The Tamiya TT02 - Just the "02" not a B, not an R, not a Type-S. Just.. the 02.

We're going to start, and end, here.



That is, a metallic blue Mazda 3.  Sitting on a TT02 chassis.  Box art, says metallic red, but I have a red Mazda already.  And my old Mazda 6 was this color blue, so the choice was easy. 

That same table, just a few hours earlier....



Betty can put out heck of a spread.  Oh....... forgot the main course.



Given I own innumerable other great touring car chassis, why are we here with a TT02?  Well I wanted a quality basher I could feel free to leave somewhere.  It's really, very hard to beat the value of a Tamiya kit. 

So about $200 later, I had a car, battery, servo, radio, ESC, motor, body, paint, bearings, wheels, tires....  And a wonderful project to do, while Betty and company were whipping up a slightly belated Thanksgiving dinner.

We need to have a little talk about the TT02.  The car comes in a wide range of configurations.  These range from the $100 specials like I am building here, through to some vague approximation of an actual race car.  My car is very slightly above the bottom of the barrel configuration.  The base model has a ABS tub, and is neigh on indestructible. 

For some reason, Tamiya saw fit to put the hard tub in my kit, with no other upgrades.  I bet this is going to be a very "special" edition. 

Other editions:

• TT02 Type-s - Touring car suspension arms, oil filled shocks, turnbuckles
• TT02 White Special - Hard tub, oil filled shocks white suspension components.
• TT02r - Aluminum motor mount, aluminum drive shaft, steering turnbuckles,oil filled shocks, aluminum 3 deg rear uprights.
• TT02rr - Oil filled shocks, aluminum motor mount, TT02 special upper adjustable arms, aluminum rear hubs, blue hard tub, aluminum drive shaft set, and oil filled diffs.   
• TT02d - with parts to go drifting.  (It's not my thing, if you're a drifter, do your research here)

I don't know where the other models really fall in the "I'd like to drive them" scale, as theyr'e all over the place, price wise, and not all come with all the accessories.  In the case of my kit, I got the $30 body kit, $30 ESC, $10 motor, $20 set of wheels and tires... and then the rest of the car for $40.  The math worked out really well there.  Back to the story.

Just after brunch, the table got cleared, and I got to work.  The Mazda 3 TT02 kit came with the hard red tub. 

The hard tubs... have been out of stock for 14 months.  Last year around thanksgiving, I sold off my spare blue tub, and after a few weeks, settling on that I won't find another.  I suspect, ~this~ car is why I couldn't get a spare tub for my TT02b. 

The TT02, gets all of it's strength from the tub.  All of the bearings are located by the tub.  Speaking of bearings, I bought a set for this car, to get everything set off on the right foot.  If you buy this kit, you won't get bearings....  (spend the $17.)  

Looks pretty doesn't it.

I ended up using the tub as a parts organizer as I went to build the differentials.

We've done this before?  These are the same as all the other diffs, but without o-rings to seal them up.  If you want to make them stiff, you need to use 200k+ oil.  Even 1m isn't quite locked, and is "useful".  

While I was building the car, every 10-15 minutes I would step outside to work on this.



There's a complete can of metallic blue on there, with a white backer.  While that cures, lets get back to the chassis.

And there we go.  At the moment of taking this picture, I was freaking out about not having the right fasteners to get the steering servo installed.  With some digging, I did end up with the right screws to make it happen, but it was about to need an hour round trip to town to hunt down some M3 screws.

Of note, the tires don't come with foam liners.  So they're really soft.  The compound is more vinyl than rubber, so they're not all that sticky, but they worked really well on the surfaces I had to run on.  We'll get back to that though.

While we're here, and can see the heads of some screws.  When you're installing the self tapping screws, put a faint dab of the gear grease on them, this lets you feel when they've bottomed out, so you don't end up stripping any of the screw holes. 

And here's the car all buttoned up.  5200mah battery, some dog slow 20kg steering servo, a FRSky receiver, and as you can see, a little dirt on the tires from doing some laps around the living room.  

Did I say FRSky?  I did.  Mister Spektrum bought a different radio. 



$40 for a 3 channel computer radio. 



With 10 model memory, and all of settings someone might need.



And, with the 180 degree travel servo I bought, I really needed it.  Travel had to be set to 45% left and right. 

