Originally Posted by
XLosiguy
I've almost completed my (very first) Tekno buggy and am VERY IMPRESSED!
I've built and raced many Truggies, short course and stadium trucks (I'm old), but somehow never owned a buggy, except one tenth scale back in the day.
I'm pretty o.c.d. about my rides and like everything nice and tight, balanced and looking good (to help make up for my driving, lol). During the build I noticed a pretty significant amount of play between the hinge pin holders (all but the rear outer hub-arm hinges), so I went to Home Depot and got some of those small white nylon washers (#6 & #8 I think), to tag take up the slack.
After playing with kit and new washers combos, I got all four arms nice and snug between the hinge blocks. But with the available washer thicknesses I had to work with, I ended up with zero slop... a perfect fit between the blocks with ZERO Binding! Just a nice free fall of the arms with no resistance.
I'm happy about that, but started wondering if this could be a bad thing? I mean, could removing the slop in the arms actually make them more prone to breaking?
I would've preferred to remove MOST of the slop with just a hair off play left but like I said, that's just how it worked out.
So... is this going to cause a problem, or do you guys think I'm OK?
Thanks, and very cool forum.
I'm not on here often these days and I missed this post. You are doing the same thing I did when I started RC a lifetime ago. It's not wrong to want no slop, but I have been down this road many times. It is best to have enough slack in parts that you don't have binding after you hit the track a few weekends. It is also a tuning option to move A-Arms forward and back with shims, but there are threads on that and I wont get into it here.
Lot of OCD guys in RC cleaning and perfecting. That's a large part of the fun and satisfaction you get from this hobby. That sloppy fit is not going to be a major change in how you feel it's handling when driving the car. I would say anything 1.5mm or less will be hard to notice on a offroad track. Now if you were on a paved road course I would say .5 is where it would not matter.
Where I notice slop matters most is camber rods and steering no matter what surface. Even sloppy servo gears can come into play at some point. JMHO.