Building the TRF201
So i’ve been buggy racing for a year now and have changed my 2wd buggy. When I started last year I wanted a 2wd buggy with metric screws and a good quality build. That’s why I chose the Kyosho RB5, I have to say it is an awesome buggy and if the mighty Tamiya hadn’t released the TRF 201 I wouldn’t buy any other buggy.
I’ve decided to do a bit of a step by step build with a few choice hop ups (some not so!) and some photos to add to the experience.
Step 1 was the differential. I hate diffs, there’s no getting away from them in 2wd it seems. There’s a really good diff building guide on TRFracing.co.uk well worth a read. Basically I sanded the diff rings with 800 and then 1500 grade wet n dry paper, added some rcLazy.com ceramic diff balls and thrust race bearings. Very smooth first time out.
Nice touch from Tamiya was the addition of the blue anodised diff lock nut.
Assemble the gearbox and use plenty of ceramic grease to lube those gears. Si swears by teflon spray [GT85, but recently I've been preferring grease too - Si.] and it seems pretty good, I like the grease tho. It’s your call.
One change I did want to do was switch out the standard idler gear for an RW delrin one. Annoyingly none were available so I picked up a couple of spare Tamiya ones. Hopefully it was just a dodgy batch of first gears and it’s all hunky dory now.
OK first major hop up, the motor plate. Advertised as saving 38g over the standard plate. Frivolous purchase but weight saving! Got to be done. Don’t believe the hype, standard plate, 19g- lightweight plate, 15g. Never worth it, stick with the standard one.
Anyway gearbox made, all sorted. Onto the next hops ups.
We find ourselves needing new ball studs. Tamiya seems to have a poor reputation in buggies for using a ball stud made of cheese. People switch out the cheese ones for a hard hex version, or go the whole hog for Hot Bodies balls and Losi or RPM imperial cups. Clearly as my 511 uses HB balls and Losi (white) ballcups I am going to do the same for the 201. (Sorry Si, it’s abit of a Marmite thing, love it or hate it). No-one in the entire world sells HB ballstuds. It’s official. I found some 3 racing Ti ones as a direct replacement. Nice, and how cool is it that Tamiya provide Ti anodised turnbuckles?! Awesome.
3 degree blue bling suspension blocks for you sir? Why thanks, yes I will. Nice upgrades and they allow flippability to drop the rear end down for a bit more anti-squat.
Rear wishbones and hubs are lifted directly from the 511 as are the driveshafts. Makes carrying spares a bit easier if you have a 511. I added some heatshrink round the rear cross joint pins for a bit of security.
Front end went together really well too, slight need to shave a bit of material from the wishbones to mount on the inner bulkhead. Whilst here I changed the metric front axles to the optional imperial ones. Good move from Tamiya so everyone can use their Losi, Schumacher or Associated 2wd front wheels. As my previous ride was the RB5 my front wheels are all hex versions but now I can steal Simon’s, Bob’s and Matt’s - happy days! Although I have bought some Schumacher slim wheels for the ubiquitous staggered ribs.
More titanium ball studs to finish off the front end and the Losi ball cups on the blue ti turnbuckles. I have to say top marks to Tamiya for providing some very handy hop ups already in the box. To buy Ti turnbuckles and HL shocks and shafts from Tamiya, would have cost half the value of the kit alone.
Here’s the full list of options I added
Tamiya
54243 Suspension Mount 3.0 rear
54225 Lightweight Motor Plate
54242 Suspension Mount 3.0 front
54220 Front axle imperial
54205 Aluminium damper bushing
54221 Front spring set
54211 Rear wing set
54210 Body set
U3766 Schumacher narrow front wheels
3racing 4.3mm Ti ballstuds 10mm
Reality Racing 4.3mm Ti ballstuds 13mm
Rudebits 50g brass plate, under lipo tray
Losi A6015 Natural ball cups
Lazy Goo Is Racer Tool Of The Month
I don’t know that Racer Mag are trying to say to us, but we’re Tool Of The Month!
Lazy Goo is proving exceptionally popular, and orders are going out all over the world.