After dinner, I sat with everyone doing stickers, while they watched various flavors of youtube and animated stuff.



That car, came out looking really good.  I did some driving around the living room, let another person or two give it a spin.  But it wasn't until the next day I got to really give it a spin.

Sadly, I was alone driving the car, so I didn't get much photo wise.  Bettys place is in the woods, and is serviced by a gravel drive.  That's where I got to drive the car in anger.  Loose diffs, lots of torque, and an ESC that wasn't calibrated made for a fast car with an on-off throttle.  The thing was a blast to drive, and the tires showed almost no wear for all the abuse I put them through. 



I've not done that to the inside of a body for years. 

The rest of the car looked worse. 

So here we are, back at the table with the car on it.  That first photo, was the car after it spent time on the muddy driveway.

If I were clever, I would have set the car up for rally height, which is some 5mm taller I think.  But even the on-road configuration was pretty fine.  A faster steering servo would be appreciated, but i'll need to decide if it's worth the extra $25 to go there.  The choice would have been really easy if I had more time to order parts, but this ended up being a "mostly amazon prime" build. 

Should you get one?  Maybe.  It's way better than anything you can buy from the toy store.  It's better than most of what you can buy pre-built, I think.  $200 can get you everything you need, if you don't mind a slow battery charger. 

There's an on-road track out there too.. that this thing will eventually take some laps of.  

Clearance cars are my kryptonite. The Tamiya FF04 Evo Black Edition

The most intimidating thing for a writer, is a blank sheet of paper.  

And so i'm terrified. 

Aah, that's a bit better. 

I'm not a fan of FWD. (Front Wheel Drive) Though my car collection would make one think otherwise.  Between the M07, two M05s, MST TCR, MG Evo, and FF03, you'd think I was a fan of FWD.  I'm not.  But FWD ends up being where all the interesting racing happens.  In Mini classes FWD has the consistent lap times, and better braking.  In touring car classes FWD has efficiency bonuses, sometimes weight benefits, and you keep the AWD braking strength. 

I had a sky high goal of getting my FF03 down to some disgustingly low running weight, and while I did end up with a light car, it's not as light as I'd like, and it wasn't exactly competitive.  I think the MST TCR is going to take up that role. 

While cruising the Tamiya USA website, I keep an eye out for the "outlier" car prices.  The FF04 Evo stood out to me.  Special edition parts, special edition colors, all of the high end bits...  for $225. 

The FF04, excepting the three gear transmission, is entirely a modern touring car.  But I think that needs some explanation. 

FWD r/c car racing really started after touring cars became a thing.  And like most of the big classes, started with some crazy decision by execs at Tamiya.  The TA01, a descendant of Tamiyas buggies started the touring car craze.  Being the sort of scale people they are, Tamiya wanted a FWD chassis to put under their FWD bodies.  From this, we got the FF01.  

The FF01 was closely related to the TA01.  And this is going to be a trend with the FWD chassis.  It's a tub, but at the time, so was everything else. 

The FF02 was a M03, with stretched arms, and a longer center chassis spacer.  I'd call it at best, unremarkable. 

The FF03 shared a lot with the TA05, and the TRF418.  That is, the arms, and suspension setup.  The FF03 I've covered in the blog a lot.  But the FF03, in the end, was a narrow plastic tub, that depended a lot on chassis flex for what it did. 

Well the FF04, is a full on double deck touring car.  No excuses given, and evidently, none needed. 

Lets start with the bling.  Check out this carbon:



Isn't that a thing?  I was very impressed with what I pulled out of the box.  speaking of which, the box, was shockingly empty. 



I swear there was an echo in there.

I really miss buying kits that, when you open the box, they feel full.  Even the CRC Gen X 10 I bought with it's tiny box, felt like it was swimming in the packaging.  This had better be worth it.  

The manual, is generic Tamiya.  This is a good thing.  Steps are short enough to not be confusing, and make very few assumptions of the users capability.

So time for a little backstory.  I started this build at about 9pm.  I was in my buddys basement, after making a solid attempt at being a plumber.  Sadly, we were not successful in that endeavor.  I had the car with me, to show it off (as he's got a few cars of his own.)   He bought me a present, and suggested we assemble the car so I could use it.  We'll get to that in a bit. 

Much like the FF03, transmission comes first.  

Look at all those little bits.  They're all completely normal if you've built another touring car.  If not.. why are you starting here?  This is "as good as it gets" in the Tamiya stables.  

And here we run into the problem with a black edition tamiya model.  How do you get any kind of contrast?  Here's the complete transmission.  It seems that the drive-train is half of a XV-01.  When I was done, there was a complete separate transmission case.  

Motor plate, and bumper brace attached.  I think these bits might be FF03 compatible.   Amusingly, the aluminum bumper brace, is a Black Edition only part, and not available any other way.

I really liked how the transmission turned out.  It's very rigid, and even with the extensions, the shock tower is nice a stiff.  

It does look purposeful.  I kinda want to get the aluminum anodized some confusing color.  Like orange, or red.  

This is a modern touring car, so it's got a modern touring car bellcrank.  These parts are all aluminium.  This might be the coolest steering rig I have, that's not on my XRay.

Now it's time to build out the pan.  

I couldn't figure out what felt strange about the steering.  Turns out, I was expecting a drive belt.  That's.. not a thing when you're going with a FWD car.

The rear front suspension is in place, ready for the next bits.  That prsent I was alluding to earlier, got their first use here.  I was given a left handed thread forming tap.  These were the most pleasant turnbuckles I've ever built.  I usually end up with bruised and sore fingertips by the time I'm done building a set for a car.  With thread forming taps for both ends, these are a breeze.

The front arms, with shafts and spacers in place.  It's a lot of spacers.  Between the front and back of the car you get something like 8mm of wheelbase adjustment.  

I love the way touring cars look as they get their arms mounted.  Of note, these are TRF418 arms, I think, which match my TA07, and FF03.. I think.  They're also the carbon arms, straight from the factory, which is nice.  Also, they needed zero fettling to flop around as they should, and to have as little slop as I consider "ok to race".  It all just bolted up, and worked. 

And the transmission and bumper brace.

That tap on the right.  That made everything so much better.  If you've read anything else I've written about building cars, you'll know I talk about buying a M3 thread forming tap.  Building the TA07, it knocked 45 minutes off the build.  Well, as you get to better and better cars, you run into more tapped aluminum, so it's less of a deal.  The $10 for a left hand thread forming tap is a major quality of life improvement.  

The car also came with DCJ's.  (Double Cardan Joints)  Color me impressed. 

And now the cars got knuckles.  

The rear arms are a lot like the front.  

And all the spacers and balls installed.

They bolt on using the usual plastic suspension mounts, with what looks like 3deg of rear toe.  

The rear end is standard touring car material.  Two aluminum bulkheads, joined with the shock tower.

The upper links are on mounts that can be spaced out, giving you upper link length adjustment. 

Here's the whole rear tower assembled.

when you get both ends on a touring car, it really feels "complete".  Defintiely on the easy side of this build.

Links installed.

The shocks installed, servo mount, and top deck.  At this point in the build, I was tired.  It was almost 3am.  so.. I just forgot to take pictures.  The shocks are the large diameter ones, and come with the proper springs.  The car also comes with a rear swaybar, with two strengths of bar.  

My local carpet track is still in flux.  So it will be a while before this sees the track.  It's going to be run in USGT for now.  At least that's my plan. 

The build went really well.  The kit parts were the best I've ever had from Tamiya.  For the $225 I paid, my goodness it was worth the money.  I can't wait to run it properly.  

Team Losi 22-4 2.0: An exercise in poor naming, and resetting what I consider to be a good kit.

I've built a lot of kits over the years.  Ranging from little plastic models, to sheds, to 3d printers, and even a friends vape rig.  I've seen all sorts of kit qualities.  From the vague set of directions on the real equivalent of filament paper through ... well what Losi packaged with this car.  We'll get back to that.




The Team Losi Racing 22-4 2.0 is a 4wd off road buggy.  It's a triple belt setup, completely enclosed, with an aluminum chassis and critically, oil filled diffs.  That oil filled bit, being mostly what makes the buggy "2.0".



Why do we care?  Well, given that the TLR (Team Losi Racing) 22X-4 just debuted at the IFMAR worlds... we probably don't.  But this car is cheap, and cheap tends to drive my what i'm buying next choices.

