RC10Talk - The Net's Largest Vintage R/C Community

I finally got mine on Friday but not sure when I'm going to build it as we have 2 to 3 more months of winter and no indoor tracks to run it! Plus I was thinking of rocking the rere Worlds Car at club racing, so we shall see!

Nice to see the captured cva pins and the large hub bearings. They should not blow out as easy! I think Serpent started the captured pin thing back in the 90's if I remember?

Why did you have to remove all the black coating from the hinge pins? Did they bind that much? Also, I got the square Reedy pack, is there an advantage to running this over a saddle or shorty? One other question! Do you think I could run pinned rear B4 wheels instead of the hex?

My front inner hinge pins were binding... Even without the coating... I ended up just removing the coating from all of them at that point because I didn't want to have to stop what I was doing to have to do it... I didn't have to mess around with any of the other hinge pins though.

I was trying to think of when serpent started using CVA style bones.... I think it might have been as late as the 950R and that was around 2001-2 or so... I know my Vektor, Veteq and Excel all had regular dog bones... No idea what the old school Serpent off road buggy used. Kyosho 1/8 onroad cars may have been doing it before but I never had one of those until the 2005-2007 World Spec Evolva and it definitely had them.

You might be able to run pinned wheels... I'll take a look at that tomorrow.

Most people around here are running shorty packs because they already had them and square packs seem to be hard to come by. I'm going to run shorty's till I can get a square pack whenever that may be.

SMC is going to have a square pack for sale for a fraction of the price of the Reedy.

On rctech, someone posted a pic of a chassis that has already been broken. Crazy.

ya but person on rctech admitted to getting loose and running into a pole. not AE's fault

... among other crazy things at Craigslist, um, I mean RCtech...

Wouldn't polishing the pins smooth out suspension movement. Although minimal the black oxide coating isn't the most of friction reducing coatings.

In the early B4 series AE wanted the pins tight in certain compnents like the castor blocks and rear hubs.

With every B4 kit I owned, the first thing I did was remove that black coating from all the hinge pins. Usually didn't have any problems with them binding after that. Its the reason I did it with this build because I thought right away I was going to encounter the same problem.

I wouldn't see any need for arms to not move freely. The B4 got better after the suspension started getting a little sloppy.

I'm not saying they don't want the arms moving freely, but rather they pins tight in the castor blacks so they rotated in the arms instead of rotating in the blocks. Why I don't know.

They wear out quickly in the castor blocks. There is more stress at that point then on the arms.

But if you have binding... anywhere, that is going to put more stress on the plastic that surrounds the hinge pin. It increases your chance of breakage because it cannot move the way it should.

popboy905 wrote:ya but person on rctech admitted to getting loose and running into a pole. not AE's fault

I didn't blame AE for it. I was just pointing out that someone already broke a chassis.

Did you finish the build yet? Impressions of the car?

Not to steal the thunder but add input.

I built my kit just as the box stated except went 2.5 heavier oil in the front. The castors have the option of being built, trailing, center and forward. Built mine trailing just as the instructions stated and had huge problems with pushing in mid and exit. absolutely no on-power steering. made some adjustments such as moving the shorty pack forward and changed the castors to center. It fixed 80% of the problem but still could use some more fine tuning.

My track is a medium bite, loamy surface which could be the reason the trailing setup did not work.

Overall the kit went together easy and the car was fairly easy to drive, even when it was pushing. Don't mind the red motor wire since I was out of black.

Seabass wrote:Don't mind the red motor wire since I was out of black.

Totally gonna hold it against you!

Jake, what is this "loamy surface" you speak of?


Hey guys, snow is still a @#$% here, so I will not be driving mine for a few months. I would like to know what spare parts I need to keep in my track box?

Just so I can pre order them!