The truck was a very smooth build (it is a Tamiya kit after all) and took me about 1.5 days to complete.

I stripped out the bearings from my Juggernaut 2 truck and installed them here but was surprised to find that some of the shafts in the gearbox had been thickened so some of my bearings didn't fit. Fortunately Tamiya provided bearing for all those shafts so I didn't need to waste time running down to the hobby store for parts.

The Juggernaut 2 also donated it's GPM machined motor plate with heatsinks installed. Check out these and other simple mods below.

The Add-Ons

On the left you see some Tamiya Steering rods I picked up cheap in Japan. They were meant for the Juggernaut but fit fine on the TXT-1. The rod for the rear steering lockout was a different length so I used the one included in the kit. The other pictures show the blue aluminium hardware I put into the truck, as well as the blue booties to cover the universals (keeps dirt out for longer wear). If you look at the last pic carefully, you'll see the beautifully machined Tamiya heatsinks on the 14-turn motors - should keep things running cool.

The Gear

On the left you'll see the Super Rooster ESC to handle the juice to the motors. Since I'm running pretty hot motors, I installed a cooling fan to keep the ESC temperature in check. You can also see the small plastic plate I made to mount the receiver from my Futaba 3PJ controller. The third picture shows the 8.4V 2000mah battery I wired up just for this ride (I've always been using off-the-shelf stick packs). Dean's Ultra-Plugs ensure minimum power loss over connections. Next couple of pics show the general layout of all the components on my truck. The fact that the motors are centrally mounted on this truck means that there are no long wires to run through the truck link on Clods. Last picture shows the underside of the truck - that multi-link setup is just too cool!

The Shell

Here are some pics of the HPI F150 truck body. Tamiya provides a very beautiful body with the kit that's already painted, but I didn't use it because (1) it's too nice to run with and (2) my truck would look just like many other TXT-1's out there. A simple paint job was adopted that took me about 3 hrs to fully complete... as with my Wildfang project, I decided to leave the bed clear to show the cool cantilever-setup underneath. Lighting wasn't great in these pics so I'll try to snap better ones in the future.

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