Remote Control Rock Crawler Build!

You love the Sick trucks built on the show. You love the trail payoffs. Well, today on Xtreme 4x4, you're gonna get both. When Ian builds this wicked too buggy from scratch,

then decides to put it on its lid.

Yeah. Right.

And not to be outdone our S 10 truckie returns on a smaller scale.

There is no question that having an off road rig is a blast. They are 18 different kinds of fun. They're fun to build, they're fun to work on and most importantly, they are a blast to drive. Now, if you've never had the opportunity to get some seat time in an off road crawler to give you an idea what it's like. Oh, it's kind of like driving a giant remote control car with you at the wheel.

You can crawl over anything that gets in your way. You can drive fast, you can drive slow. And if the worst case scenario happens and you end up putting this rig on its lid, all you gotta do is roll it back over. Keep driving

with full size rigs being so similar to RC cars. It isn't any surprise that the world of remote control modeling would expand into full on scale rock crawlers.

And no, these are not just some toys, these are seriously hardcore miniature crawlers designed to handle the same terrain as the full size toys.

So today we're gonna take a closer look at this part of our hobby. And yes guys who are into RC crawling, take time behind the controller just as seriously as we full size guys take time behind the wheel. And for good reason,

they're damn fun.

The first rig we're going to look at is the low

cmrc or miniature rock crawler. It is a 1/18 scale crawler that is ready to go right out of the box.

The suspension flex is just like a full scale rig and with a little bit of practice, you can do some impressive crawling with this little beast.

Now, just like a full size rig, you can modify these small RC cars with a whole host of aftermarket parts and components to remove any of the weak links. And these truly are scaled down versions of a full size crawler. If you pull the body off and look underneath, you'll see a small electric motor that turns a transfer case to drive

shafts to travel down to two solid axles that are mounted on a link suspension with coil over shocks. Now, just like a real rig, the first thing we're going to do here is we're going to tackle the center of gravity. We want to get it a lot lower, so it's more stable. Now, the easiest way to do that with an RC car is to remove the battery from up high on this tray, mount it down on the axle

with the tires off. We can replace the outer knuckles on the front steering axle with some heavy duty aluminum units

inside the axle. We'll remove the plastic lockers and replace them with some heavy duty metal ones to keep them from stripping out.

And finally, a set of bent lower links will give our little crawler more ground clearance and prevent us from getting high centered.

And the last upgrade we want to do to our little MRC is a set of tires. Now, these are loi

rock claw blue series competition tires. The compound is a little bit stickier and they're a little bit softer so they conform to the rocks. Now, the one downfall to the MRC is that it doesn't come from the factory with true bead locks. The bead locks that are on here are just simulated bead locks and the tire is actually glued into a small group.

Now, you really wanna have bead locks on your remote control crawler for one reason, it's not to keep the lip from coming off when aired down because there's no air in these tires. It's because the torque of the motor will actually cause the plastic rim to spin inside the tire and then you'll have no traction. That's why they glue the tires onto the rim. Now, there is one modification that you can do to the stock wheels using a piece of PV C pipe, have a set of bead locks for less than two bucks

by cutting three quarter inch strips out of two inch PV C pipe. We'll have an inner liner to fit inside the rim.

We'll drill a hole to let the air out from the inside of the tire and we'll essentially have a liner and a dual bead lock set up

right away. The modifications we made to our MRC are noticeable. New metal lockers ensured that we had full time four wheel drive whenever we needed it.

And the new lower center of gravity and the new bead locks kept the rig planted to the ground

up. Next, he's known as Crawling Coles and we'll check out his mini masterpieces when Xtreme 4x4 continues.

Welcome back to extreme as we scale down the show a bit from full size to 110 scale to be exact.

This is RC Crawling RC as in remote control. And guys who are into pebble pounding are just as serious about their minis as we are about our full size rigs.

I mean, these guys even have their own technical jargon,

uh bully axles, mayhem wheels, ultra comps, T one E chassis FX R speed control, hot bodies, river tires,

kamikaze lower

links, head up axial uh body on it.

