Associated TC7.2 turnbuckle eyelet-to-ballstud fit is terribly tight. Anyone else?
 

I just built a TC7.2 factory team. I'm pretty certain I built it correct.
The eyelet-to-ballstud fit is terribly tight. The resulting binding in the steering rack assembly is so bad my 5 year old probably can't turn the steering rack (total friction).
The eyelet needs to freely rotate about the ballstuds and they can't - it's way too tight. Is there some grease I'm supposed to put in there? I owned more than 20 RC cars over the years and never had this problem.
I double-checked to make sure there weren't multiple variations of the ballstuds or eyelets in the lit and there isn't.

Anyone else found this?
What did you do?

You have a couple of options:
1) Do what they tell you to do in the instructions and take some needle nose pliers and squeeze the ball cup while it's installed on the ball stud.
2) I ended up buying a set of BD7 ball cups and they worked great. https://www.tqrcracing.com/shop/prod....asp?p_id=8330

New cups it is.
The ME/tooling engineer really screwed up that part.
They should have modified the tool or sacked up and made a new one. It's 1000% unacceptable on a $400 product to ask the end user to screw with the eyelet to fix their mistake.

Not many manufacturers have perfected the eyelet and ballstud. Only one that I know is probably 3racing. Try measure the size of your ball studs, if its 4.8mm +-0.02, the 3racing eyelets will work great.

I'm pretty sure TC7.2 does not have 4.8mm ball studs. I believe they use 4.3mm ball studs.

Tolerances are really tight. If they'd gone a little bit looser, it would be fine during the original build but then they'd loosen up pretty quickly as you run the car.

Better off getting new eyelets as the Ae ones are pretty dodgy. They are tight and also a few guys at the track have found they are more brittle. Yokomo are a spot on fit and are way stronger
One fix to free them up a little if you decide to keep the original is to polish each ballstud. One at a time place them in a drill and get them as shiny as you can, will make them free up a little

Balls studs on full size vehicles have lots of variation too. During the manufacturing process the ball stud is spun at 10000 rpm in the cup for 10-15 seconds. Then lubricated and they are good for 100000 miles and silky smooth. It might help.

by the way the plastic will get super hot so watch your fingers.

I've made it a habit over the years to lube ball studs with powered graphite

I can not say for sure but do not believe that ballend was designed around a 4.3mm ball. That ballend has been around as far back as I can remember and am willing to bet to was set to fit a standard ball size and not a metric. This is why AE calls out in the instruction manual to squeeze the ball end. Squeezing opens up the ID just enough to work with the 4.3mm ball.
Most people have switched over to the Xenon VSS ball ends. They are a perfect fit for the kit 4.3mm ballstuds.

The TC7 ball ends are from the TC6 era and that car was metric.

..thanks for all the responses. The Yokomo BD7 set as mentioned in post #2 worked perfect.
They're beefy and have a long stem, more robust than the original part, and there's no friction.
They also have a small hole on the top of the cup so you can remove the turnbuckle without having to pry it off of the ball.
For the steering rods the ball cups have to be installed about as far as they can go on - there's just enough adjustment.

You can always take a dremel and trim slightly down. Precise measuring before cutting.

Setup station will get it final dialed in.