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.