i bought a stealth recently off ebay that had a hydra put on it along with an extra stealth hydra shaft. when i got it i gave it a spin an was like "wow". as trashed as the outdrives were i figured it would be toast, but it spun real good. i'm taking it apart and was suprised to see this:
shame the oudrives are wasted. did a company make these? they look to me like a custom job but i dunno for sure.
i kinda feel like just cleaning them all and just filing down the ugly on the outdrives. they'd be goin' in a shelf queen anyway and i cant help but feel like they at least deserve a worthy home. i'm a sucker for the feelings of inanimate objects.
are they aluminum? if they are, they might be made by irs. i have a set in one of mine, but i don't recall them having the countersinks by the diff ring.
They look like titanium maybe. Aluminum or titanium outdrives take a beating in anything other than stock class. That happens when the driver does not get off of the throttle over jumps, too.
We see that kind of thing a lot in modified DO racing. I have a set of aluminums on my TC3 that are coming off soon that look worse than that.
Do you have anymore info on the titanium outdrives? Can you still get them? I've never seen them, but I would think they would be a lot harder than stock?
I would be surprised if it would be Titanium. In my experience Titanium (at least grade 6AL-4V, which is an armor grade) is pretty dang good stuff. I know that RC manufacturers probably don't use armor grade, prob more like pot-metal stuff in the Titanium world. It is not as ductile as Alumium and there should be a significant difference in weight, Titanium is much lighter and much harder. Also it almost looks like Stainless, at least has the same hue about it. There would be one good way to tell, take a Dremel or grinder to it...... if it throughs a ton of yellow sparks, then it is Titanium. The armor grade stuff gives quite a spark show.
All I know is I would like to get some titanium outdrives for my GT. Hoopty's outdrive above looks like a finely machined piece of art compared to some of the ones that have come off my trucks.
There are plenty of companies who make pretty decent titanium alloy driveline parts. None that I know of for older diffs, like the original Stealth, though Dynotech did make some pretty trick little ti (3Al-2.5V) parts, IIRC.
I know 6Al-4V ti is used quite a bit in the cycling industry, too. That stuff is out there, and used more than you'd think in R/C driveline areas, and nuts & bolts.
Worn out drives like that look like poorly heat treated tool steel, but if they are old, old steel pieces usually show some sign of oxidation. My initial guess was a low-grade ti alloy but now that I am looking at them, you wouldn't drill-lighten them if they were titanium.
Neat pieces, regardless. Don't think I have ever seen anyone drill lighten diff outdrives like that. Not sure if I have ever seen steel outdrives that mangled, either. I wonder what the dogbones/CVDs looked like?
The outdrives shown in the picture were made by a company called Barracuda from 1993-1995. They produced the outdrives for both the Stealth and Losi XX transmission. I have a pair for the Stealth transmission and they are in fact made of Titanium. They retailed for $69.99-79.99 US and were targeted for high-end racers and were supposed to be used only for the big events as they lasted between 2-6 runs depending if you were running stock or modified. Unfortunatley they never took off here in Australia for a few reasons (price, durability and many racers found that the super light outdrives actually made their cars twitchy/nervous compared to the stock heavier outdrives) but I remember reading that they were used with great success in the U.S. by oval racers. Hope this helps.
This is my first post and I hope I can contribute in any way possible to this great forum.
i was wondering if barracuda made them last night, but i couldn't find anything on them.
here's a quick tip, if ya knock the pin out of the dogbone, and replace it with weedwacker line, they'll last much longer. this way the line will wear out, not the outdrive. plus, weedwacker line is cheap.
