Diff ball holes on the Kimbrough spurs . . .

I was wondering if anyone runs extra diff balls in the spur, like some extra on the inner ring of holes to sort of distribute the load more evenly?

Thoughts?

I must give a big shout out to Ray & Julie of Niftech . . .

I got my order today as promised, COD but oh well . . .

I ordered the toe tool, some caps, some bronze pivot balls and the pivot ball tool. Beautiful stuff, good documentation. They even threw in a free gift, a tub of diff grease, happily suprised. I always love local newspaper packaging, I really get a kick out of it. Niftech's paper had plenty of hand written markups highlighting relevant news from the Cleveland paper "The Plain Dealer".

What I didn't expect was plenty of hand written thanks and words of encouragement. They appear to be a real Mom & Pop shop and go out of their way to exceed the customer's expectations.

They also included some Niftech stickers and two printed copies of the current catalog.

In this day and age of slick ssl PayPal shopping carts it's kind of refreshing and more personal to deal in this fashion. The post office may be thrown for a bit of a loop in the heart of Silicon Valley but it's entertaining to witness them scurry around for procedural documents that haven't been used recently.

So in closing I must give Niftech two thumbs up for providing outstanding customer support using what some may consider antiquated channels. This maybe so but there is really no substitute for the human touch.

Thank You Ray & Julie,

To quote the Governor of the great state of California, (Arnold) . . .

"I'll be back . . ."

woot . . .

I guess I shouldn't say anything at all . . .

If I can't say anything nice . . .

WTF???!!!

I made a not so nice comment about the "forum", thought better and came back to delete it but couldn't so I just edited it . . .

Sorry . . . this is in no way in context to my Niftech thread.

Another reason why the configuration of this board sucks.

Hey gang,
I am considering cutting some upper and lower rear pod plates to be able to move a brushless motor over the 3.5mm needed to weight balance the rear pod correctly. With todays "large wheel" tires on the market, the off sets that they have, it would seem that we could take advantage and move the motor plate over. The disadvantage would be that you will only be able to run wheels that have a 2.75mm off set or greater such as Parma & Jaco. The CRC's have a 1.4mm off set which is not enough to correctly get 86mm to center (half of 172mm for max width). Another disadvantage would be you would not be able to narrow up the rear track width if you use it for tuning. I have made up a set of custom rear pod plates and a shortened right diff hub and have run it in the past. It works as expected and the left rear tire wear matched the right. Diff hubs are not easy to make at my end, but IRS and CRC spit them out all day long. So what do you guys think about this? Painted into a corner with limited tire manufacture selection? Or very cool, why didn't we do this sooner?

Brian

Brian,you got a PM bro on this subject.

You know me Brian...I'll buy pretty much any product that claims to solve pretty much any problem. Let me know when they're ready. :

LRP now make a thin front plate for the motor that shifts it 1.5mm to the right (looking from the rear of the car) and it gives you all the centring and room that you need in the pod. This is being driven from the TC end to get the weight more inboard, so I guess we will see it on lots of motors some time soon. Don't think that, after a lot of work, you will find a market, Brain, as the problem is being alleviated by the motor guys. HTH

It takes almost 4mm to center the weight in the 1/12th motor pod.

Brian,
We've done some work on this and I think it will prove to be the right thing to do. There are those who don't think it is necessary, but in addition to the tire wear issue you mentioned we think the car feels better balanced on the track with a balanced motor pod. That being said, a car with an unbalanced pod doesn't exactly feel bad. But you have to ask, if you were designing a new 1/12th car from the ground up with the plan that it would only run brushless motors, would you center the weight of the motor or not? It makes sense to me that you would center it, just as it is basically centered with brushed motors in the current pods.

I've found that with Parma wheels you can easily center the weight in the pod and get the axle centered at full width, as long as we use a right side hub that has 1mm removed from the wheel flange (a lot easier to do than making a hub LOL) A better solution would be to have a narrower right hub, say 3mm narrower. CRC now makes one that they place in their brushless motor conversion kit for the GenX that is just that. That gives you room to adjust track width for tuning

As for the marketability aspect of such a product, I wouldn't take a guess, as I have proven numerous times that I am a poor judge of that

I have a couple of questions for a newbie to this scale

I'm getting a CRC Gen-X, I would like to run Lipo and Brushless

• What suggestions can I get for an ESC, combo
• Lipo size, given it would be replacing the 4 cell, any special considerations
• Best motor size for new to this scale person running on carpet

Many Thanks in advance for the help

For electronics, I suggest anything that has a small footprint and is fairly lightweight. As of now the small electronic speed controllers that fit fairly well are the lrp sphere (non-tc spec) and the Novak gtb 4 cell specific controller.

For racing 12th scale at any tracks across the nation, the power source allowed is 4-cell nickel metal hydride battery packs. There is no lipo equivalent to 4 cell. 7.4 volts is too much. Past history has proven that.

Best brushless for a beginner in 12th scale is probably going to be set per track, and your best bet would be to go to your local track where you will be racing and find out what the classes are like. Most tracks that are racing stock class are running 27 turn motors with 17.5 brushless..

good luck

why not just use some AE motor shims if you want to move the motor over and don't want to commit to a new pod? $2.50 a shim. I can get two shims in my pods so that is about 4mm. But I just use them on my 1:10 oval car. Didn't put much though on my 1:12.

Shims would move the motor to the left, it needs to move to the right to balance the pod.

I will have to check out the CRC shorter diff hub. That is ultimately on the wish list as it would allow all manufacturers back in the game if the motor plate was move over. Yea, as I recall I needed to move the LRP/Reedy's over 3.6mm (not 3.5mm), Novaks maybe slightly more or less. Then the only sampling I used was from a 5.5. 17.5 & 13.5's may have just a little more wire in the right place requiring a slightly different balance number.

As far as marketability.... well lets just say I haven't retired off of my previous work either. The motor shift makes sense. If others purchase it, then that's all the sense it needs to make. The one proto rear that I do have allows the b/l motor to fall right in the bottom without disassembly. Not that is going to be a big deal, once the motor is installed, it's likely going to be there for the life of the car.