My New Favorite RC Car - The Kyosho Fazer: Rally Edition

No, there isn't a new Kyosho product out there that you missed.  The Kyosho Fazer: Rally Edition is something I made up.  Two things prompted this mod, the rock damage to the body from driving my Kyosho Fazer Dodge Charger in gravel and the bouncy nature of 60mm tire touring cars in rocky conditions.  Both of those things made me want to put the Kyosho Charger on the shelf for it's own safety, but I hate Shelf Queens, I drive my cars.  That got me thinking about mods.  Bigger tires and a beater body shell are the obvious mods.  I ended up doing a little bit more.

It turns out that my favorite cheap body shell, the SummitLink Baja Beetle, fits pretty well on a 275mm wheelbase touring car.  For those of you with a short wheelbase touring car, fear not, it'll fit even better because the Fazer is a bit long for the body shell.  You can be the judge, but I think the pictures prove my point.  I do have to mention a couple of things, though.  I think the Baja body looks a lot better on the Fazer if you don't mod the suspension, but the arms that I designed help the handling a lot.  I taped a kind of cardboard grill onto the front edge of the body to fill the gap above the bumper.  I think it looks alright, but it could use some improvement so I'm trying to scheme up a good front end design to model or make.  Second, changing the size of the wheels means you'll need to trim the foam bumper a bit; No big deal, but worth noting.

So, I had some dirt cheap, smallish truck tires (95mm) kicking around that never really worked out on other projects.  I love them on this car.  They are awesome for general bash driving because they have good grip but are also pretty firm so they are durable, but soft enough that they help absorb bumps.  Be warned, the Kyosho becomes very easy to roll if the only mod you make is bigger tires.  I'm not entirely sure why it's so twitchy at high speed, but it'll do traction rolls on a whim.  It's not too bad on grass or in the dirt, but on pavement it becomes a real handful.  On gravel covered pavement it becomes super fun because it goes from rolling to easily to sliding really nicely.  Way fun, my friends.

The one thing you don't want to do with this car is big jumps, because it just ain't built for that.  Rally type bumps and jumps, on the other hand, it handles just fine.  It'll fly off a curb or launch off a smallish dirt mound with no trouble and actually has pretty good characteristics in the air.  This isn't a nose diver, guys (but it will catch that foam bumper from time to time and take a big flip).

Once I got it rolling, I made the leap and drilled some holes in the body shell.  No regrets, guys.  All you need to do is lift the front posts a notch and you're off and running.  I taped up the inside of my SummitLink shell a fair bit to make it more durable and it has held up pretty well.  It's got about 10-15 hours of running on the Fazer, the WLToys 12428 and my trusty Arrma 4S Outcast/Kraton (I modded the Outcast to Kraton wheelbase for this season).  Not bad for a cheapo body shell, I'd say.  No cracks yet.  I added some 3D printed roof sliders, mostly for the 4S, but they have saved quite a bit of wear and tear.  And, as mentioned, I added some 200mph tape in strategic locations to try to get extra life out of it.  So far, so good.

The next mod was installing a 3900KV cheap Chinese brushless power system (OCDay 60A ESC with one of those finned 3900KV motors) to see what kind of speed it has in it.  On 2S, the answer is about 40mph.  The problem is that without any suspension mods it is super unstable at that speed.  The good news is that some street style buggy tires make a huge difference.  It goes from impossible to drive fast to merely a handful.  On the bright side, it'll run for a half hour on a 5200mAh pack if you can avoid destroying the car.

Next I got a little crazy and decided it needed to handle better at high speed.  This is my sickness, guys.  It really bugs me when a car handles terrible.  Back in the day, Losi spoiled everyone with the JrX Pro.  That car, out of the box, built with the setup they put in the manual, was an absolute joy to drive.  I had been driving RC10s for a while and it was just silly how awesome that Losi car was right out of the box.  I made me feel like a noob despite having put a lot of hours into learning how to set up a car.  I can deal with a lot of small stuff, but big problems still annoy me, so this thing being so twitchy at high speed was something that needed fixing, but the car isn't really adjustable.

That's ok, I know what needs to be done.  First, by adding big tires we cranked up the center of gravity (CG) by 15mm ((90-60)/2), so getting it back down a bit would be good.  On a buggy you can lower the ride height by adjusting the shocks, but that's not really practical on a touring car chassis when you're talking about 15mm (or even half of that).  The other thing is the twitchiness, which would be easy to fix by adding a bit more toe out to the front, possibly along with a bit of camber.  The bright side is that even though the car isn't really designed to be adjusted the way we want, it can be done if we have a 3D printer, and I have one.  So what do we do?  Make new suspension arms.

Back in the day, dropped spindles were a big thing on hot rods.  On VW front ends, guys on a budget would weld select-a-drop adjusters into the torsion tubes.  I decided to do dropped knuckles in the back and lowered arms in the front.  That's because the front knuckles have articulating balls in the pivot points which are not practical to duplicate via 3D printing.  It turns out that the back knuckle mod was a bit fragile so I ended up doing arms for the back too.  TPU is a really solid material but the bendiness that makes it so awesome also makes it less than ideal for suspension, which needs to be rigid.  A test print of the back knuckle I designed proved how bendy the  stuff is because it was so soft you could have added rear wheel steering to the car.  So I made these wedge shaped arms for the front and the back that lower the shock mount points about 7mm.  The fronts are also designed to add about 3 degrees of camber and some toe out.  The result is a much better handling car at high speed.  It hauls along at 40mph with no trouble now.

The only problem with the new setup is that it is still a little loose, so if you're heavy on the steering, you can get the rear end moving pretty easily, and traction roll if you get frisky at high speed.  I like the handling for the most part, so I'm probably going to leave "good enough" alone.  It actually drives the best on a really short lawn.  It's spring where I live so the grass hasn't got going yet and the car is super fun in the short grass in the back yard right now.  In long grass, it's like a typical buggy and doesn't do great, porpoising a lot.  If you have some dirt and gravel to play in, you'll have a lot of fun as long as it isn't crazy bumpy.  The car is very controllable and plows through a lot of rough terrain without much trouble.  Deep tire ruts and big lumpy bumps would be a problem, though.  It isn't bad on trails, but less is more when it comes to speed.  The confines of a bike trail or gravel walking path make it hard to stay between the lines if you get going too fast because the car has a tenancy to float on a really loose surface, just like in real life when a race car gets onto the marbles on the edge of the track.

Bottom line, this car is super fun to drive because it handles a wide variety of conditions fairly well.  The big tires make all the difference in the world for making the car feel more real, not so bouncy like a touring car on anything but perfectly flat ground.  To me, it very much feels like a Rally car, but a bit more capable than a real Rally car.  It's actually almost a downside that putting on big tires makes it so much faster (25mph all the way up to almost 40mph) because for off road driving you never really get to use anything over 30 or so, unless you're trying to crash or have some big drama.

You can judge for yourself if you decide to mod your Kyosho Fazer.  To me, this is a fun project that will get that Fazer off the shelf and out in the world for some Rally bashing.

Wrench to drive or drive to wrench?