Have you got some yet? Let us know what you think.
Lazy Bearings Now In Stock
We’ve received the first delivery of a range of popular ball raced bearings.
We’ve got sizes for hubs of most of the race cars in use today, as well as diff carrier bearings, and other ones too.
They are jolly good quality, ABEC-3 steel balls. Double rubber sealed.
We will expand this range once we gauge popularity.
You can buy them online now at Lazy Bearings
Associated TC6 Live Build Workshop
We’re at it again, we’re hosting another live build workshop, this coming Saturday, 29th January 2011 between 11am and 5pm.
This time we’re building a lovely Associated TC6 touring car, these are supposed to be darned quick, and we’ve got our hands on one thanks to a willing volunteer who wants us to help him build it.
It will be streamed LIVE over the internet all day long.
There are a VERY limited amount of spaces if you’d like to join us at the work bench in the shop to build it with us.
You can buy tickets here.
New Lazy Balls for 12th Cars
We’ve just got some smashing new balls in stock, 1/8″ suitable for a wide range of 1/12th cars.
You can buy them here Lazy Balls 1/8″
They’re in packs of 12 for £7, free postage on balls!
We’ve also go various diff greases in stock, and a variety of diff rings in too.
Buy them today!
PetitRC Race 2011 Day 2
Day Two? Sunday.
And then, there was a Sunday too.
We got there around 6:30am, just as the top boys were hitting the track for practice. The track was virtually the same, just one jump moved and the table top reprofiled.
Most of the drivers liked the track, saying it was easy, a touring car tracks with a few bumps and one big jump.
Just one round of practice, and then onto four rounds of qualifying.
My practice was okay, though the car was a bit of a handful, so I didn’t string together 3 decent laps.
Qualifying
First qualifying and I popped in a 13 lapper, which was okay, but then I seemed to spend the rest of the day wrenching on something or other.
Rounds 2 and 3 were rubbish, but finally round 4 came about a 14 lapper, and another J final position.
Noteable amusement was wondering what the funny burning smell was, and then some hours later mark spotting my power wire trapped under the prop shaft…
Mark had placed his 511 into the I final, Rob was in the J with me, and Matt was down in the L final.
Finals
The 4wd finals seemed to be about either racing or going big and trying to break the car.
In my final my first lap I accidentally went big, I wasn’t actually meaning too, and it ended up under the raffle table “was that a car?” I heard someone say, so I guess I wasn’t going to be doing any winning. The car stayed in one piece for a few laps, and then the servo saver, err, saved my servo.
Rob went on to throw the win away, backing off too much and ended up second.
No idea what Mark did in his final, we were all getting a bit tired by this point…
The A finals were ace, with Bradders on top, showing that AE is still a force to be reckoned with. The rest of the field showed maximum skill, racing in a nose to tail train the whole race at cracking speeds, I could visibly see them going faster than I did. That’s why I’m not in the A then…
After the last A, a bonkers UFO race took place, which was basically a jumping competition. Hupo won with his car nearly in the roof, it broke on landing, though… And scared the pants off Kathryn.
Prizes, and then a raffle where I took no prizes ended a superb weekend.
Kat and I chose to stay another night in the hotel, and a nice leisurely drive home on Monday afternoon.
Ace weekend!
The Gallery
Extra Bonus Special Fantastic Gallery
PetitRC Race 2011 Day 1
Day One? Saturday.
Wowah, here we go then.
People seemed to start moving around the hotel at 5:45am… Phone calls were made, who’s up?
We rolled out at 6:30am, the car park almost empty. A brief tour of the KFC car park and we found a road.
I lost Matt who was behind me due to the sheer power of the fairy powered Focus. Actually, no, they went to McDonalds, and for Mark to vomit… Oh dear, he really did drink too much. But, he outlasted his new FRIEND Belsten, who was found asleep in the car park late evening.
The track was chocka, the pits are full, extra tables a go-go, awesome atmosphere already.
Practise started, and the track looked nice, straight forward, with an entertaining tabletop, but it should really reward some close driving, some good battles are for sure.
