vintage-tamiya-restoration

I wanted to do an SRB that retained the flavour of the original, but bling'd up a bit :). The pot-metal parts went off as usual to be bead-blasted. Following that, and a clean, they were then pickled in an acid bath prior to plating. We had mixed results with the bright nickel finish - see this post for details . Ho hum. Here's the build so far with the parts that turned out well and were not destroyed. Front suspension will have to follow once I've sourced replacement bits and got those plated. Gearbox parts. Decided against a ball diff for this build as primarily it'll be run on the beach with a bit of luck!  I'm not sure of the origin of this rear bumper cage. It's reasonably well made in alloy, so I decided to keep it, at least for the moment. There's 2 problems with the Rogue Element Components motor cover. First, any standard 540 brushed motor is going to get shorted out as it's a very tight fit against the connectors. Secondly, whils

I have a new Scorcher start up project on the go (pics to follow). I thought for a change that after bead-blasting all the pot metal parts I'd get them plated in bright nickel. Purely experimental and with no idea how they'd turn out. Turned out to be a useful experiment with mixed results. The first plating attempt didn't work well at all - in  many places the nickel just didn't "stick" to the pot-metal base and left bubbles in the finish. So they were re-bead-blasted ready for a second go. A spectrometer was used on one of the gear casing parts to see what was in the metal - lots of alu and a trace of zinc, so the idea was to put the parts in an acid bath to remove the zinc element which it was believed was preventing the plating from taking. Rear gearbox casings and suspension look fantastic. Mixed results though - turns out this was a really mixed bag of parts from a metal point of view and ended up melting some of the front suspension bits!