Hooben ZTZ-99A - Bought on a whim

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tankme
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Hooben ZTZ-99A - Bought on a whim

Post by tankme »

I never did a thread on RC Tank Warfare for this tank, but since I've made progress on it you guys can get all the build info to date.

In Feb of 2021, the https://www.hooben-shop.com had the Hooben ZTZ-99A listed as only $208 with free shipping. That seemed like a good deal IMO for a tank in a version no one else makes, but it is a Hooben so all bets are off. There are actually 3 ZTZs on the market in 1/16. There is the HL ZTZ-99 (actually a Type-98, but sold as a ZTZ-99), the HL ZTZ-99A (actually a ZTZ-99), and the Hooben ZTZ-99A (an actual ZTZ-99A). All three represent different versions of the tank even though two of them have the same designation. Chinese tanks get very little love from the R/C community which is probably why I like them...

I did a bad thing and bought it. I couldn't pass up at that price so I took a huge gamble on Hooben. I ordered it on 2/8/2021 and it arrived on 3/5/2021. In typical Hooben fashion they sent me a bogus tracking number on Feb 20th that meant nothing. Shipment actually went out on Feb 24th under a different tracking number which means the shipment actually took nine days to get here from HK. That isn't bad for actual transit time. Hooben basically took 16 days to process the order and actually ship it.

Now for the good - the packaging was excellent. The box is made from like 1/2" corrugated cardboard with cardboard reinforcement angle pieces on every exposed edge. The interior is a softer type of cut foam.

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Some pics of how it came from Hooben:

Upper hull arrangement.
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Turret traverse motor.
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Lower hull. Main battery connection is a Deans type connection and comes with a Deans to Tamiya adapter. No battery is included. Standard battery box size. Plastic the hull is made out of looks and feels more like ABS than styrene.
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Close up of the electronics. They look similar to a Taigan MFU. Shows the ability to hook up a hobby grade transmitter in manual, but uses what looks to be a Molex connection for that and not a standard servo type cable. Gears are ferrous - magnet does stick to them. Unsure if it's a 370 or 380 motor yet, but it does look like a 390 will fit fine. All the solder joints look better than HL joints.
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Part of the smoke system. I produces tons of smoke. This motor is wired to one of the drive motors. I assume that is so the volume of smoke will increase as the motor speed increases.
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Bottom of the chassis with the nylon tracks. They are single knurled pin that resemble Leopard 2A6 tracks. I don't have a Leo, but I can confirm the Leo tracks, idlers, and sprockets are NOT compatible as they physically will not fit under the track guards. Comes with plastic idlers, plastic sprockets, and plastic suspension arms.
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Upper hull detail - greased from the factory.
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Similar torsion spring setup to some HL tanks, but the spring bale is larger diameter.
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Wheels came with bronze bushings (5x8x2.5mm). Can be adapted to take 5x9x3mm bearings easily. No rubber tires. Tires are plastic. I have verified that HL ZTZ metal bearing wheels will fit the shafts, but the arms are plastic so it's probably not a good idea to mount them as they would put too much stress on the plastic arms.
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Turret detail with mount for IR system. IR system is similar to Taigen.
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Inside of turret upper.
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Turret setup. Uses servo recoil and motor driven elevation. Gears are all plastic. Barrel pivot point uses bearings. Daughter board is normally mounted in the hull.
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Bottom of the turret. Greased from the factory.
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Turret ring has ball bearings installed.
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Large general decals.
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All of the digital decals included, but I think I will paint the camo on and skip the decals.
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Nice color, numbered placement guide for the digital decals.
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In the next post - The teardown and start of the build.
Derek
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tankme
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Re: Hooben ZTZ-99A - Bought on a whim

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Part 2...

The idler and sprocket are plastic. Since I have a Heng Long ZTZ-99 I tried to do some test fittings to see if HL parts would fit the Hooben. The HL ZTZ tracks will not fit on the Hooben sprocket as they are too narrow for the HL track. Hooben sprockets are also taller by like a mm, but that wouldn't affect anything. The road wheels are also a bit taller on the Hooben. The Hooben gearbox is a standard 8mm shaft with double D cuts, but the HL sprocket (single D) will not fit on it without modification. The flat on one side would need to be deepened on the shaft to get the HL sprocket to fit.

The idler on the Hooben uses a non-standard 7mm shaft with no bushing so it's plastic on plastic. I was going to see if the idler brace I bought for the HL ZTZ would fit, but went a different route as you will see later. I test fit the HL ZTZ-99 and T-72 metal idlers, but neither fit really well without major mods. The ZTZ-99A seems to go away from the T-72 sprocket design and tracks. Since the Chinese basically copied the 12cyl turbo diesel from the Leopard 2A6 fitting it to the ZTZ-99A, it seems they also copied it's tracks and sprocket, but I did find out the Leo tracks and sprockets would not fit due to the extra width.

