Games with Ezra, Part 1

Ezra, about to start a game of Hordes of the Things.

My son Ezra is now 5 years old, and he has enjoyed playing games of all sorts for as long as he’s been able to play.  Here are some of the games we have enjoyed playing together so far.

He has a great capacity for learning game mechanics, and a long enough attention span to finish a game that he’s truly interested in.  Most of the time he’s able to handle loss well enough to want to play again. The biggest challenge I’ve had in finding good games to play has been that he’s only just starting to learn to read.

For now I’m limiting this list to games that adults can play with kids, and those that are surprisingly appropriate for children (or at least for Ezra) instead of the ones everyone knows work well with kids.  This isn’t a game review, and I won’t be teaching how to play the games; but I will mention any changes we made to make the games more playable.

Cartagena

One of the first “real” games we played together was Cartagena.  When we first started playing, I removed the “move backwards to draw cards” mechanic and turned it into a “play one, draw one” game.  This helped him learn the mechanics and the strategy of skipping over full spots to move forward more quickly.  In the last year or so, we’ve started playing with the full rules instead, but we don’t play as often as we did.

Carcassonne

Carcassonne is fairly commonly known to be good with kids, except for the farmer scoring mechanic.  The Hunters and Gatherers version can work a bit better, because scoring hunters is a bit easier, but I find it to be a bit more bland, and young kids still have a hard time thinking ahead far enough to know whether to place a hunter or not.

Castle Panic

And our third entry in “Games that start with CA” is by far Ezra’s favorite and most played game.  At its height we were playing for hours on end, and I’d get sick of it before he did, but at this point he rarely maintains interest long enough to finish a session anymore.
Castle Panic is especially good with young kids, because it is a cooperative game.  You play with open hands, make plans together, and accomplish goals with each others’ help. We both prefer playing this one with the Wizard’s Tower expansion.  Although there are cards with words, they all have unique pictures, and when we were playing this game regularly, Ezra could recognize and summarize every card in the base set even though he wasn’t really reading any of them.  The most challenging aspect of this game, for grown-ups and kids alike, is to make plans for your whole turn before you start trading in your cards.

HeroQuest

Marla found a copy of HeroQuest at a yard sale for around $3, and it was a great investment.  I’ve finished more dungeons with Ezra than I have with adults. We played this one semi-cooperatively: I played the dungeon master and controlled the two spellcasting characters under Ezra’s guidance as the party leader.  He controlled the barbarian and dwarf: Kick in the door, and kill whatever’s on the other side of it!  When there were decisions to be made involving traps and searching, I had Ezra make the decisions since he wasn’t looking at the map.

Heroica

I’m not sure what it is about Heroica that encourages just about everyone who plays it to make up new rules and change the ones that are already there.  This is an incredibly simple dungeon crawl with no reading required, and it also has Lego, so how could any kid refuse? It’s theoretically competitive, but realistically players are usually leap-frogging each other through the dungeon.

Lionheart

I found Lionheart at a yard sale before I had any kids, and for years I attempted to trade it away.  I’m glad I didn’t, because it has been a lot of fun with Ezra.  This is a board-based miniature wargame for 2 players.  The mechanics are easy to pick up, and the combat doesn’t even require math skills.  I expect it’d be hard to find these days, but it’s a lot more worth playing than I expected it would be.

Dune Express

This is a fun little print-and-play area control game.  It has no language components used during gameplay, and there isn’t much for players to remember.  We play the basic rules, but haven’t had to make any changes to play well together.

Zombie Dice

Zombie Dice is a quick “push your luck” game with simple rules.  Ezra’s good at managing his risk in this game, and he’s just as likely to win as any adult.

Zombies!!!

For Zombies, we skip the event cards, and there are no other language dependent components used during play.  This makes the game a bit less fun and flavorful, and it can take longer without the help of additional weapons, so I also reduce the number of board sections we need to get through before reaching the helicopter.

Dungeon!

I’m only listing Dungeon here because it was a major disappointment, and did not meet our expectations.  It’s too simplistic for Ezra, he gets bored too quickly. There aren’t enough decisions to make, and there is very little character development.  For a simple, fast dungeon crawl, we prefer Heroica.

En Garde

This one is listed for ages 14+, but that’s ridiculous.  The truth is, almost every game with plastic or metal parts produced today must list an age of 13+ or 14+ because they cannot afford to have their pieces tested for toxicity.  We play the simple or slightly advanced versions of the rules, with no other changes.

Uno

I don’t love Uno, but there were some times when Ezra couldn’t get enough of it; and he consistently beat both his parents and his sister.  He also likes Harry Potter Uno, or Crazy Eights if there aren’t any Uno cards around.

Loot

I’ve played this with both kids a few times, but it isn’t that good with only 2 players.

The Sorceror’s Cave

This is one of the first dungeon crawl games I played with Ezra.  It’s extremely dependent on good luck to succeed, which totally drove away Martine.  Ezra fared better and enjoyed playing it, but we quickly moved on to other games with a similar theme.

Wings of War

Ezra loves starting games of Wings of War, but rarely finishes them.  He likes playing with the plane miniatures, and isn’t very good at flying predictably. But early on, he shot me down the first time our planes were within shooting range, so maybe that’s why he keeps coming back…

Hordes of the Things

I’ve started introducing Ezra to a few different miniature games, but at this point I have to wait until he asks to play so I don’t drive him away with my enthusiasm.  He has finished several games of Hordes of the Things, using all of the rules (all of the rules that happen to come up) but with a limited set of elements. The easy way I’ve found to introduce young kids to the game is to limit element selection to only about 3-4 types of elements, either all foot or all mounted.  Kids can remember 3-4 different combat factors, but it requires a chart if you need to remember different factors vs. foot and vs. mounted.  We played HOTT using Mechwarrior prepainted figures, limiting element selection to Behemoth, Knight, Rider, and Hero.
I’ll write more as we discover more games worth playing, but I expect we will soon start opening many more boxes once Ezra starts reading.

A New Bike: Raphael All-Rounder

A few months ago I found a great deal on a new, hand made bike frame on the iBob mailing list.  And finally, I’ve assembled it into a great bike.

Raphael Cycles custom frame set

This is a Raphael Cycles custom steel frame and fork.  It was built to order… someone else’s order, not mine.  But it was beautiful, the specs seemed to fit my needs, and it was far cheaper and faster than ordering my own custom frame, so I jumped on the opportunity to buy it used (but never built up).

I built it with a mix of new parts and donations from an older bike, my blue 1983 Trek 520.  Here’s a brief summary of the build, off the top of my head:

  • Sun CR18 rims with Shimano hubs: generator on the front, 8 speeds on the rear
  • 32mm Panaracer Pasela tires with plenty of clearance under the rims
  • New Velo-Orange Grand Cru crankset and fenders
  • Old Shimano Deore XT rear derailer
  • Older Suntour AR front derailer
  • Shimano Deore bar end shifters
  • Nitto stem and front rack
  • Sakae Randnner [sic] bars
  • Dia-Compe brake levers
  • Tektro CR720 brakes
The build went fairly smoothly, and after setting it up in the basement I’m happy to say I haven’t had to fine tune anything after my shakedown ride.  I haven’t ridden it far yet, but I plan to put a lot of miles in commuting, and hope to be inspired to take more non-commuting long rides as well.
The frame set itself is beautiful.  However, I do have a few minor nit picks with it.  To be clear, this is a better bike that is much better suited for the purposes I intend to use it for, than the bike I’m replacing.  None of these concerns are very important to me at this point, and I haven’t talked to the builder about any of them.  I don’t have any right to complain, because I didn’t order the bike nor was I involved with its specifications.
To paraphrase, I’ll quota a song by the Eagles: “I can’t complain, but sometimes I still do.”
The pump peg behind the seat tube is in a very convenient location.  Luckily I never use frame pumps, however, because I don’t think a pump could fit between the fender and seat tube.  I haven’t made the rear fender line perfectly parallel to the wheel, so I could probably squeak out a few more millimeters of room there, but I don’t think it would be enough to fit a pump.
There is noticeable fender-toe overlap.  I have not previously noticed this on other bikes I’ve ridden, even with the same size tires and fenders, on the Trek 520 that wasn’t built for this kind of setup (but has a similar geometry).
There was no rear brake cable hanger.  I used a Surly hanger, but unfortunately the seat clamp slot was quite narrow.  It required me to file down the brake cable hanger, in order to be able to tighten the seat clamp enough to keep the seat tight.  I could’ve filed down the seat clamp slot instead, but I didn’t want to break my new paint.
I’m not a fan of the overall shape of the bike when it’s set up with my preferred cockpit dimensions; though, it looks fine without any parts on it.  It was apparently specified as a 59mm frame, but the head tube makes it look smaller than my 57mm frames.  Part of this is because the fork is longer than on my other bikes, and part of it is because the head tube has an extended top, so it looks far shorter.  The stem is very high, so I could fit my front decaleur to the bag without cutting it down and refitting it from its previous use (aka “I’m lazy”).
On the other hand, there are a lot of minor details that I absolutely love on this bike.  All of the fender mounting points have threaded inserts facing the correct direction, so I don’t have a bunch of brackets and clamps all over the place to hold the fenders on.  I like the contrasting paint on the head tube (though the color is a lot closer to teal than the royal blue it looks like here).
This is my first time using the Velo-Orange 50.4 BCD cranks, and I must say: if these are easier to set up than the TA Cyclotouriste cranks they’re modeled after, then I’m not interested playing with the TA cranks.  You need a very narrow front derailer in order to be able to upshift successfully without pegging the derailer cage with your crank.  This old Suntour derailer is the only one I had on hand that would do the job at all, but I may look for a better alternative.
I’m very happy with the way this bike turned out!  I’m still not ready to get rid of the Trek that it replaced, but I have an even older Fuji frame and fork, if anyone’s interested…

Here are links to Raphael Cycles blog posts documenting the construction of this frame and fork.  It’s very interesting to see the process that went into building this bike.

Update: A few observations after riding this for a week or so:

  • This is the most comfortable bike I’ve ever ridden. 
  • The toe clip overlap is not a problem in practice; it only shows up at very slow speed.  
  • The builder states that this is an early frame and not representative of his current work.

Fall-In 2012

Last weekend was Fall In! in Lancaster, PA.  I drove out with Rich and Larry as usual, but unfortunately JM couldn’t attend this time.

Fall In 2012: Maureen Reddington-Wilde
playing Gauls in the Warbandia event.

This was an unusual convention for me.  For the entire weekend, I didn’t use any army that fought after 50AD, but my chosen army dates were even earlier: no later than about 250BC.

Thursday

Thursday night, Larry ran Warbandia. Eligible armies need at least 6 warbands, and I didn’t have many choices.  I brought my Celtiberians, since I painted them fairly recently. In the first game, I beat Maureen Reddington-Wilde and her Gauls 4-0.  The second game against Mike Guth’s Visigoths was worthy of an epic poem, but unfortunately I’m no poet, so all it gets is a compound sentence.  In one turn both of our generals were killed, tying the game at 3g-3g; but unfortunately it was Mike’s turn next,  and he was able to kill one of my elements without me killing any of his, so he won 4g-3g.  In the final round, I lost to Paul Georgian and his gauls, 0-4g.

Friday

The Stooges telling us we did it wrong.

Friday was BBDBA doubles.  Since JM wasn’t around, I found an alternate partner: Chris Brantley.  We played triple Hittites, the later list with heavy chariots instead of all light chariots.

Our first matchup was against the Stooges and their Patrician Romans (East). We were doing okay for a while, but then we started rolling combat dice. Chris’s command lost 3 chariots in one bound, punching a big hole in the center of our line.  We were able to regain some ground, but not enough; we lost 6-94 after our C-in-C command broke.  We made a few mistakes in the center, such as missing an opportunity to close the door on the enemy’s general.

Bill Brown and Will Michael run forward with their pikes.

In the second round, we faced Will Michael and Bill Brown with their Scots Common army.  This was the most interesting Pike army I’ve ever faced, mainly because they decided to split their pike into each command and use it on the attack rather than holding it back and using it as a huge static defense.  They deployed away from their camp, which pulled us into their trap.  We deployed heavily in front of their camp, to encourage them to deploy their third command there to defend it.  Unfortunately, our C-in-C wasn’t on that side of the board, so they smartly decided to give up their camp, and concentrate all their forces on our C-in-C.  We won their camp, but we weren’t fast enough to kill 4 more elements in their C-in-C command before they broke ours and won the game.  It ended 14-86 in their favor.

Unfortunately, for the Nth time in a row there were 9 teams for BBDBA, which is just the completely wrong number to have.  In the third round we got a bye, which just sucks.  I’m there to play, not to win a free 80 points without playing a game.  I had a good time playing in the other two games, and I’m not sorry we lost.

In the evening, Chris Brantley ran Ars Militaria: a Book II event using double blind deployment.  This ended up being very interesting, but it’s not how I’d prefer to play DBA every time.

David Kuijt built stands to hold curtain-like screens across the center of the board.  After placing terrain and choosing our board edges, the curtain was put into place and we each deployed our armies based on knowing only the terrain and not the enemy’s deployment.

I brought Later Achaemenid Persians.  In the first round I lost to Dave Schlanger and his Early Gordyenes.  In the second round I beat Alex Bostwick’s Seleucids despite his attempt to force-push the terrain when I wasn’t looking.  In the last round, David Kuijt beat me with Greco-Bactrians.

The blind deployment worked fairly well without any cheesy moves taking place.  Nobody had time to find any obvious ways to break things, and the armies were matched well enough that there weren’t any problems.

However, I do think the screens affected the metagame and deployment choices somewhat.  Maneuver is more important if you aren’t sure where your enemy is going to be, which affects both army selection and deployment.

Saturday

On Saturday morning, I ran DBA Matched Pairs.  As at Historicon, we only had 15mm armies show up, which was a good thing, because the 25mm boards weren’t available yet this time either.  We had some inexperienced players joining in, so we took our time to teach them well and only got 3 rounds in before time ran out.

In the afternoon, I played in the Two Davids sci-fi event, 61 Cygni: Blood, Dirt, Plasma-bolts.  This event use a ruleset inspired by HOTT, written by David Kuijt with the goal of implementing Mechwarrior/Battletech themed battles a bit better than HOTT manages.  There were 8 players on a huge board, the map of Rio de Janeiro that they used for Monsterpocalypse HOTT at Historicon.

The main problem with using HOTT for large scale sci-fi battles is that the guns are huge, but the HOTT shooting ranges are tiny to nonexistent.  David’s rules implement direct and indirect ranged fire at much more plausible ranges, while maintaining most of the feel and rules of HOTT under the surface.  Overall, the rules worked fairly well; but I think they need a bit more polish to really handle the feel of Mech battles effectively.

Unfortunately I didn’t get any pictures of this visually impressive event.

David Mitchell’s Skythians kicked butt.

On Saturday night was the Two Davids campaign event: Death To Assyrian Oppression!  This event pitted a half dozen Neo-Assyrian Later Sargonid armies against a gamut of historical enemies.  I played Skythians.

My 5 rounds:

  • Dave Schlanger attacked, I lost and lost my general.
  • Rich Gause attacked, and I lost
  • Jack Sheriff attacked, and I lost; but I killed his general.
  • I attacked David Mitchell and his Skythians, and lost again.
  • Maureen Reddington-Wilde attacked with her Skythians, and I beat her.

I ended up with only 2 points, but at least it wasn’t negative!  In other news, Alex Bostwick was taken over 6 times in 5 rounds (with one suck-up tile) and came in last place with -1.

Thanks to everyone for another great convention!  I hope to see you at Cold Wars 2013.

DBA Army III/62b: Early Polish

I painted this Early Polish army to be an ally of Early Russians in BBDBA.  Unfortunately, JM didn’t make it to Fall-In, so we haven’t had a chance to use it yet.

DBA army III/62b: Early Polish; Essex miniatures.

The figures are all Essex Miniatures except for the sword-wielding knights with crests, and the musician; those are Black Hat (Gladiator), I believe.  This was not an army pack; JM chose all the Essex figures during the early part of the Wargames Miniatures Essex clearance sale.

For the heraldry, I spent a lot of time perusing a wonderful Polish heraldry web site.  I especially like this easily browsable scan of a Polish heraldry catalog.

Although there are a lot of wonderful designs there, I like to tie the look of my army together so it’s not too garish.  I decided to divide the army into three houses, each with an element of knight, bow, and spear.  The remaining elements used red highlights but otherwise didn’t use any specific heraldry

I had to make an attempt at the Polish national Dr. Seuss birds.  Fo the others, I chose designs primarily for the way they looked, without any consideration for when they were used historically.  I tried to choose designs different from designs I might use on my Serbian, Hungarian or other Eastern European armies. I left the red caparisons plain, but mirrored the triple rose heraldry on the blue caparisons.

This army painted up fairly quickly since it doesn’t have any optional elements.  I’m not sure when I’ll use it.  Lately, every army I paint up has been used less and less.  I almost need to have a specific event to paint for, in order to ensure that every new army is used in at least 3 games.

RC10: Viper Mk II Complete

Here is my completed RC10 body with livery based on a Viper Mk II from the modern Battlestar Galactica show.

I designed custom graphics using Inkscape.  I found information about the font used in the show on a Galactiguise post.  A semi-crippled version of the font is available for free download there.  After getting everything right, I sent my file to Cafe Press and had a transparent bumper sticker printed with my designs on it.

RC10 gold pan with Battlestar Galactica Viper Mk II livery.

The print quality is what you’d expect from an inkjet printer: it has high resolution, but a grainy quality where it’s mixing dots to get the color you’re looking for.  The bumper stickers are supposed to be waterproof and durable for outdoor use, so I expect this will work as well as any RC car stickers.

I recreated the 3rd squadron “VIGILANTES” seal for use on the nose. The rest of the markings are typical of a Mk II Viper, though not necessarily identical.

I also finally got around to building the wing. I don’t like the way wings look most of the time, so I kept this one transparent.  I don’t expect it’ll make any difference in performance on the relatively slow carpet track.

You can also barely see the new “stock” motor I installed.  Hopefully the sensor wire won’t get too botched up, hanging out like that.  I haven’t had a chance to get to the track to verify I’m using the right size pinion, yet.

HPI Savage Flux XS SS Initial Review

After building the Honda S800, I was itching for a kit that took a bit longer to build.  I also wanted to give the kids more opportunity to participate in the build and in driving the resulting car.  Ezra wanted a Monster Truck, so I searched for one available in kit form and found the HPI Savage Flux XS SS.

The HPI Savage is their 1/8 scale nitro powered monster truck.  “Flux” makes it electric.  “XS” makes it extra small, with the body being approximately 1/12th scale. “SS” is the Super Sport kit edition.

I finished building the truck, with intermittent help from the kids; but according to Ezra’s definition it isn’t a Monster Truck yet.  A monster truck has to be a truck, but it also has to have monsters on it.  We hoped to find some good stickers for this during the halloween season, but haven’t succeeded yet.

I haven’t driven the car very much yet, so this initial review will be primarily about the kit build itself.  It was definitely a more involved, slower build than the Tamiya M-05 chassis.  Some of this was the fact that it’s 4wd, some is because of the design, and some of it is because of frustration during the build. There are some parts of this kit’s design I really like, but other aspects are pretty bad.

The basic design is quite solid.  The first section of the build is putting together the front diff and suspension arms. The second part is the rear diff and suspension arms.  The front and rear half of the truck are nearly identical: the diffs and bulkheads are the same, and all 4 A-arms are interchangeable.  The main differences are the front and rear hubs (also identical side to side) and the bumpers. Overall this symmetric design makes it more convenient to deal with spare parts.

The front and rear are joined with a two part plastic center chassis that is reminiscent of the twin plate design used on the larger Savage.  The diff and motor are stuffed into it in a single piece, and the servo is buried in there somewhere as well.

One complaint I’ve heard about this truck is the difficulty of maintenance on various parts.  I think there is some truth to this: it’s a very tight truck, some parts are hard to get to, and most of the stock screws absolutely suck (more about that later).  But it’s not as bad as many would have you believe.  This is a lot more evident if you build the kit and see how things go together (and come apart).  You can remove the front and rear diffs for servicing with only a handful of screws.  The center diff and motor do make it a pain in the butt to change pinions often. They can be removed pretty easily; the problem is wedging them back into place with the front and rear dogbones where they need to be.

The absolute worst thing about this kit is the hardware.  Most of the screws are metric M3 with 2mm hex drive heads. The 2mm hex drive is simply too small for the screw material they chose.  The sockets can’t handle the torque required to drive the screws very far into fresh plastic.  I tried several different 2mm hex wrenches, and they all had the same problem: some of the sockets are oversize, and the screw material is soft, so the head ends up stripped.

I ended up stripping at least half a dozen screws during assembly, and had to extract several destroyed screws and replace them.  Luckily, the non-HPI replacement screws I bought work much better.  Several more screws are still stripped, but I managed to drive them all the way in, and hopefully I’ll never have to remove them.  The problem most kits have is accidentally stripping out the plastic.  These screws cause too many problems in the other direction.

For this body, the kids decided they wanted a light blue color, with a white roof and black trim.  They planned to add skull and crossbone and lightning stickers on it, but we haven’t found any reasonable options for either of these yet.

“But, that car isn’t blue,” you say.  An astute observation!  The only light blue Lexan paint I found was very old, and the can got me about 2 seconds of spray time before running out of pressure.  So now, the car has a light dusting of metallic silver-blue, and I filled out behind it with red.  It’s not totally horrible looking, but it was definitely not what we were aiming for.

This is the first time I’ve used Fasmask liquid masking for the interior of the body. The windows came with precut masks, but I masked the roof, bed, and lower edge of the truck.  The Fasmask worked pretty well, but I need to make a few changes next time.  Here are my newbie tips for using Fasmask:

  • Follow the directions when they say that multiple thick coats will make it easier to remove the masking material.
  • Don’t bother trying to paint the exact edges of the area you’re masking.  If you can do that, you should just paint the lexan paint on by hand instead.  Go over your lines far enough to ensure a thick layer where your design ends, and then cut the design into the mask.  This gives a much cleaner edge.
  • Don’t start masking if you’re in a hurry. It takes a long time for each coat to dry, and you need several of them. 
Looking on the Internet, I figured out how people test their maximum speed, for what it’s worth: strap on a portable GPS, and press Go.  I geared this truck down a bit, with the larger spur gear the truck comes with, and it’s being powered by a Duratrax Element (by Castle) 3900kv sensorless brushless setup.  With 6c NiMH batteries, I got up to 27mph in the alley behind the house.
This is no speed demon in its current form, but it’s still way faster than I should be letting the kids play with at this point, so I have no problem with that. 
Now we just need to go find some place to bash it before it starts snowing. 

RC10 Gold Pan: Viper Mk. II

I painted the original body for my RC10 day-glo orange, like they used to use for street maintenance in the mid 80’s.  It’s showing its age, with scratched paint all over the place, and cracks where it is most often stressed.  Also, it’s ugly.

It turns out that Team Associated still sells bodies for the original RC10.  Two different varieties, even.  So, when I ordered steering parts (that didn’t work) in August, I also ordered a new Viper body.

I already thought this buggy reminded me of the Viper Mk II from Battlestar Galactica. So, why not use a Viper-inspired paint job?

RC10 gold pan, new Viper body

I masked the windows and applied masking tape for stripes in the approximate locations of the red stripes on the Viper Mk II, and sprayed the rest white.  After removing the tape I sprayed red with another layer of white behind it.

I finished it with hand painted netting on the windows.

I learned a bit about masking: you need to be very careful about getting the edges of the mask to touch the car, or they don’t work.  Unfortunately the white overspray on the red portions don’t work that well as battle damage, yet, because the rest of the body looks so pristine.

I hope to get some decals printed with BSG viper logos.  I think that would add a lot to the look.

RC10 Gold Pan Renovation: Part 3, Steering

Flashback to late August:

After replacing the wheels on my RC10 gold pan buggy, it didn’t handle very well.  Considering the fact that the front wheels rubbed on the front a-arm at full steering travel, that should not have been surprising.  But I wanted to try reducing the steering travel to avoid rubbing, and see if that helped.

Unfortunately this didn’t work.  The steering linkage was plagued with problems.  The car had a wider turning radius in one direction than the other, the servo struggled, and there was a lot of play in the linkage.

After looking at the steering linkage enough times, I realized it pretty much sucked.  Plastic bell cranks ran directly on threaded screws for pivots without bearings; the servo saver was sloppy; and it had a bent wire linkage to the servo instead of a ball and socket linkage.

After doing some research at rc10talk.com, I learned that replacing the steering linkage with one that used bearings was common.  Most of the bell cranks that were used Back In The Day are no longer available.  However, Traxxas makes a bell crank set that’s a perfect fit.  Sweet!  Okay, well not perfect, but close enough.

As outlined here, you need to make shims to fit between the inside of a 3/16 bearing, and the 8-32 screw used as a pivot on the RC10.  I used some of the #8 washer/spacers used on the rear wheels, to ensure that the bearings spun freely instead of rubbing on the chassis.  Once you do this, the rest is easy: install the bell cranks and turnbuckles, and you’re good to go with identical steering geometry to the original.

This helped a lot: steering was faster and more responsive, and with the better turnbuckle linkage I could tune it a lot more finely than it was before.  Unfortunately there still just wasn’t enough travel, so I was still stuck.

I wanted to get new front hubs with more caster.  The original car has 25° for the shock travel angle, but the hubs push caster back to 10°.  I wanted to try 25° of caster, so I bought some RC10B4 caster blocks and hub carriers and associated gubbins.  Unfortunately I got the wrong king pins, and couldn’t assemble it.

Flashforward to late September:

RC10 with Traxxas bell cranks and wide track arms

I sat around not doing anything with the RC10 for a long time, but then I needed to order a replacement part for my Losi XXX-SCB.  So, I added my missing king pin (and screws) onto the order.  A-Main hobbies also carried some original RC10 swept-back front A arms, the “wide track” version in black; so I added those to the order as well.

Oh, I should also really replace all the transmission bushings with bearings, so let’s just throw those onto the order as well…

So on Tuesday night and Wednesday, I put it all the new parts on and rebuilt the shocks with heavier oil.  Here’s the result.

I had to remove the front anti-roll bar, because there is no mounting point for it on the wide track A-arms.  I calculated appropriate turnbuckle lengths to maintain the original geometry by extrapolating based on the increased A-arm length, but I expected to have to tweak them after driving it a bit.  Now, at extreme steering angles, the inside of the plastic hub is the first part to hit the A-arm; but at that point, you have plenty of turning going on, so it’s not a problem.

The shocks have never been completely disassembled and rebuilt, and they’re showing some wear inside.  It’s not ideal, but I’m going to live with them for now.  I completely cleaned the transmission parts using Simple Green in an ultrasonic cleaner, removed the bushings, and reassembled everything with the bearings.  Once every 30 years isn’t too often, is it?

On Wednesday night, I brought the car to the track and tried it out.  It worked a lot better than I expected: handling was great without me having to tweak anything at all.  I ran it through 2 battery packs, as much as I ran the Losi-SCB last night.  Apparently I’ve already bent one of the camber links, though; I guess I need Real Turnbuckles instead of threaded rod.

There was one problematic incident: I popped an E-clip on the transmission, and it blew the “bearing adapter”out the left side of the car. That’s weird.  There seems to be more slop on this shaft than it had with the bushings.  I used a new E-clip there, and it was fine for the rest of the night.  Consulting the assembly instructions didn’t show me any parts I was missing, so maybe the bearings aren’t the same dimension as the bushings they replaced.

Overall, I am now very happy with the way this car handles, indoors at least.  Unfortunately, whenever you pick the lowest hanging fruit, there’s always another one: it’s really slow, especially during acceleration. So now I’m thinking I might need to look into a “stock” (17.5 turn) brushless motor setup for it, to replace the brushed system it has now.  But I’m going to start by going to the J&C Hobbies flea market scheduled for next Sunday to see if I can find anything fun there.

Frank broke a part on his equally vintage Kyosho Optima on Wednesday night.  Don’t replace it! It’s a slippery slope, and a totally inefficient way to get a running buggy.  At this point it’s almost as easy  for me to list the parts I haven’t replaced, than those I have.  But several modifications ago I decided to “embrace the project” since it really is at least as fun as driving the resulting car.

RC10 Gold Pan Renovation: Part 2, wheels

After getting my RC10 back in service, it became apparent that I would need new tires some day.  The rear tires had very little tread or traction left, and the ground clearance was barely sufficient to run it on short grass.

Unfortunately, the original RC10 wheels are a small obsolete size, and modern tires aren’t available to fit them. My options seemed to be:

  • find vintage wheels and tires on ebay or other sources
  • buy JC Racing wheels that use standard buggy tires but allegedly fit on the original RC10
  • rebuild the rear end to fit modern buggy wheels

The JC Racing wheels look really nice, but they take a long time to ship from the UK, they’re expensive, and I’d need to salvage the wheels every time I replaced the tires since they cost so much.  Also, there isn’t nearly as much challenge involved in slapping new wheels on the car as there is with rebuilding the entire rear end.

There are many threads on various RC forums regarding the various ways you can adapt your gold pan RC10 to run modern 1/10 scale buggy wheels.  Unfortunately they tend to skimp on the details and expect you to figure stuff out yourself.  Truthfully, there are so many minor differences in early RC10 buggies that this might be the best bet.  But hopefully the story of what I did will help others who have the same problem.

I’ll deal with the front and rear wheels separately, because the front is much easier than the rear.

Front Wheels

Currently, RC10B4 wheels are still available, and they fit just fine on my original 3/16″ axles.  I started with DE Racing “Borrego” wheels for the B4 buggy, with 3/16″x3/8″ bearings to fit them.  I bought JConcepts Barcode front tires.

DE Racing Borrego front wheel, and original RC10 wheel

Overall, this setup mostly works, but it isn’t perfect.  The larger diameter wheel fits just fine, but the wheels are also wider. This causes the tire to rub on the front A-arm at full steering. This can be adjusted with servo travel on the transmitter, but it must increase your turning radius somewhat.

The Barcode tires were completely useless on grass, I may as well have been driving slicks.  Since my options were either to drive them for a few days and buy replacements, or save them for indoor driving and buy replacements, I opted to save the bar codes and buy even more wheels and tires.

I got Associated B4 wheels all around, hoping they might work slightly better than the DE Racing wheels.  For the front, I got Pro-Line 4 rib tires, a modern version of the original tires on the car.  Overall these worked very similarly to the bar codes: they’re a bit too wide, but otherwise they work fine.  They also don’t have great traction on the grass, but they have a heck of a lot more tread.

Rear Wheels

When I say “rear wheels” here, I really mean the entire rear end of the car.

There are two basic problems with using the original RC10 with newer wheels.  First, the old RC10 axle is weird. Instead of being a constant diameter 3/16″ axle as in the front, it has a fat section near the center of the car, tapering down to a narrower part where the wheel mounts.  The taper keeps the wheel from rubbing on the hub, but modern setups use a thick conical washer for this instead.  The second problem is the wheel offset: the old hubs don’t stick out as far, so modern wheels end up rubbing on the rear arms.

The basic solution to both of these problems is to replace the original hubs and axles with RC10B4 hubs and axles.  Unfortunately since you’re changing the hub location, this has a bit of a cascading effect and requires replacing quite a few parts.  For reference, I’ve found it useful to refer to the RC10B4 manual pdf (Google it if the link ends up broken), to find modern part numbers for the required replacement parts.

I opted to stick with the RC10B4 pin drive on the rear wheels for now, but it should be easy to use hex drive wheels with a hex adapter if the B4 wheels become unavailable.

I’ll try to detail everything I ended up actually using, without any of the extra parts I didn’t use; but I may forget something.  Most of these parts are shown on page 10 of the manual referenced above.

  • Associated 9584 rear hub carrier
  • (4) 3/16″ x 3/8″ bearings
  • Associated 9670 rear axle RTR
  • Associated 7368 3/16″ axle shims
  • (2) Associated 9671 B4 RTR dogbone
  • Associated 7377 axle spacers
  • Associated 7369 universal roll pins
  • Associated 5407 O-rings
  • Associated 9608/9608B wheel spacer
  • 4/40 threaded rod, for longer camber links
  • 8/32 wheel locknuts
RC10 gold pan with RC10B4 rear hubs

The assembly is mostly straightforward.  Remove the old wheels, hub carriers, and camber links.  Save the ball link parts for use with the new hub carriers and camber links, and reassemble the hubs as shown in the manual above.

The B4 hub carriers have a narrower hinge pin hole, so open them up with a 1/8″ drill bit.  As long as your hinge pin is loose in the old A-arm, it doesn’t matter if it’s a bit tight in the new hub carrier.

Since the new hubs are offset farther out than the old ones, you need longer dog bones to compensate, or they will fall out when your suspension is fully extended.  Some people have replaced their dog bone linkage with CVD links, but I was not willing to risk getting the wrong part since it cost so much more than the dog bones.

On the original RC10, the rear dog bones are held in place using springs in the hubs with small nylon spacers on the differential side.  In modern cars, O-rings are used at both ends of the linkage. The B4 RTR dog bones are just at the limit of maximum workable length using a reasonable camber angle.  The important part to get these to fit correctly is to remove the nylon washer from the differential side of the link, before replacing it with a rubber O-ring.  When you’re finished, you should be able to bottom out the shocks before the dog bones bind up, but they won’t fall out going over jumps.

The wider hub offset also affects your camber settings.  You need longer camber links in order to maintain the original camber setting.  On my car, I had to increase the distance between the ball link ends to about 0.75″ in order to maintain a good camber setting.  This was enough of a change that I bought a long piece of threaded rod to build new camber links, rather than risking stripping the original plastic ball link ends by using them when they’re too loose.

RC10 with B4 wheels and Traxxas/Pro-Line tires

I started with DE Racing Borrego wheels and Barcodes tires, just like in the front, but these tires don’t have any more traction when you put them on the rear wheels.

For my second attempt, I used Traxxas step pin tires and Associated B4 rear wheels.  These have a lot more traction on the grass than any of the other tires I’ve used on this buggy.  On the grass, the buggy used to oversteer a lot on corners, but now it pushes like crazy.  I like the overall look of the car with these tires.  The combination of pin and rib tires mirrors the car’s original look.

I may want to install a slightly smaller pinion to compensate for the larger wheel size, but otherwise I’m happy with these modifications. I should still be able to use the old wheels, so I can compare the handling to see if it’s any better now.

My original buggy had bushings throughout instead of bearings.  This project replaced almost half of the bushings with bearings, so I now have reduced friction as well as more modern wheels.

RC10 Gold Pan Renovation: Part 1

As I mentioned before, I had an Associated RC10 remote control buggy as a kid. It was a high quality car at the time, and took the hobby by storm when it was first released.  I wanted to get my car back into service after many years in storage, so here’s what I did.

RC10 gold pan, first release

This is an original “gold pan” model RC10, predating any stamps on the bottom of the chassis.  This dates it at about 1984 when the car was first released.

The first step in getting the car back into service was just to see if it even worked.  This was easier said than done, due to the state of the car’s electronics. The original radio was a wide-band aircraft radio (oops!), using frequencies that are no longer usable, so that had to be thrown out before it was even turned on.  The speed controller was a rheostat, and was mostly broken, so it also needed replacement.

The obsolete NiCd battery was so destroyed my dad didn’t even give it to me.  Unfortunately the original crosswise battery box mounting didn’t leave enough space for modern NiMh batteries.  In retrospect, I think I could’ve found a LiPo battery that would have fit, but instead I decided to remount the battery box lengthwise.

After a few attempts to make an adapter to mount the battery holder without drilling the chassis, I gave up and made a critical decision in the evolution of this car: I was not going to attempt to preserve the original buggy, but instead I would just make it work well using modern parts where necessary.

I’m keeping all the old parts, so it could be returned to close to its original state, but truthfully most of the parts I’m replacing for a reason, not just on a whim. The RC10 was a wicked good car in its day (see what I did there?), but mine was the very first version of the kit.  Changes were made to critical systems early in its life, and even when this car was original, people routinely replaced parts with better alternatives when possible.

So: To heck with it! I drilled and tapped 2 holes in the chassis to mount the battery holder.  Done!  One end of the battery now sticks in where the throttle servo used to be mounted, and the other end is held down by one of the two original battery holders.  A 6-cell NiMH pack fits perfectly, and I could probably run 7 cells if I found a hump pack instead of a long pack.  I haven’t made the switch to LiPo, but I’m sure something would fit here.

For the other parts, I got a Spektrum receiver and a brushed ESC.  I ripped out the throttle servo, speed controller, receiver, and receiver battery pack, and replaced them with the new parts.  The old Futaba servo needed a new connector, so I rewired it.  I also needed new bullet connectors on the motor, to replace the original Tamiya connector. I powered everything up, and… it worked!  Of course it did, why wouldn’t it work after replacing most of the electronics?

In the following weeks a few other problems cropped up.  The steering servo was slow and weak, so I replaced it with the Hitec seen above.  The motor ended up dying a slow death, probably because of worn brushes like my Losi motor (but after 28 years instead of 28 days). I replaced that with an Axial 27 turn motor to keep it at “stock” speed.

In the end, it’s more important for me to get enjoyment out of this buggy than to maintain its original state.  I get more enjoyment out of repairing and improving the buggy than from driving it when it’s in crappy condition.