This is heavy duty stuff...
Finally my new gearboxes arrived from the states., and what mighty fine pieces of engineering they are too. You can see the comparison in the next shot. The original Tamiya g/boxes on the left and the new ETO Armor units on the right (Armor and not Armour as these are from our American cousins). You can see that, not only are the gears much beefier and arranged linearly, the housing is much more substantial too.
I have to say it wasn't a straight forward swap and I did struggle (a bit) to fit the new g/boxes and Schumo bearings. First up, two new holes needed to be drilled into the aluminium chassis to accommodate the new mounts. Then, four of the original holes need to be filled, I simply secured these with short bolts (the underside is now peppered with loads of bolt heads and 4 more won't make a jot of difference). The left-hand drive shaft was then removed from the new g/box and secured into the chassis. The drive shaft was then threaded through the chassis and reattached to the left-hand drive. All that was left to do now was fit the Schumo bearings on the outside - easy enough, or so I thought... Four hours and a lot of expletive language later I finally had everything in. And here they are...
Time to fire this baby up...
Unfortunately, I think I may have fried my new battery by charging it too fast. When connected to the tank the charge was only sufficient to power the DMD for about 20 mins. In that time I was able to get drive to the wheels and sounds from the speaker (wow, I'd forgotten how loud they are), however more time will be needed to set up the transmitter as the control is not as it should be. I have ordered 4 more batteries (I'm going to power up my Tiger 1 as well) but until these arrive I'm kinda stuck again. That said, I have some time off from Thursday of next week and I should be able to really crack on with this, maybe even finish it!
Till then
Cheers
Paul