My BL Revo project

[BrianG]

Hello all, I just registered here and thought I'd start off by posting my BL project. I'm coming over from the Traxxas forum (via Dafni's suggestion). Anyway, here's my project:

When I first decided to get my first "real" R/C a while back (almost a year ago), I was torn between the E-Maxx and the Revo. I really wanted electric, but also loved the design of the Revo. Well, I've had plenty of fun with my Nitro Revo, but now have decided to build an electric one this time.

I want to take a minute to thank Dafni for inspiration to tackle this project and have "borrowed" many of his ideas in my design.

I could have bought a rolling chassis off eBay, but thought it would be way more fun to build from scratch. Plus, building from scratch let me get the exact hop-ups I wanted right off. After a few weeks of collecting parts and re-configuring the chassis, here is my semi-final result:











Hop-ups so far:
- Ti GTR checks
- RPM A-arms - originally blue, but dyed black (changed my mind about the color after I bought them).
- Aluminum pushrods.
- P2 rockers.

The chassis was fun. I pretty much cut and grinded off all chassis side pieces except for the steering servo areas. I decided to paint the chassis and battery tray supports black (yeah, I know it will chip off) and am pretty happy with how it looks.

I then used some 1/8" aluminum angle stock (1.5" X 1.5") for the battery trays. I cut the bottom side of the tray to 1" wide to better fit the battery.

The battery tray supports are 1" wide X 1/8" thick aluminum bars I bent using my vise (arg, hard to get a precise bend!). I wanted them thick to take a beating without bending. Yeah, it adds weight, but it's aluminum. I mounted them all using nuts and bolts (using threadlocker) for easy maintenance or replacement.

The battery tray pads are simply craft foam glued with shoe-goo. The batteries are held down with velcro.

Again borrowing from Dafni's design, I will be using an E-Maxx tranny. A little fiddling with the chassis was needed to get it to mount right (not shown in the pics). I'm still not sure if I want to go with a single speed tranny or dual speed. Either way, I'm not really sure what spur/pinion or tranny hopups to get - I guess I'll have to experiment.

Now I'm shopping around for a brushless motor/ESC. I like the price and performance of the Feigao 540 9L motor (2731kV, 68A, 12-16 cells) and Warrior 9920 99A controller. I want a motor and controller that has quite a bit of torque - high top speed is not a real concern. I plan to bash and maybe do some rock crawling, so low speed control and torque with no cogging is what I'm after. I also want something reliable.

It will probably be until after tax-time before I get the motor/ESC, tires/rims (planning on beadlock rims), better batteries, and radio/Rx system, so it will pretty much stay this way for a while. I'll update this as I progress.