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Here's a picture of the front suspension.

The wishbone is made of 6mm delrin which seems more than up to the task to handle the suspension duties. Suspension geometry remains unchanged although I added another additional hole in between the stock two holes.

Also made custom shock towers to mount the TRF shocks.




Here's another pic of the truck from a different angle. I probably will alter the shape of the rear-wishbones a tad for both aesthetic and geometry reasons.



Anyone else have good ideas on shortening the Blackfoot 3?

Very nice Work.

6 months since building this and I still haven't gotten round to painting the shell but I did cut a custom chassis that I've been thinking of doing for sometime now.

The objective is to return the wheelbase of this truck back to that of the original Blackfoot so it looks better with the shell. The stock wheelbase just doesn't look right as it is too long.

I previously cut new wishbones to achieve this and although they worked well I always thought aesthetically they always looked a tad off.

So a custom chassis was designed and cut... here's the truck with the new chassis and how the wheels fit better under the body. I took almost 40mm off the wheelbase.




One of the challenges in shortening the wheelbase with a new chassis was where to put the battery as it sat snugly between the front and rear gearbox assemblies. I don't know why I didn't see it before but it recently occurred to me that the front "gearbox" (actually it's a 2WD so it's just a casing to hold the front suspension assembly together) had a sloping rear surface... it was perfect to locate a battery there without raising the center of gravity too much.




So off to work on Autocad and the result is the battery neatly placed just above the front "gearbox" casing. While I suspect the slanted-battery-look may not work for everyone, I actually think it's quite unique!




Here's a pic of the suspension towers which allow the mounting of 4" buggy shocks. I run the TRF tamiya dampers. There are multiple upper mount positions for tuning.




Here's a pic of the chassis from the top. The chassis was also designed so the stock body mounts could be used without drilling new holes in the body. So what we have is a shortened chassis that fits snugly under the original shell without hassle.




One more pic of the truck. I'll be doing up the hard shell and also a lexan shell for bashing. It currently sports a 8.5T brushless motor so I suspect it should have some nice power and speed.




I like the idea of having a "modernized" vintage-inspired basher... let me know what you think!

Painted, "decal-ed" and "driver-ed"...

very nice work!

Very nice work on the chassis. what wheels are those I have never seen them before.

Beautiful! That's what Tamiya should have built.

bearrickster wrote:Very nice work on the chassis. what wheels are those I have never seen them before.

Thanks. Those are wheels from a Thunder Tiger truck. I think it was called the SSK. They were reasonably cheap and came pre-glued... even the tires looked pretty close to the ones on the Tamiya trucks. Actually the tires perform quite well compared to the stockers as they are softer and come with foam inserts.

Here's a pic I googled...

I was cracking my brain thinking of a way of cutting new wishbones to narrow the wheelbase of the truck... which needed new dogbones, etc...

then it dawned on me that a simple wheel swap could do just that!

Here's the Blackfoot, now it's dimensions are very very close to that of the original!



Now to paint up a lexan basher shell!

Took the truck out for a spin on the local offroad track and I was all smiles!