Scale 1/8 buggy

[nativepaul]

It rained last night and ths morning so in an effort not to cake it with mud I put the road rages on and used it on tarmac, with the road rages it didnt handle anything like as well, I was geting a lot of understeer, when I brought it in I realised why.
The rear tyres are dirty all over so they have a big contact patch but the fronts have too much camber for the flater tyres so they are only making contact on the inside edges.

Looking from the front of the buggy if I put the spanner on to the top of the turnbuckle, do I need to pull it towards myself or push it away to lenngthen the arm? Is it the same direction for both sides or are they opposite threads?

If I lengthen the top arms to get the road rages sitting flat, how will this effect the handling with the off-road tyres?

[nativepaul]

I've taken nearly all the camber off the front wheels, after a run the tyres are dirty all over now and the handling has improved a lot but its not up to how it was with the off road tyres yet. I am still getting a little understeer in normal use, although it is close enough to neautral that with a dab of brakes and a scandinavian flick I can make it oversteer sometimes, but I would like to get back to its original feel (very close to neutral with maybe a tough of overtseer).
Does anyone have any tips or tricks to reduce understeer or to induce oversteer?
I have quite a lot of toe-out on the front, and a little toe-in on the back, would reducing either of these toe angles help?

On a lighter note, I had my first big accident on the weekend,:026: I've rolled it a couple of times but this is the first time I've propperly crashed.
I was running my buggy in the garage area behind my flat, running a course around a some puddles on the tarmac, with the straight next to the garage doors as they are slightly raised and theres a long line with no puddles, but I stayed too tight to the doors and started turning for puddle 1 too late, and hit this drain
It was going fast and I knew it was going to be broken so I ran over to it but saw nothing obviously broken, I tried to reverse away but there was no movement,:013: so I took it inside for closer inspection, I was worried that I had bent/cracked/snaped some parts and that the shock had ripped some components off my ESC, BEC or RX leaving me with a large repair/replcement bill. I looked the mechanics over carefully and found nothing broken or bent.
This scratch just to the right of the bolt in the lower arm was the only damage to the buggy. I am very impressed with the Lightning 2 pro's strength. I started troubleshooting the electronics trying a new battery first and eveything came online and worked just fine, so I took a look at the battery and one of the wires that links the top 4 cells to the bottom 8 had pulled off at one end, My only repair was a quick solder job.:027:

[nativepaul]

I got my first breakage yesterday, I hit the same drain again, this time going slightly faster (it was dry) but I had allready started turning away from it and just clipped it with the rear wheel, the leverage from hitting that far out broke the left rear hub :-( a new pair of rear hubs was a lot cheaper than I was expecting so its not too bad.



I got my dad to give me a lift to the model shop to get the rear hub and while I was there I picked up a set of Medial Pro Tarmac II tyres they only had them premounted on yellow rims instead of the cool black Hyper7 ones I got for for the Road rages, but the tyres are 10 times stiffer than the Crappy Proline Road Rages I was having problems with, so hopefully my handling issues will be over and at least I know what colour my scale body will be now.



Its been ages since I last saw my dad, he is into Electric boats and planes too, so I ran the buggy which impressed him, then showed him my Eagletree and what it did, which astounded him completely. He told me of a datalogger he used in his electrical engineering years ago that was the size of a desktop PC, with less than 1% of the eagletree's power, it cost his company £14k at a time when his skilled wages where £1200 per year inc overtime, technology has certainly moved on, here is some eagletree graphs for my buggy on its 12 sanyo RC2400s.



I showed him how low my voltage is getting under load and told him how good the recent LiPos are under load, we use 1st generation LiPos in our smaller electric planes, He said that as he hadn't seen me since my birthday he would buy me a set, they where out of stock at the model shop but we ordered some in and hopefully tomorow I will be the proud owner of a Flightpower 4s 4350 pack, I'll post a pic and some new graphs with that pack when I've got it set up for the new tyres and lighter pack.

Wish me luck, I should have about double the power and 50% more top speed, I hope I can still manage it.

[nativepaul]

No LiPo yet, but getting rid of the Proline RoadRages and replacing them with Medial Pro Tarmac IIs has made my handling predictable again and puting some 7K oil in my centre diff has given me the slight on-power oversteering sweet handling that it had originally with the off road tyres, but without ripping the spikes off in 1 run.

Next week will see a start to my scale body.