When it arrived it looked like this .
Looked good but after some study I found a couple of problems , the outer bearing seat one the axle for the rear chain sprocket was half broken away
the previous owner had just glued the bearing in 
, the second thing was more minor , the rear upper shock mounts on the chassis were intact but had white stress marks around them 
.This obviously led to a complete strip down to check it all over , there were no other problems but my mind was turning now , I 3D printed a repair piece for the gearbox bearing seat and ordered a replacement from Shapeways .
The stress marks on the shock mounts was something I'd already thought of a fix for , I drilled right through the mount and chassis behind both sides , M3 tapped the holes and fed a piece of M3 studding through both mounts .
This should reinforce the shock mounts nicely . Once I'd done that it dawned on me that I'd started preparing it to drive without even thinking about it
The next weak point to address was the other major fragile spot in the car , the rear gearbox mountings , you often see them with either broken mountings on the chassis or shattered gearboxes , there are a few reasons for this , firstly the bottom of the gearbox is lower than the chassis and likely to be hit and secondly the back of the gearbox is where the heatsink and mounting for the resistor for the mechanical speed controller sits , this heatsink structure is ridged and any rear impact will be passed through the heatsink and straight into the gearbox .
So this is what i came up with .
Its 2mm Kydex , it smooths the under gearbox area so it won't catch impacts and I added a rear bumper to cushion rear impacts .
Although the original tires were in nice shape they had hardened , the previous owner had thankfully only very lightly glued them on , enough for the shelf so they were easy enough to remove without damaging them , I replaced them with some Kyosho Optima RE RE tires .
I'm now waiting on a set of ball bearings and it should be good to go .
