Been away for a while....

...but not out of the RC game completely.

For a number of reasons I haven't found (or maybe that should be haven't made) the time for my RC cars. Truth be told I'm having a bit of a break to see in what direction I want to go with it. I no longer work on my cars in the house and 'my' room has been turned back into a home office. I'm thinking that if I have to work outside anyway then I might as well get myself a big, smelly, oily 2 stroke RC again. We'll see though, if it does happen it won't be for at least 6 months.

Anyway, what I have been up to is helping a local high school with the 4x4 in Schools Technology Challenge. The challenge, in a nutshell, is to create a rock crawler to compete a number of tasks / obstacles within a set design spec.

As new comers to the competition the school were eligible to compete in the rookie class but as that didn't stretch much beyond making a new bodyshell the team decided they wanted to jump straight in to the deep end and take part in the full competition!

Here is a picture of the track at the Southern region finals that took part at Savoy Place, home of the IET in London.

As you can see, the track consists of a number of technical elements and despite only working on the car during their lunch breaks the car that the team created did a great job of getting around the course.

Based on a Losi Mini Rock crawler the team re created the chassis, designed and made their own suspension links and mounts, made their own wheels, upgraded the suspension and tyres, converted it to 4 wheel steering and even more adaptions.

Here is the teams main driver who managed to do 90% of the course on his own with no driving errors at all! With over 20 years experience of RC cars I couldn't have done a better job.

The team have made it through to the national finals in March so I'll be giving another update then as well as a full run down of what has been done to the car. Wish us luck!