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....
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.
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