Marshall Banana’s RC Action

Diff Lesson

Been a novice means you are always learning. Some lessons are easy, oh my, the car turns to the right when i turn the wheel to the right, and some are a little harder and you don’t see them coming.

The lesson learnt above falls into the latter. The trained RC ear would have heard there was a problem with their DB01, and pulled over, taking it apart and working out the issue. My ear heard no problem and continued on, the first sign of trouble been a lack of rear drive as my 4 wheel drive turned into 2.

Eventually got around to taking the diff apart, and was shocked to find out what had happened. The first clue was when diff balls fell out of the drivetrain when I took the covers off. I thought that rather odd, so continued on, thinking the diff had become loose. I took the diff out, and noticed the pulley was moving very freely.

I removed the diff screw and thought something along the lines of “holy shit-cakes batman”. I’d melted the diff, completely destroying the pulley and melting the diff rings into the diff ring holders. It was a mess. Luckily it was only the rear, the front diff looked very nice.

I loaded up the trusty internet and started to search for people in similar situations. It didn’t take long. Seems that if i had have researched a little better, i would have known that this same situation was happening to DB-01 users all over the world. The thing we all had in common was High Powered Brushless setups. Although the drive train was designed and built to handle them, the diff joints were not. With it been a combination of metal and plastic, and the use of glue to hold the diff rings on it just wasn’t going to cut it. This user on the oople.com forum sums up what happened best:

“The diff plates are glued in place on the DB-01, which is great when you have little load on them, but when you put a 6.5 in it, the loading on the rear diff is significantly higher, so the glue ends up cracking, the plates then start to slip, everything heats up, and then you got a molten mass in the rear pulley.”

- http://www.oople.com/forums/showpost.php?p=214596&postcount=7

So the path forward is to get the TRF501X diff joints (part #51286) which are up to the task, and a direct drop in replacement. So they have been ordered and are been flown to this wonderful land as we speak. They are a little more pricey then the standard plastic DB01 replacement, but its only going to happen again so I may as well fix it for good.

I’m also going to finish off the car with the “essential” hopups. Aluminium suspension mounts and front uni’s will hopefully give me an edge against the competition (you know who you are) and hopefully a more reliable car.

Another lesson learned.