And my car actually worked, handled nice, perfect.
Second practice, as there was the smell of burning rubber in the air. A lot of dremelling action going on. Stagger ribs pushing a little, and minipins too grabby, so cutting both in various ways was happening.
I decided to be more aggresive with the car, and I improved, the car was nice.
Bacon bagettes were jolly nice, and everyone seems happy, a nice relaxed atmosphere going on.
Team Durango are running late prototypes, in mid motor configuration. They requested no shell off photos. The cars are close to production, the geometry etc is sorted, but the materials are to be changed a lot from the prototype.
Qualifying is just starting!
The qualifying is sorted very strangely. Rob Nelson has optimized it to allow maximum use of the track and time without breaks anywhere in the day.
Using the driver’s best three consecutive laps the qualifying is sorted from practice. So the top 8 heats (forget trucks exist for now) go off first, the best first. Then, from heat 9 we start from the worst again.
So I seem to have pre-qualified around 90th (out of 130 or whatever), with the rest of the Lazy team behind me by a heat or two.
Qualifying
Round one was all a bit rubbish for me, I forgot how to drive, the car seemed lumpy and I made loads of mistakes. The rest of the Lazy team also had poor runs. So poor that Mikey Scott went faster than all of us, kudos.
Up at the top, Jorn Neumann was leading, with the Durango DEX210 prototype. I have to admit, the car looks sweet, I can see myself trying one of those…
We all got wrenching, I decided to do a new diff, and all was happy.
Then we had a nice pie.
Round two was a good run, I was going well, oh, until I missed the landing off the tabletop. And then Mark took about a week to marshall me. Somehow I was still on an improving run after this incident, until all power went on my final lap, no idea what happened…
It transpired that the diff had come unscrewed!? I think I might have put it in back to front. Oh dear. Amateur.
Round 3 the car was great, pushing on nicely, Mark once again had marshalling challenges with my car. I swear he gets all nervous in the fulfilment of important tasks.
The start of Round 4 saw the top heat guys battle away, Jorn and Lee wheel to wheel, with Lee taking TQ under a lot of pressure. We gotta say though, that mid-motor Durango was looking quicker than the rear-motor Tamiya on this track today. The A finals will tell the tale.
My performance in round 4 was my best of the day, 71st in round, woo!
So I ended up J3 in the finals (it went down to the N final!), Mark J3, Matt K7 and Rob L1. I’ve no idea how I went quicker than the others, clearly it was all down to Trish’s setup or something.
Finals
Adam Showtime Lewis went out and DOMINATED the N final, the crowds loved it. Same tomorrow then?
Around about this time Kat turned up with healthy snacks. And cake! Excellent fuel for finals.
Bob went out in his L final, was leading it for a while, but ended up third, Fribbers getting past him somehow. What was Fribbers doing in that final, I thought he was quite good?
Matt raced his final, but for the life of me I can’t remember what happened. We just don’t get good value out of Matt… Hmm, contract renegotiation time I think…
Me and Mark went out in the J final, and had a ball! I ended up 8th after a nudge on the first lap, and then battled away back up to third! The car was great, a lot of people said it was looking good – pity I couldn’t drive it any harder. Never mind. Mark whizzed from 9th up to 4th, just 3 seconds behind me. (Don’t tell him I was trying to slow down so he could catch me for a showbiz ending…)
Up at the top the three legs of the A-final were awesome racing. Lee and Jorn battled out the first two legs, each winning one. So the third leg was the big decider. Lee and Jorn raced nose to tail for 3 or 4 minutes, spectacular stuff. And somehow Jorn made a mistake and Craggy ended up in the mix! Great fun, a few more incidents and Hupo was up with the pack.
Lee got it done and pulled out the win. Oh yeah. The crowd love it.
Ceremony
There was a bit of a bun fight for the raffle (tickets stuck to smaller prizes), I won a cap. The big prizes are for tomorrow’s raffle, same tickets.
Then the prizes were handed out, some nice pit boards painted by some guy called Graham Smith? And our logo was on there! Woo!
