Fighting Buggy - Part 5 (The Front End)

Now that the buggy's rear is done, it's onto the front end....

Fighting Buggy - Part 4 (An Oily Mess)

Onto pack B, where I'll be assembling the rear damper and the cool-looking external oil reservoir.

Fighting Buggy build - Part 3 (Motor mixup)

So, the first upgrade I got was a new motor to replace the stock 540 "silver can" that came with the buggy. My Electronic Speed Controller (ESC) was for brushed motors that had 25 turns or more, so I was quite limited in the choices out there. I contemplated getting the Tamiya sport-tuned and torque-tuned motors, but finally decided to get the Tamiya GT-tuned motor instead. This motor packs 19,000 rpm and a powerful 500gf/cm of torque at 7.2V. I figured it'd be more than enough to get my buggy roaring away.

Fighting Buggy build - Part 2 (Transmission and rear axle)

Time to get started making my buggy! Tamiya makes it easier by dividing the build into sections with the parts in helpfully labelled bags. So, I begin by ripping open bag "A"....

Fighting Buggy build - Part 1 (Opening the box)

It seemed to take forever, but the postman finally rang my doorbell one fine day to drop this baby off....

Love the retro box art!

Fighting Buggy

Recently I've re-ignited a passion for racing Tamiya mini 4WDs, which most kids aged between 7 to 12 years old did in the late 1980s here. A side-effect of my mid-life crisis was that I soon found myself browsing through Tamiya's catalog of remote control car kits. 

As a kid, I wished I had a remote control car that I could race around the void deck or at East Coast Park. But those cars seemed so expensive back in the day that I never did get one.

I especially loved the look of their offroad buggies...there's just something nostalgic about them that brought me back to my childhood in the '80s. I mean, check out this ad: