MM5700 in T4

[glassdoctor]

I'm a little skeptical like you say... I don't have a pede/rusty.. but others have said it works great = bulletproof.

I would be little concerned about wear of metal on metal... but I haven't heard of any problems with them.

[jnev]

Well, I ran the aluminum idler and an aluminum tranny case, and with that combo, it worked great. Although, I didn't run as much power through it as the Mamba Max 5700. The good thing about the tranny case, is that will be no flex, like the stock case where the gears could move out of place easily and strip.

The only parts that I was continually breaking was the arms. I built my T4 out for parking lot racing and for nothing else. It was completely setup to go as fast as possible. The truck itself is as good as it gets, IMO; but when you go that fast on concrete things just break. It wasn't unusual to see my T4 sliding the scale quarter mile on its roof. The transmission in the T4 is bullet proof, with one caveat. You HAVE to do maintenance. I ran my T4 for a month without pulling the tranny and all I found inside was two cracked up friction rings and black dust where the diff balls used to be. It really didn't mess anything up, I just needed to rebuild the diff. If you are having tranny problems, then the T4 will be the ticket.

The only other advise I can offer, if going fast is the name of the game, is to stay away from aluminum arms and shock towers. They just get bent and are more expensive to replace. The same goes for body posts. You might want to consider an aluminum tranny case. I occassionally had problems with stripping the screw holes in the plastic case. If you don't go aluminum, get into the habit of tapping the screw holes, rather than forming the threads in the plastic with the screw. This really helps if you tear your truck down often. I believe the tap size is 4-40. If you go with the FT version of the T4, when you do break the arms, just replace them with the standard plastic arms (goes for shock towers too). In the alternative, you could boil the FT parts, this will make them a bit more flexible and will probably hold up a bit better with impacts.

As far as the breaking parts goes, you really have to take what I say with a grain of salt. For me, RC is a release. When I play, I really play. I'm very hard on my equipment. If you keep it sane, chances are that you won't be replacing parts nearly as often as I was; and with the T4, the tranny won't be an issue.

AAngel, thanks for all the info. It sounds like you and I bash our trucks similarly so I will take your advise to heart and look into getting a T4 instead of trying to bulletproof the tranny of my Rusty. I'll just run 6 or 7-cell packs on the Rusty and do 3S speed runs with the T4 when I feel the need for speed.

Thanks to all others that have posted advise as well. It's great to learn so much about the T4 in such a short period of time. And thanks, ***RC*** and others, for the info about the steel diff/aluminum case for my Rusty. It's good to know that is a viable option for me as well.

Oh, I forgot to mention this. When doing speed runs, you might want to wrap the inside of your tires with a double layer of duct tape. Be sure the clean the insides of your tires to get a good stick. This will help to greatly reduce the ballooning of the tires. This isn't so much for purposes of gearing as it is for keeping control of the truck. It gets really hard to steer when you're hauling butt. It also helped to keep the tires from tearing off of the wheels. Just keep in mind that the tape will let go at some point. For me, the tires were usually worn out by the time that happened.