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Sand Rover model car
Details and pictures of my modified Tamiya Sand Rover.
This Sand Rover started life as a standard Tamiya model car in the early eighties. Originally the Tamiya Sand Rover was a 'plastic fantastic' kit aimed mainly at beginners to model cars. The chassis was a black ABS tub, rear suspension consisted of plastic single wishbones with a flat GRP leaf spring. Front suspension on the original car was a crude plastic trailing arm setup sprung by small coil springs. The car had no damping whatsoever and bounced around a lot but was still a great fun car.
The bodyshell of the Sand Rover was a work of art however. This consisted of the main ABS hard plastic moulding, a metal reinforced plastic roll bar, metal framed perspex windscreen and front and rear lights which were always getting knocked off. A driver figure, steering wheel and gear lever were also included.
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This modification turned out to be quite an interesting engineering project. Most of the original Sand Rover was worn out or broken, this included stripped plastic gears, broken suspension arm mounts, warn out trailing arms etc.
It was decided to use only the original car's chassis, bodyshell, front tyres/wheels and the rear underside gearbox cover/suspension support, all the rest was junk.
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I had some steel 64DP gears in my possesion which were left over from a different project. A few calculations were made and it was clear that I could use these in the car to replace the plastic gears that had stripped in the original model.
A bit of lathework soon fasioned a set of shafts for mounting the gears. Ballraces were fitted in all the required places. The original plastic gears stripped because of them unmeshing while running on warnout plastic bearings.
An alloy plate was made to mount the 540 motor and pinion gear on to complete the gear train.
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Sand Rover model car page 1
Sand Rover model car page 2
Sand Rover model car page 3
Sand Rover model car page 4
Sand Rover model car page 5
Driving the Sand Rover car
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