequent strip-down soon after this revealed no major damage to anything, and showed all the moving parts to be in pretty good condition.

So - potentially a neat little project - and in a way a small Christmas present to myself - just to do a tidy-up job, really. In their day, these were just cheaper versions of something like a Tamiya Brat. And some Brats ended up looking very (very) nice indeed.