I must say, i have just bought a Master Smacker & believe it or not i raced it at Ardent at the weekend in the winter series. Main reason i bought it was because the chassis on my main car has bust & i couldn't get a replacement part in time for the weekend, so the choice was pull out of the event, or spend half of Saturday trawling up & down the M6 until i found a model shop with the parts i needed to fix my Tamiya in stock or just buy a cheap car & turn up to have a giggle, so on friday afternoon i went to the local model shop & got the Smacker & built it ready to take to club on Friday night knowing full well on Sunday i'd just be making up the numbers.
I have to say a few things, i took the car to club on Friday (literally within an hour after i finished building it) for a shakedown & the spur stripped within a lap, i then discovered why, there is a lot of flex in the chassis so when meshing the spur/pinion always fix the top deck, i didn't 1st time so when i bolted the top on, the chassis lined up & made the mesh way too tight, so on that basis the manual is not a good thing to go off if like me you built the car as per the book followng the page order. I spent most of Saturday morning & afternoon rebuilding the car & undoing all the cock-ups that the manual had pointed me towards, thankfully i had a spare spur gear handy so all was not lost & i didn't have to buy any bits. Another thing is the pinion that comes in the kit is a heavy old Brass lump, so fitting a .6 pinion from a Tamiya will fit & shouldn't risk bending the motor shaft because of the weight, thankfully i had a few handy so swapped the heavy brass 22 pinion for a nice light alloy 22 Tamiya one.
With regards the build, the manual also implies you should fit the drivetrain (both diffs & the main prop) before the steering arms & servo saver assembly, this however is completely wrong & totally useless because before you can fit the servo saver assembly you have to remove the centre driveshaft, which means one of the gearbox assemblies has to be removed to get the centre shaft out, so fit the Servo Saver assembly 1st before starting on page 1 of the manual.
Another gripe i have with the car is with the wheels/tyres, not so much the kit ones as i didn't run them, but if you want to fit aftermarket tyres & rims (i ran wide mini-pins on the rear), you need wheels with a wide offset because standard off-set rear dished rims won't go on at the back end & foul on the wishbone & the hub / upper arm, thankfully Fastrax do the wide offset rims & i had some handy to graft mini-pins onto after a quick boiling session to get the tyres off the standard rims. the car is as wide with the wide off-set tyres (all round) as my mate's kyosho Laser ZX5 & is just about as long.
To be fair on Sunday the car didn't do to bad, my intention was to not come last with it & i have to say job done & I really think i could if i'd been more aggressive with my driving & not held back so much i could of got it higher up. i stuck in a 9t ezrun motor & 35a ESC (didn't fancy risking anything more potent just yet) & was running cells & initially took my time to get round, not breaking any records just pootling round to get the feel of the car & not driving it like a spanner in case i broke something. I had to make a few adjustments such as the rear shocks really needed to be filled with lighter oil (about 20wt) as it tends to rebound on landing from jumps so i couldn't fly the big tabletop jump without it ending up on the cars roof & one of the shocks started weeping on the friday night, a quick rebuild & it was fine, the only other problem is when jumping, the car tends to nosedive so you have to take the smaller jumps slow on the approach & then nail the throttle as soon as you get any air to level the car out.
Mostly the problems i had were down to battery problems. because the battery tends to fly out, so tape it in by wrapping tape over the strap, but i also had a cell come off the battery bar in one heat & a connector fail, this could be down to bad soldering (using that lead free solder isn't the best for making cells) or simply because the cells rattled themselves loose with vibration, only time will tell. In the last qualifier i drove the car a bit harder than i had done with the intention of getting a good run in, however the transponder wasn't working so it didn't pick up any times, gutted. Still i managed to get it into 6th in the E final. Another problem is the shock bottoms tend to work loose, this may be because i was running with no adjustment spacers fitted & the droop was not set.
Question is now, do i run the car again at the next round or switch to my Tamiya.. i may just sell the Tamiya & buy an X4 if the smacker is anything to go on, but i hope the build manual is better!
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