The 22-4 is a relative of the XXX-S touring car.  I really should sit down and check the lineage here.  Expect an update on the history at some point in the future here.  Since I've not taken enough time to sort that out, lets get into the massive string of impressive impressions I got from this car.

Lets start with the manual.



It's bound.  It, is, bound.  Not only bound, it has special paper as a cover.  And the cover is at least printed in two colors.  Someone cared.  In fact, the box is a little cheap, in comparison to many of the other kits I've built.



Look at how thick that is.  Thick manuals aren't a reason to be intimidated.  They are often an indication of care.



The manual has 10 pages of introductions, and explanations before it dives into building the car.  Those instructions tell you what all the symbols mean.  It's exactly as it should be.

The build starts on page 10.  And the steps are short.  Rarely is there more than a handful of screws per step.  Speaking of well thought out, lets talk about what is included.

In the manual, there's a list of tools needed.  The list is the three Allen wrenches you'll need, pliers, CA glue.   The car includes four nice wrenches, threadlock, two shock fluids, diff fluid, and high pressure grease.  Their tool list wasn't "short", it was just "this is what we did not include.

So lets get started.  The car builds from the bottom up.  (As opposed to the diffs in.. as is more common.)  This is no simple bent pan.  This is broken, then pocketed, all over.  Some of those gaps are pockets have some very narrow lines, so this wasn't a quick machining job. 

The first step, is putting on the foam tape for the battery.

Moving along, the chassis tub edges get bolted on.

It seems I lost that photo, but the rear belt tunnel is bolted on.  Most of the "big" plastic parts on the chassis are exceedingly well thought out.   We'll take a look at that later.

Every bag was full of sub-bags.  Bag A had A1, A2, A3, etc in it.  Bags never crossed each other.  Once you finished a bag, you were ~done~ with the bag.  And never did you start a new bag before the old one was done.

..... this made finding the right screws really easy.  And there were never leftovers.

Speaking of bag A2, here's what inside it.  The motor mount is clipped between the mid belt and front belt case.



This is a good time to check this out.  If you look at the rear belt guide, and the mid belt guide, you'll see these silver bits sticking through.  These are molded in aluminum inserts.  I've only rarely seen this in r/c.  Inserts mean a company plans on parts lasting a long time.  This was really surprising, and very impressive.  The thought here, definitely justifies the list price of the car.

Next up, is building the transmission input shaft.  It includes the slipper, and the belts to drive the mid belt and front diff.

This is another place where the quality of the kit screams through.  The slipper clutch plates, have grooves cut in them.  I've never seen machine work like that before on slipper clutch plates. 

And here's the completed input shaft, both pulleys and the slipper all ready to go into the car.

The input shaft drops right in.  So here's something I consider unusual.  The belts are S2M, instead of S3M like you'll find on touring cars.  The belts are also wider, and floppier than what we'll typically find on modern touring cars. 

I wonder if this is a legacy of the XXX-S or an engineering decision.

So there's also a layshaft, or jackshaft, to get the mid belt to drive the rear end of the car.

And here it is, in place.

I couldn't resist getting pictures of those molded in aluminum inserts.  That's such a nice touch.  That's a "we plan on you owning this car for a long time" touch.

I've also not needed to trim a single part off a parts tree so far.  And, there aren't any parts trees in the kit.  Everything is pre-trimmed and ready to install.

This car started its life something like six years ago.  In a time where ball diffs were still a common choice.  The chassis was designed with ball diffs in mind......  And well...  as high traction surfaces became the dominant type of track, ball diffs stopped being ok.

Losi figured out how to put gear diffs in the same space that they had ball diffs.

These are planetary type differentials.  The gears are all steel.  Having never owned a Traxxas product, I'd never built a planetary diff before.  I think they're easier than bevel gear diffs.

Unlike most touring cars, the front and rear diffs here have different pulleys on them.  The actual differential cases are the same, but the pulleys are different.  Here, we ran into the only weak point I can think of in the manual.  The instructions for filling the diffs are just "add fluid".  No idea what level to fill them to, or if bubbles are ok.



That.. is me guessing at the fluid level.  I feel good with my choices there.

The rear diff found it's home.

Ok, time to do something other than drivetrain.  How about some steering?

That tunnel there, I thought was neat, but then I realized it's critical to the car.  This is where the steering goes.

