AE TC5R steering knuckles
 

hi guys :)
just wanted to pick your brains. i have a tendancy to break my steering knuckles on my tc5r as i race on a tight track with hard barriers :(
i was looking at the integy metal ones, however need them in a hurry and dont want to order them from america.
so this leads to my question, will xray knuckles fit?
i compared some xray ones to mine and they look the same, apart from were the steering ball joint attaches. but that wont effect much.
thanks in advance for replys.
adam

Just from my experiences, I have found adding aluminum to the car has been a bad idea. I bought some diggity design C hubs, because I was tearing them up. Essentially this moved my break point to arms and servo parts. I have since gone back to plastic. I know this may sound like a a-hole comment, but learn to drive a bit better. It has forced me to be a bit nicer to my car.

yeh i was told that it shifts the breaking point by someone else. however its only little crashes that seem to break them. i dont crash very often, but when i do they break. At my club there is only a very short time between heats, which means i dnt have alot of time to change them, often resulting in me missing races. when i only race once a week, missing half the heats is bad :(
especially as i feel iv got a good chance of winning this years season :lol: i dont want it to be down to silly little things.
adam
p.s i thats not an a-hole comment :P even the best can still do better :lol:

Get the Parma bumper. Much better protection, you will almost never break anything. I think it is about ten dollars.

Out of curiosity, where are you breaking them? As of course, I have found that the easiest part to break on a tc is the steering knuckle. If you are breaking them where screws mount into the knuckle, try tapping the screw holes first. I have been doing this to my x-ray knuckles and they take a harder hit now before they break. Tapping the holes take some stress away from that area of the knuckle as you are just cutting the threads away instead of pushing them outwards into the plastic. I got the idea from when I first purchased the crc gen-x, as we had to tap the mounting holes in the lower arm or they would break rather easily. Now I pretty much make it a habit to tap any mounting holes into plastic.

thats an idea :) as its were the bottom screw goes in that breaks, which causes it to come loose and out pops the drive shaft :cry:
also tapping it will make it alot easier to change as i spend alot of the time trying to get that screw to bite :P
adam

Needing some help selecting a low profile servo for the tc5r. I tried to do a search for servo on this thread but could not find anything. I find that hard to believe but anyways let me know what people are using that is light weight yet best performance.

I don't run this car anymore, but I did for a while. You need to look at a few things to help minimize the breakage:

1) Put a Kydex under bumper on the car. (www.manutechracing.com)
2) Put a Parma Xray T2 Bumper on the car (you have to dremel it to fit and drill new holes, but it is worth it)
3) tighten up your servo saver as tight as it will go
4) consider aluminum steering blocks

The key to all of this is to try and minimize impact to the front end. Believe it or not the aluminum steering blacks actually help stiffen up the entire assembly. I had lots of great success with this setup and I hardly ever broke parts.

Good luck!

Just to add to Artworks comments - Parma does make a purpose built properly cut TC5 bumper now and no modifications necessary. This will help the most and definitely get a 3mm tap and pretap the holes before assembly. I also ran the "hard" parts for knuckles, hubs, and castor blocks - they take a screw better, I never lost traction and even some pros run these on asphalt (i.e. Rick Hohwart's 2008 Worlds setup from Thailand). I avoid aluminum - especially the Integy crap that I've seen that has bad manufacturing tolerances and it bends pretty easily.

Can't go wrong with the Futaba 9551 digital. Fast and low profile along with some weight savings.