Some are designed for speed

others, it's torque, not power, it'll get you up over these rocks.

Matthew Coles and Mike King are hardcore fabricators of these many monsters.

We heard rumors on the interweb that one of these guys had built a near exact scale replica of our s 10 drugging.

And here it is.

So why did you decide to build a scale model

time?

Well, I build it for, uh, the MS D scale nationals in Montana

And um I want to build something pretty sick and see me yesterday on the show and I just had to build it.

The attention to detail on this thing is insane.

I

want to make sure that I have the same wheels as close as I can get. Then MS D wheels are pretty much dead on to the, the 11 wheels. And I also want to get the color pretty close, which is kind of close.

And then I, I want to get the tube work as close as I can.

So I watched a lot, I watched the episodes and looked at the truck and try to get my chassis as close on as I could.

I say, I probably have about 1520 hours in that truck, maybe less, maybe more. I don't know. And I started off doing the chassis. I got the body and build the chassis to sit around. The body went to my S 10 shell chassis is all custom based off your chassis. I have a 10 axial axles and transmission in there.

And when I do all the tube work, I use the majority of brake line. So all the tubing on here except for the sliders and the stinger, everything else is brake line and the sliders and the stinger are solid rod because they're gonna take a beating. I want it to be a little bit stronger and I braise everything together with a map torch. I use map, gas and silver solder

in the interior. I made a little speaker box. It doesn't work but has to look just like the speaker box in the 11. And I custom made the seats in the dashboard, the console,

put the green led s in there,

custom made the light bar and made the light bar bracket on

Mattis turned this hobby into a full time gig. Custom building these mini machines in his basement for clients from Bristol to Baghdad.

I've been building scale RC Crawler trucks

probably for about five years now. And I built the first scale truck. One of the first ones I built was an S 10 just like this one,

but it was a regular body. Had the two bed and I end up shipping that truck to a guy in France

and I built a Chevy Blazer. I shipped to a guy in Japan

and I have trucks all over the country and some all over the world too.

One thing, minis and full size rigs have in common

breakage.

Oh, man, I lost a lot of stuff,

carnage.

The seat fell out. We lost the top of the fuel cell here

and

the body came off.

Seats just velcroed in.

Now, obviously take a spill like that in a 1 to 1 rig. And you're gonna need more than Velcro to put it back together. You'll also probably be spending some time at the hospital getting yourself put back together. Now, Matt charges about 500 bucks to do a rolling chassis and just about $1000 to build you a turnkey scaled version of a rig.

Now, I'm telling you right now, they are honestly just as much fun to drive as the full size ones.

Welcome back to Xtreme 4x4 where today we're having an up close look at remote control rock crawlers, a really cool aspect of our sport. Now, we've already gone ahead and fixed up this little low cmrc crawler

to make it handle some serious terrain when we take it out. Now, we're gonna step up the ladder a little bit and look at a larger rig. This is a 1/10 scale crawler. Now, this is the type of crawler you'll see actually out competing

scale rock crawling competitions and this is an axial A X 10 scorpion. Now, this is a new version of the Scorpion. If you wanted one of these before you had to put it together yourself. But this is a ready to crawl version right out of the box, plug a battery in and you're ready to go. Now, the drive train in this thing is pretty beefy as it is, but we can do one upgrade to make it handle the train a little bit better. And that's replace these plastic links with a full aluminum chassis.

I'm sure some of you guys are wondering why, go to all this trouble, why buy a remote control car and then tear it apart just to make it better. Well, it's no different than what we do with trail trucks all the time. You wheel it a little bit and you wanna be able to tackle harder obstacles. That's exactly what we're gonna do with this buggy here

by installing the all aluminum chassis. We upgrade the suspension links from plastic to aluminum, gives us more articulation and allows us to hit larger rocks.

