I received this giant crawler from RC4WD.com for a magazine review this week. The Killer Krawler is a perfect balance between form and function. It's 100% CNC aluminum, and at 1/6th scale it's simply absurd. I'll be posting more about it after the print review comes out.
Here is my son doing some fixin'. It's in the blood :)
I'm still playing around with the Losi Micro Crawler, this thing is just way too much fun. In this latest mod, I've decided to turn it into a Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV), or Moon Buggy.
I used the Micro Crawler as a base, everything's stock except I've added BWD wheel weights, and shorter micro-t springs for the shocks. The Astronaut and buggy came from a toy from "Space Voyagers" and hacked into pieces. The scale isn't quite right, the buggy would have been larger, the build would have looked better if the astronaut was smaller. but it was the best that I could find, and the wheel covers were perfect for these tires. I had to shave the legs off the poor guy a bit, so that they could fold in more, and fit inside the chassis, in order for it to fit the stock chassis. I probably should have just stretched the chassis, but was too lazy :)
I used some Tamiya acrylic paint for wipe-offs and dry-brush. Added some grit, and detail. It turned out ok, helped it look and feel more realistic. I also painted over the gold areas with some hobby gold paint, the gold that came with the toy were not consistent, and looked too fake, and gold plated like.
The result was a super compact LRV, which is much heavier than the stock Micro Crawler. The stock motor seems to hold up ok with the added weight, and although it's rather top heavy compared to the original, it can still climb well. It was a blast to build, and very fun to drive and explore.
Here is something that I've been tinkering with lately, a 1929 custom pickup model body on the Losi micro crawler. The model was hacked to fit as low as possible on the chassis, cutting out holes in the body to make room for the shocks.
The model and test fit:
Primer coat:
Final truck
I moved the rx into the cab of the truck, and relocated the battery inside of the hood. The body is just servo taped to the chassis. I also replaced the stock springs with micro-t springs to bring the CG down. This helped a lot in how it performed, stock CG is really high and makes it quite tipsy. Also the foam inside of the tires were removed, and I wrapped solder wire inside of the rim for some weight. Front wheels are now around 17g, and 15g or so in the back (Stock is ~11g). When I tried more weight (~20g), I found that it had a harder time with the steep walls of the losi track. Here is a quick video of it in action:
This is a really fun rc crawler, being micro sized makes it really fun to try to climb everything on the desks and floors. I got the losi tracks from a LHS for free, and is really fun to test and play in. I'd strongly recommend it for anyone with a micro crawler.
I've got bunch of ideas that I'd like to find the time to tackle using this chassis. I don't think that I will go as far as a scale rig, that just seems way too much work.... But it is a really nice chassis platform.
I should point out here that there seems to be some QA issues with the center tranny gear. At least with this first early batch. I had one, like many other people around the forums, that suffered from some binding. The binding were not very noticeable in my case. However when I took the transmition out, there was an area in the main center big gear that would catch a bit. Being too impatient to wait for a Losi fix, I did what some others have done, sanded out the hole a bit around the bearings of the gear box. This allowed the shaft to be more forgiving, but it still catches a bit some times. I ended up sanding the hole bigger and bigger, before noticing the real issue. So I had a big hole in which the center shaft had a lot of play. The final fix was to add a single bead of shapelock to hold the bearing in the correct position. It's a hack, and I'm not sure if I'd recommend others to do this, but mine is now silky smooth. Hope that losi will recognize the issue an have it fixed soon.
