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My newest Scorpion Project, which shows the attempt at widening the front and give it a bit more strength.

Thanks to gomachv for the rear shockmount

Cool and interesting frontend Dennis

Looks very rugged. Cool

Credit the rear tower to Phin

Looks great Dennis!

Many thanks for the kind words.

gomachv - Okay, I´ll let it slip this time, but next time... I´m going to give You credit

Those front towers are beefier than a quarter pounder with cheese. Does it reduce the clearance between the body/tub and the front towers?

The manufacturers bend on the chassis rails gives too much material on the side of the rail, towards the innerside of the bend.

This causes a small bulge which makes the shockmounts point a tad outwards.

I´ve filed these small bulges of to have a clean mount of my superstructure shockstruts
If I want to run it with original tub and body, I´ll have to space the shockmounts 2-3 mm from the chassis.

Boiled the brass bushings in oil and polished the raw aluminum
I had and old RC10 body, thanks to Lennard, gave it a clean trim line and some Tamiya rattlecan paint.
It´s a pain to find rear rims with the right offset, so these will do for now.

Well done Dennis

DennisM wrote:...

gomachv - Okay, I´ll let it slip this time, but next time... I´m going to give You credit

You had it right the first time. Gomachv deserves the thanks.


How's the shock travel with the rear tower? The original tower came on an Assault I harvested for spares, and when I played around with it I noticed the rear shocks would bind up at about half compression.

Hcp22 wrote:Well done Dennis

Many thanks Lars

Phin wrote:

DennisM wrote:...

gomachv - Okay, I´ll let it slip this time, but next time... I´m going to give You credit

You had it right the first time. Gomachv deserves the thanks.


How's the shock travel with the rear tower? The original tower came on an Assault I harvested for spares, and when I played around with it I noticed the rear shocks would bind up at about half compression.

I´m not having any troubles with binding, it´s quite smooth all the way.
Were You using 12mm CB shocks or 10mm "Ultima/Optima".
How were they mounted? - in front or to the rear of the mount.

Thanks for letting gomachv copy the mount

DennisM wrote:...
I´m not having any troubles with binding, it´s quite smooth all the way.
Were You using 12mm CB shocks or 10mm "Ultima/Optima".
How were they mounted? - in front or to the rear of the mount.

Thanks for letting gomachv copy the mount

Parma shocks...which have the same 8mm bore as the red Ultima/Optima shocks. Had them mounted both at the front and rear of the tower, and though they had better travel when mounted off the back they would still bind up.

The binding is probably something to do with the shocks and not the tower. The Parma rear shock tower for the scorpion mounts the shock tops further inboard than on the RCH tower....could be Parma designed their shocks with that mounting angle in mind.

The binding might also be a result of the path of travel of the swing-arm rear arms and the long vertical shocks; swing arms move in an arc rather than purely up & down, and at some point in that path, it could cause the shock shaft to make a slight angle against the hole as it compresses.

Regarding the wheels with negative offset, I know what you're talking about. It seems like most RC cars these days have wheels with nothing but tons of positive offset; in other words, the wheels look flat on the outside, and the deep-dish is on the inside, like FWD 1:1 cars these days. It's difficult to find wheels with nice deep dishes on the outside, like the muscle-cars typically had back in the 60's & 70's. Unfortunately those high positive offset wheels will bind up against bodies, shock towers, swing arms, and what-have-you...and IMHO, looks goofy anyway. But that might just be my age showing itself. I prefer cars with deep-dish wheels, at least on the rear.

I've found that about the only wheels out there that have a high negative offset are the narrow crawler wheels, but most of those are bead-locks. I needed to use wheels like that for both my buddy's Buffalo as modern wheels just rubbed everything inboard.

Phin wrote:

DennisM wrote:...
I´m not having any troubles with binding, it´s quite smooth all the way.
Were You using 12mm CB shocks or 10mm "Ultima/Optima".
How were they mounted? - in front or to the rear of the mount.

Thanks for letting gomachv copy the mount

Parma shocks...which have the same 8mm bore as the red Ultima/Optima shocks. Had them mounted both at the front and rear of the tower, and though they had better travel when mounted off the back they would still bind up.

The binding is probably something to do with the shocks and not the tower. The Parma rear shock tower for the scorpion mounts the shock tops further inboard than on the RCH tower....could be Parma designed their shocks with that mounting angle in mind.

Scorpion, Beetle and Tomahawk had 8mm shocks. Turbo Scorpion, Ultima and Optima had 10mm shocks

Bore is the inner diameter of a cylinder.

The earliest red shocks were 8mm on the outside but were only a 6mm bore. TS/Ultima/Optima red shocks were 8mm bore and the Kyosho Golds and Platinums shocks were 10mm bore...like the RC10 shocks. Then you got the Big Pressure shocks from the Burns which were 12mm like many modern "big bore" shocks.