[Tweaky]

Hi, just like to share these pictures of my 2wd, 502x Hybrid. This has been in the back of my mind for a while but seeing Dave Burton’s DB1 conversion prompted me to give it a go. As I didn’t have all the Tamiya bits to hand I decided to build up a Schumacher SX3/Cougar Belt drive 2wd from parts I had. This was a great conversion, quite simple and with a minimal amount of new components, and it worked really well, even had an F1 grade driver using it for a while. Pictures of the Schuey conversion are lurking around in the 'I made this' section SX3/SV. Meanwhile I had accumulated a couple of Tamiya donor cars and set to work. This defo not straight forward as this time I did not want to cut the chassis. So plenty of 3D cad work later I ended up with a lot of new alloy components to hang the 201 front end onto the 502 chassis, a funky steering bellcrank had to be used as the servo needed to be kept well inside the chassis, again this worked really well and was from other Tamiya parts. Also a new carbon top deck had to be designed to stiffen the front end and topped off with a Proline 502x Bulldog shell.
As you can see it all looked rather sweet. So how did it go? Well rather dissapointingly, we tried it a few meetings and did some test day’s but couldn’t find a sweet spot with it and the conclusion is we are carrying far too much weight at the front. There is so much new alloy up front and the motor position is probably just too far forward, we could compensate with weighting the back down, but then the rear end geometry on the 502 doesn’t really suit 2wd car either. So after all that hard work, I’ve now shelved it and now looking for a 511 Belt drive to try the conversion on. I’m pretty sure this will be a better platform to base it on, as it will be closer to the Cat SX3 Hybrid, which I know works.
Anyhow, enjoy