We bought one of these, to replace the flame throwing Desert Fox.

I’ve swapped out the Deans (gah!) connector and flipped the ESC to LiPO mode. Its running well on the 2S 4000mAh LiPOs I originally bought for the ‘Fox.

Thoughts

Its been a great car for us, pretty trouble free in use. The lad loves its speed and the traction the 4x4 gives him, even in really thick mud it makes its way out without trouble. Jumping is great fun, it always lands well without breaking anything.

If pushed, I would say I dislike the pillow ball front steering mounts. They are definitely a weak spot of the car, the slightest thump on either of the front wheels has them popping off.

This presents two issues, firstly the dog bone from the side which popped out, typically also falls out. Now thats easy enough to put back in, but if the car was travelling at speed and you didn’t see exactly where it was when the ball came out, then you are now searching for a small dog bone. Typically in the grass or worse still, in the mud 🙁. After loosing a couple of dog bones I noticed that Helion sell universal drive shafts, where the drive shaft is attached to the axle. Ok, this isn’t the reason you’d normally upgrade but it did mean that when the ball popped out, the drive shaft would at least still be attached to the wheel, meaning no more searching for a missing shaft!

The second issue is what to do when the ball pops off. Technically you should remove the wheel, remove the little plastic nut that holds the ball in, replace the ball, screwing into the suspension arm, then replace the plastic nut and finally put the wheel back on. That all takes a few mins, you’ll end up covered in mud but its not so hard. The other way - which is the way I ended up doing it most of the time (given an impatient 7 year old hopping around desperate to get his car back on the road) - is to push the ball back into the steering upright from the wrong side. They go in fairly easily, using the ground or a tree to hold the wheel square and giving it a good thump. The problem this brings of course is it is stretching the opening meaning the ball is now more likely to pop off.

We’ve found that it doesn’t make it so bad, over the 2 years we ran the car I probably replaced the steering arms a couple of times, they are pretty cheap and for me the cost of replacing them was outweighed by the speed to get the car back on the road.

Electronics failure

After more than two years bashing it around, and almost completely submerging it in muddy water on multiple occasions, the ESC finally gave in. I’m not sure how long to expect these things to last, but it had a fairly hard life and kit electronics are never known to be the best so I wasn’t too bothered. I found a guy on the MS UK forums selling a Hobby Wing clone, which was water proof and would be slightly quicker, so we grabbed that and swapped it over. Back to bashing!

The (temporary?) retirement of the Dominus

We’ve recently (Myself, my son and my daughter) have got into 1/10 buggy racing. In an effort to allow at least two of us to race at the same time I’ve built up two race cars. The second of which lacked any electronics, so in a (very mature) conversation with the lad, we agreed to loan the electronics from the Dominus to the B64 I built for the kids. So the Truck is on a shelf in the loft, its all in good order as a roller, just lacking any electronic bits!

Videos

I’ve shot a few videos of the kid bashing around with it, which you can see below.

On the hill at Bratton in Wiltshire

In the woods at home

In a dusty carpark in Devon

Gallery