Lots of pictures were taken with trophy girls, and then we all demolished piles of t-shirts. Good jaaaab.
Back to the hotel, and now time for bed, got it all to do again tomorrow.
The Gallery
PetitRC Race 2011 Day 0
Day Zero? Friday
Up at 6am, I was in the shop at half past to load up stuff into the car. By 7am I had lost my wallet.
Apologies to Kathryn for having a massive hissy fit, but 15 minutes of searching found it behind the drivers seat!?
We trundled up to Mark’s and ate his bacon (on white bread!) whilst waiting for Matt.
Hitting the road, Kat and I took a car full of stuff up the A34 whilst Rob was picked up.
Several hours later, with a surpring lack of traffic, we ended up at Ardent.
The pits were fairly busy, practice well underway. There was talk of the blue carpet being mega-grippy, and when we hit the track we found out it really was.
Somehow the carpet setups we had on our cars didn’t work at all, so a frantic couple of hours finding driveable setups were spent (cheers Trish!)
Kat ran around taking photos and she even found some goats and an old tractor.
I proclaimed I wasn’t going to break anything this weekend. So of course my next three practice runs ended in front end breakages. The last of which snapped the front end of the Cougar big time. Rich Lowe happily showed most of the pits the error of my ways, cheers chap.
And then, the track was closed! A full rebuild ready for Saturday.
So we all slunk back to the hotel for car rebuilding action. And a little snooze too 
Our hotel had a good few dozen racers staying in it, so as it was Mark’s 33rd birthday, we all had a jolly good larf in the bar.
And he was pleased as punch with his Tamiya birthday cake (made by Kat, she’s dead ace you know), and the photos with the TRF guys!
We’ve snook back to the room for blogging action whilst the party continued, and whilst the TORCH committee meeting took place.
Early start in the morning, the track opens at 6am and practise starts an hour later…
Gallery
PetitRC Race 2011 Preview
We’re almost ready, our race kit is packed, our team support supplies are packed. Our pants aren’t yet packed.
We’re heading up to Derby to Ardent Raceway for the PetitRC Cultural Race 5th Edition 2011 first thing on Friday morning.
Somewhat strangely, we’ve been chosen as official web press partners, so we’re going to be blogging here throughout the weekend. In our usual fashion it will consist of lots of (hopefully amusing) words of our own racing experiences of the event.
We’ll also try and cover what’s going on at the heady heights of the top of the results, if we have a ladder tall enough.
Up the top we have names such as Lee Martin, Marc Rheinard, Andy Moore, Neil Cragg, Hupo Honigl, Jorn Neumann, Shin Adashi, Mikey Scott and many many more coming to the UK for the event from all over the world.
Photo galleries will be appearing at the bottom of each day too. If we have the time and inclination, we might post a YouTube video or two direct from our phones, if we’re not rushed off our feet fixing our cars.
Live streaming is expected by bbkRClive - bbk are providing their expert timekeeping services throughout the event.
Comments are welcome throughout the event, comment below and it’ll reach us directly, as well as appearing on the site. Let us know what you think, what you want to see, and general messages of support.
PetitRC Preparations
(Picture explanation: Mark tried taking a picture of the threadlock accidentally attached to my power wire, but the camera, of course, instead focused on my massive bald head… Good camera skillz Marky…) Maybe next time you ‘ll threadlock the tube to your head to make it easier for a photo – Mark
It’s all busy here at Lazy Towers, orders are flooding in for balls, goo, tyres and spares. And we’re rebuilding cars for the PetitRC race in a few days time.
As usual, I’ve not touched my own cars for weeks, since the last time I raced, so a thorough strip down was in order.
I found quite a few things that I’d damaged, so spares were taken off the shelf, and orders have just been made to Schumacher and Durango for more bits required.
So, I currently have two cars unbuilt waiting for parts. I guess I really should have done this weeks ago, but, you know.
The PetitRC race is approaching fast. Arguably the biggest event on the UK calendar with 175 entrants, with 28 hours of racing over 2 days.
We’ll be blogging live from the event, and it will be streamed live by bbk.
Can’t wait!
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