As I'm sure you guys have figured out by now working on these small remote control crawlers is just like working on a full scale rig. The only difference is, is you don't need a welder and you don't end up hitting your thumb as many times. But all the same principles apply by swapping over to this aluminum chassis. We end up with longer lower suspension links and that'll give us more articulation when we're driving this thing off road. Now, one thing you can do to a remote control car

that's very hard to do with a full size rig is that is move major components around for weight distribution. You can see here we move the speed controller down on the small plate on top of the lower links as well as put the battery on top of the rear axle. Now, what that did is removed it from the top side of this buggy to keep it from getting top heavy. That'd be very hard to do in a full size rig. Now, if you're working on a little crawler like this, just like working on a real rig, eventually, you're gonna get tired of working around an existing vehicle, whether it be a Jeep or a Toyota. Sooner or later, you're gonna wanna go out, buy some tube, build a tube buggy.

That's what we're gonna do. Now,

believe it or not, a lot of companies that are normally known for full scale rig building are starting to get into RC crawling. It's honestly that popular. Now, Trail Gear is one of those companies and we normally get stuff from them for our Toyotas or Suzuki's, but they've just launched Trail Gear RC and they sent us an entire selection of parts to build a full tube chassis crawler. Now, when you get it all spread out like this and you build one from scratch,

you can really see how similar they are to their full size brothers. Yeah, they have an electric motor and a speed controller instead of an engine. But the transfer case that we're gonna install in this little crawler is actually what's called a dig transfer case just like an Atlas too. It'll let us operate the front or rear axle independently. When you get inside the differentials themselves, you can really see how similar it is to a full size unit.

It's got a ring gear and then a locker inside this differential, two axle shafts that go out to turn the wheels and deep down inside there is even a small pinion. Now, it uses electric servos instead of full hydraulic steering. But the principle is still the same, just uses electricity instead of that hydraulic fluid, believe it or not, these have high end aluminum coil over shocks that you can even change the shock, oil weight in to determine how they react

when they're off road. Now, of course, oversized tires, but this time we're going to be installing them on functional dual bead locks with metal rings to help protect the bolts when we're out on the rocks. Now, all of it will be mounted onto this, a warthog full tube chassis. Now, this is a completely welded tube chassis with all the tabs needed to mount up the suspension and the other components. All we have to do now

is put it all together

all that after the break, plus back to the rocks to see how she does.

You know you've made it big

when you got your name on a little car.

Why

you,

now, if there's one area that can be a little confusing when dealing with an RC Crawler, that could be the electronics, but it's actually not that difficult. It's like most RC cars, you have a simple receiver that you mount inside the crawler and this will accept the input from your handheld remote control. Now, power will come out of this and head over to control the servers and the motor. Now our motor has an electronic speed control. Now, this will determine which way to crawler goes either forward or reverse and it's a digital signal. So you have a full control over how fast it travels. Now, the power will come out of that controller and go over to a brush less motor. Now, this electric motor obviously, if it turns one way crawler goes forward, if it turns backward, it goes the other way, you can see a small servo mounted on this dig transmission and that's also controlled by the controller to unlock and lock our rear axle to allow us to those front dicks. Now, everything is controlled with a handheld remote control and it's obviously pretty simple to understand you turn the steering wheel to turn the front wheels, hit the gas to go forward or back with this trigger. Now, this little button right here will be what determines the front and rear dig option because it's controlled by here. Just a simple servo throw. Now, all we have to do now is take all these electronics,

put them in our buggy.

Now, if you're like me and you had RC cars as a kid, you're probably used to a battery pack that is about that big and weighs a ton. Well, all these new crawlers use these small

lipo batteries and this is a full 7.2 volt battery. But the nice thing is you can mount it down low in the chassis like on the axle to keep the weight down. The last thing we have to do for our crawler is to cut out the body panels for our chassis and then put on our custom stickers.

One of the coolest things about driving an RC Crawler. If you can pull off lines, you wouldn't even try in a full size rig.

Uh.

Oh.

Oh,

but just like our full size trucks.

Our RC Crawler

can do a front d

activate the servo with the remote

lock, the rear axle, dig with the front tires, reage

the rear axle

and you got a whole new line.

So there you go, guys, you wanna get into some hardcore crawling, but don't want to spend a lot of money. You can break into the world of RC Crawlers for anywhere from 300 to 1000 bucks depending on what you wanna build. And in the end, you still get to put it together yourself.