I, didn't get a shot of putting on the mid belt cover.  I.. ended up stripping the screw head on one of the fasteners there.

You end up needing to assemble the steering bellcrank through the tunnel.  It's not wildly difficult, but there's a definite lack of finger room to try to get that right.

And getting the cover on.



Finally the steering arm.

As much as I like this view, we need to cover up the bottom of the front diff.  

Conveniently, that's the next bag we have to open.



The manual has you build the front suspension attached to the car.  I decided I'd build it as a sub-assembly and install it as a unit.  There is a reinforcement plate on the front, so if you hit something.. you're gonna break the arm instead of the mount.  And the pivot pins are screws, that are held in place with locknuts.  No e-clips!  I remember those e-clips from my LXT.

And... the sub assembly attached to the car.

Those arms need to connect to the rest of the car somehow.  That means, shock towers and upper control link mounts.

Those bolt to the front diff case.

Look at all that bracing.  This is very well thought out.  Usually the "this breaks first" point on most cars is easy to figure out.  I'm not sure what would break there, first.

From the front suspension, we then go to the knuckles.  They are built around some aluminum hub carriers, which are tapped. This means you can't get the threading wrong, and you can't accidently get a bound up front hub.

There's no through pins on the front suspension.  The lower arm pivots are shoulder screws, and are locktited in place.  It's going to be really easy to work on this car.

Camber links.  The turnbuckles that came with the car, are all deburred, chromed, and just... exactly what they should be.  They're seriously high quality.  Heavy... but they're not going to be the part that fails first.

We did the front end, time to do the back end.  The rear hubs are plastic, but use HUGE bearings.  I didn't mention it earlier, but all of the hubs have crush tubes in them, so the beraings are only loaded in directions they are intended to be loaded in.



I do enjoy building CVD's.  And I got to build 4 for this kit.



.. and installed in the hubs...

Ok, so lets do the back end.  Here's the camber link, and front rear suspension mount.

The rear suspension mount is totally a touring car part.  There's a tiny screw used to keep it in place until you get the shock tower installed.  The screws that mount the rear shock tower handle the whole stack of chassis, suspension mount, lower belt case, upper belt case, and shock tower.

The wing mount, shock tower, and rear swaybar in place.



Hey, that looks like something.  .. needs shocks though.

I've not expounded enough upon how good this kit is.  The only way it could have been better would to be to have holes pre-tapped in the plastics.  All of the plastics seem to be carefully chosen for carbon/glass fiber percentages, there's only been a wisp of flash anywhere, everything fit properly.

One of the big tells on the quality of a kit, is the quality of the shocks.  These shocks....

First off, look at these shafts.  Most shock shafts are built on ground, that's been grooved and threads put at one end.  This shaft, you can see, has a smaller diameter where the threads are, and a smaller diameter where the piston clips are.  The center section is larger diameter and polished.  This... is a more complex part.  And a better part.

The shock body threads are perfect.  The threads on the adjusters are perfect.  Nothing wanted to cross thread.  the annodization is thick and hard, so everything wasn't chewing the coatings off.

The pistons are machined, and etched with the piston hole diameters.



The shock shaft seals are x-rings, and you get two seals per shock.  There's a 3.5 mm spacer between the seals.  There's a lower shock guide.  There's spacers inside each shock to ensure there's reasonable fluid volume below the pistons when they're fully extended.  The spring perches have holes to let schmoo drop through.

These are good shocks.

And it doesn't stop there.  The car came with two shock oils.  Usually a manufacturer will just ship with "ok" oil.  You get two full bottles of 32.5 and 37.5 oil.

This, is a really good kit.  And everything about the car screams quality.  I can only hope the 22X-4 is this good of a kit.  This is, by far, the best kit I've assembled.  And I have assembled what I consider to be really good kits in the past. 

It's worth mentioning, the last Losi kit I built, was my LXT back in.. oh.. 1996?  Something like that.  That kit needed some hand fettling, but it wasn't a bad experience.

This car needs a name.  Something that's not letter soup.  With both the 2wd and 4wd cars being named 22 something there's definitely some brand dilution going on there.  I should be nice, Losi has never been good with names.

So.. that's where we're ending for today.  I'm sitting here, gluing up tires, and waiting for my electronics package to arrive.  When that comes in, expect a full review.