Mechanical abuse

Or....how to waste about $600 in a week.

Recently, after having replaced the piston/liner/rod in my off-road buggy engine (OS.21VZB V-Spec), I went to the track to do a spot of tuning. After having some real trouble trying to get a consistent run out of it, I started to attack the track with a little too much enthusiasm (read: hitting all the jumps at full noise). At some point, most likely during one of the rather heavy landings, the air filter popped off the engine (that's bad, mmmkay?) and I did around 6 or so laps sucking all manner of dirt/grit into my nice new piston/liner :-( Scratch $125 worth of parts right there.

Not to be dissuaded from my current addiction to all things R/C, I put a new piston/liner/rod (which I had on hand for just such an occasion) in the engine and ran it in. Now, it should be noted at this point that it seemed to run faultlessly throughout the entire running in procedure. Revved out exceptionally well after run in and idled like a dream. All good, right? Wrong.

I put the car away until race day on Sunday, at which point I couldn't get it to run. It would start ok, but then wouldn't rev out. Then, after it got hot, it wouldn't idle. Then, it wouldn't start at all. So, after missing the start of my heat, I went back to my pits and pulled the engine out to have a closer look at it. After blowing it off with the compressor, I found a nice crack running along the entire bottom of the crankcase :-( That's also bad, mmmkay? Scratch another $125 worth of piston/liner/rod, plus a crankcase. Basically, that means a replacement engine, at around $400 or so.

Turns out when I replaced the first piston/liner/rod, I neglected to check the crank pin on the bottom end. A fellow racer gave me the tip after I displayed my newly destroyed crankcase to all and sundry in an attempt to share the grief. When I got it home, I stripped the engine down completely and checked the crank pin with another V-Spec engine I have. Sure enough, it's nowhere near the right size/shape anymore. Looks like it's been letting the bottom of the rod contact the case and....well....the rest is history :-(

Bugger.

Fast toys!

Considering how shit the kite season has been so far, I decided to find something else to do while there's no wind. Years ago, I used to race 1/10th scale nitro powered radio controlled road cars. Lots of fun, but not very well organised, so when the engine in my one and only car finally died, I gave it away. I recently sold my R/C helicopter and one of my large R/C planes, so I had some spare cash kicking around and decided I might like to try my hand at 1/8th scale off-road buggies this time.

I popped in to one of the local hobby shops to see what was around and there was a second hand car in there, complete with absolutely everything I needed to get going. Turns out it was a Hobao Hyper 8 Pro with an O.S. .21 VZB V-Spec engine in it. The guy had spared no expense and had a ton of extra bits and pieces with it (including a whole, near new V-Spec engine that he had blown up on its very first run!), so it ended up being a steal :-)

I'm still struggling with the fact that the car spends half of its time off the ground.....it's a lot different to on-road racing, that's for sure! I'm slowly getting a handle in it though. It *is* a hell of a lot of fun too :-)