SpeedMerchant Rev.8 aluminum chassis

0 May 27, 2016, 11:24 a.m.

By Aaron Waldron
LiveRC.com

New from SpeedMerchant:
www.teamspeedmerchant.com

If you had the chance to attend a 'big' race last season, you probably got to run on the newer style black carpet. The new stuff has more initial traction than the grey Ozite we've been running on for years, and has much less of a fuzzing problem.

On our line of pan cars, our 1/10th cars were virtually un-affected by the change from Ozite to the new stuff. Josh TQ'd and Won the Snowbirds this season with Steve Boice in tow for 2nd, with the exact same set-up they've used on their World GT4's for the past couple of seasons. In fact, we had 5 out of 10 cars in the World GT A-Main at the Birds and they all ran our standard set-up.

The carpet does seem to necessitate a much larger set-up change in 12th scale cars, due to the smaller tire/rim combo wanting to 'dig' into the new black rug.

We've had great success over the past few seasons running our Rev.7 & 8's with the off-set in-line battery placement. Especially as traction at big races went up, the in-line cars just gained corner speed while still being balanced and easy to drive. While cars with a transverse 'battery back' placement tended to get touchy and harder to drive consistently with the increased traction.

Part of the reason our cars have always worked so well with the in-line lay out is because our New School front suspension has a lot more 'cut' than a standard Associated R5 (type) front suspension. With the new style carpet, one of the largest issues on set-up is just trying to make the cars easy to drive and less touchy while maintaining good corner speed. The general trend over this past season has been to de-tune or deaden your front suspension by running very little caster, almost zero camber and really increasing the amount of super glue on the side wall of the front tires. We've found that configuring cars in the transverse/battery back lay out also helps keep static weight off of the front end, and in turn helps the cars not dig into the carpet.

Another more recent development has been the availability of aluminum chassis for the current crop of 12th scale cars. These chassis have a little more weight to them which lowers the cars center of gravity, and also a slightly different flex characteristic than the quasi-isotropic carbon fiber used for our chassis. Our friend Donny Lia won this year's ROAR Mod National with an aluminum chassis on his Roche 12th scale. Since then, several national level racers have tried aluminum chassis on their 12th's. The general consensus is the aluminum chassis just make the cars easier to drive and less touchy on the new carpet while maintaining corner speed.

We've been working with Mike at McFactory Motorsports on our Rev.8 Aluminum Chassis. If we were going to offer an aluminum chassis, we wanted to make sure it was the very best available and designed to our exact specs for fit and finish. I'm happy to say that the prototype chassis Mike sent us is outstanding. All of our parts fit on perfectly.

We've known Mike for a few years now, and the stuff coming out of his shop is second to none. He does much more than just aluminum chassis, including awesome personalized carbon fiber pit boards and lots of set-up tools for the competitive RC racer. Be sure to check out McFactory's Facebook page @ https://www.facebook.com/mcfactorymotorsports/

The picture above is of the finalized prototype chassis and bottom plate in natural aluminum. The production pieces will be anodized satin black and will also come with carbon fiber battery locators and hardware that mount to the chassis.