After a full year of my son and I racing our 2wd Slashes in the “Spec Slash” class, I wanted to record everything we’ve broken, fixed, upgraded, and replaced. I’ll also include a setup sheet of what we landed on being a fairly consistent indoor off-road carpet track setup.
Spec Slash rules differ by track, so check with your local track(s) before you buy anything. Some allow replacing stock plastic parts with RPM brand replacements, some do not. If you race at multiple tracks, better to error on the side of caution and stick with stock parts. I’ve included both parts here for reference.
I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with sunglasses. I want nice ones, but I’m very penchant for breaking or losing them.
One brand I’ve been leaning towards lately is Tifosi. In the world of cycling, the tifosi is the italian word for their fans. It literally means those infected by typhus, so you could consider them to be rabid fans.Continue reading →
Expensive Sunglasses
At one point I decided I’d get a nice pair of sunglasses for cycling to the tune of $80. I got some Tifosi Dolomite specs that have vent holes in the lenses. I liked them so much I bought a second pair with polarized lenses.
Then I lost them on trip to New York. The sun was setting, I took them off and left them somewhere, never to be seen again.
RIP polarized dolomites
Feeling despondent, I went back to crappy $10 sunglasses because I felt I didn’t deserve nice sunglasses.
Reasonably Nice Sunglasses
Then I was at the bike shop last month and they had some nice, casual looking Tifosi sunglasses on the rack in fun colors. I tried them on and thought they looked and fit great. I assumed they’d at least be $50. To my suprise, they were only $25 🤔
I realized this is how I can have decent sunglasses without the guilt or shame that I’m burning Benjamins if they get lost or mistreated. I’d only be burning Jacksons
So if you’re looking for a set of inexpensive, but well-designed sunglasses, head to your local bike shop and check out these lines from Tifosi:
With the width of the vehicle worked out, it is time to make it drive like a crawler.
To slow the Slash down to believable crawler speed I actually kept the stock gearing in place (19.23 Final Drive Ratio for the brushed 4×4). Then I added a RC4WD 1:3 Gear Reducer, which would change the final drive ratio to almost 60:1 – a popular ratio amongst crawlers and close to the TRX-4 low-speed setting.
The gear reducer is normally a bolt on part, but there were some tweaks I had to do to get it to fit the Titan 550 motor. First the receiver hole in the gear reducer is too small fo the 550’s standard 13mm bearing enclosure (the part that sticks out right before the motor shaft). Which is strange because the age-old Tamiya 540 motor also specifies 13mm for this part of the motor.
The arms are going to be the single biggest difference maker when it comes to overall width. As part of my research I gathered a list of several Slash-compatible arms and their lengths. If you’ve got more arm lengths to add to that list, please comment below.
Bandit arms are 67mm wide, while the stock Slash 4×4 arms are 92mm. Just by making this switch we’re going to remove 50mm of overall width, bringing it from 296mm wide to potentially 246mm – less than the goal of 249mm. So we have some width we can add if need be.
Here you can see two sets of Bandit arms compared to the original Brushed 4×4 Slash arms:
