TLDR - Try Tungsten Putty…
The longer story... Click here to read me blather on for a bit.
We all know that I like the path least travelled… on in my RC journey that is the path of PR Racing. We also know that I like new and shiney and trying different things… which often leads me to getting a different buggy, building it, running it, seeing something newer, building it running it… and of course I make the excuse of “its for content” and thus the circle of my RC life revolves ever onward…
I have always shied away from Schumacher… as they are pretty much the antithesis of the path less travelled - go to any club day and you are greeted by a whole load of LD3s. filling up all levels of the meeting.
Dont get me wrong- I know they are good - and I know that in logic they are a better decision than my usual, with people that understand how to tune them at most clubs, an abundance of spare parts and upgrades, high likelyhood that if you dont have a spare for the part you just disintegrated against a wall, someone else will have… there are a lot of good reasons to go Schumacher here in the UK
WTF does this have to do with tungsten putty? well you see, in my wanderings through RC life I had an Associated B7 or 2… and @Sir_bear had a Schumacher LD3 fully tricked up… which being a full blood brother of AE he was not happy with… a quick handshake later and we parted ways with the pinkslips for each others vehicles…
Which led me to eventually (after I got it back from Rob Fox) trying an LD3 on track… and bugger me it was good… ok… looking at laptimes I wasnt actually FASTER with it than the PR … but I was more consistent and it felt AWESOME over the jumps. My inquisitive (and pig headed) personality was triggered and I want to see if I can get the B10r to run as good.
One of the biggest differences on the face of it was the oodles of brass that had been deposited into the front end of the LD3, front arm hanger, under servo weight, ESC mount plate etc… which lead me to investigating deeper - I want to get the PR to a similar weight and balance. there isnt much difference in it, but we all know that a little bit of weight in the right place can make all the difference.
The trouble is, although the PR is a very well built car - there are not so many options for it. We can get a brass ESC tray, We can get those funky bolt in side brace / weights… but there is no servo weight void, and there is no brass front hanger yet. So I started looking at how I could get some more weight on it
So I grabbed some stick on weights that have mysteriously ended up in my possesion (Thanks @Dubboy ) and with the help of some corner scales worked out that if I slapped 30g on the front half of the B10r I would be getting close. The issue is there isnt much space to put weights in the front, especially not low down, and sticking weights to the topdeck just felt wrong, they are pretty high up there, and at a time where people are flipping shocks to get the weight low and Agama are reintroducing laydown shocks I felt that this was bad.
Stripping the B10r back a bit I found some voids in the front hanger and the front bulkhead, with these both being low down, and on the axle line I thought it would be a good idea to cram some weight in there… and my first thought was to start melting lead (cos i dont expose myself to enough bad things like thinners, epoxy, plastic fumes etc) but while I was researching that, @Ellis mentioned that I should try tungsten putty, end of blather.
Void in front bulkhead and arm hanger
weight before putty
Voids stuffed with Putty
weight after putty
So a nice gain of 21.4G low down over front axle… be interesting to see what weight brass arm hanger will be, and what changes we see in handling with this extra weight.
That being said, the experiment isnt hugely scientific - there are addtional changes made to the set up, @Ellis is helping me in this journey and has suggested a few geometry changes too…