Being a modern tank the turret rotation is actually slow. Top speed is slow also. The motors are 380s.

Installed a Henntec for a T-72/T-90 that I planned to mate with some HL metal T-72 idlers. The bearings on the T72 metal idlers were 5mm and the Henntec shafts are 4mm. I was going to swap in some 4mm bearings that fit the idlers, but ended up just using the stock plastic sprockets in the end. Also I poured resin in the bottom of the hull which really stiffened it up. I learned from my first time doing this to seal up every hole with hot glue before pouring the resin. Didn't lose a single drop this time.
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Replaced the Hooben wheels with the left over Heng Long ZTZ-99 wheels I had laying around after replacing them on my HL ZTZ-99 with metal ones. I am not going to use metal wheels on this as the suspension arms are plastic and I don't know of any metal ones from Hooben. The Hooben wheels had brass bushings, but I have installed bearings in the HL wheels. I like the HL wheels better than the Hooben ones. I had to shorten the shaft on the suspension arms to fit the HL wheels so there is no going back to the Hooben wheels at this point anyway.
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Got magnets installed to hold the turret together for maintenance.
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Upper magnets shown and replaced the Hooben apple mount with a Clark mount to accept the Tamiya apple.
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Clark mount from the top.
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I can close the door and hide the mount when I'm not using an apple.
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Shown with Tamiya apple installed.
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In the next post - electronics install...
Derek
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tankme
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Re: Hooben ZTZ-99A - Bought on a whim

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Part 3...

I was halfway convinced to put it back together with stock parts and dump it out on Ebay, but then I decided to revisit it the other day. Since I had already done some work to it I figured I'd do just enough to get it battle worthy and not spend a crap ton of time on it. These are the changes from the last few days...

Never mounted the electronics in a turret before, but due to how much space the turret rotation motor takes up in the hull it made sense for this build. Control board is an OpenPanzer TCB. It was the last one I had laying around so I figured good enough for the project.
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The way Hooben had the recoil servo mounted it didn't have enough room to have a decent throw/motion for the barrel so I mounted the "L" bracket to the old mount point to give it more throw length. I do have to find a way to stabilize the barrel as it flops around during the recoil stroke. I reused the Hooben elevation motor and it works well. I couldn't find my Taigen Leopard 2A6 sound card so I just threw my JS2 card in there for now to have sound.
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Both the volume control and the apple mount are hidden under hatches, but easily accessible.
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Just hot glued them both in place.
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Installed a Taigen high intensity flash unit.
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Moved the IR emitter to the top of the barrel and installed a red LED in it's place for the MG. Not accurate for real life, but it filled the hole.
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I rewired all the rear LEDs so that they can be activated as brakes, marker lights, and hazard lights instead of all wired together as brake lights.
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I reused the Hooben traverse motor and it's a little slow, but works good.
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Installed an FRS7S speaker box and printed a speaker grill for it. I added magnets to hold the upper hull on.
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I reused the Hooben gearboxes. They are loud, but seem to work OK. They are slow for a modern tank.
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The Hooben adjustable idlers were replaced with a Henntec T-72 unit. Because of the Henntec I had to cut off the mudflaps it used to have as they impacted the tracks when the tracks were properly tensioned. The aluminum angle is used to brace the front end. I reused the vinyl tracks as my plan to use Leopard tracks failed. The Leo tracks from HL are wider and will not fit under the track skirts.
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And now you are caught up to where it's at as of today. Still debating on a color scheme. Not sure if I want to do the digital decals, digital paint, or go with a green digital....decisions, decisions.
Derek
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Re: Hooben ZTZ-99A - Bought on a whim

Post by Sub »

Hi,
Looks like a nicely detailed model.
Its great to see another Open Panzer TCB in use, a most underated product in my opinion, the settings and parameters for customising personal settings are nearly endless, you can also use a Taigen Leo turbo diesel sound unit with it too with a slight mod, they sound great when used with the TCB.
Looking forward to a video of it when its completed.
Regards.
Sub.
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Herr Dr. Professor
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Re: Hooben ZTZ-99A - Bought on a whim

Post by Herr Dr. Professor »

I have the two HL ZTZ tanks, but I had no idea the Hooben existed. Some of the turret and hull detail looks a bit better than on the HL versions; however, I am not a good observer, as I am still in need of a "what's this thing" primer for modern tanks. :{ I am glad you are reviving this ZTZ and I am eager to see what new magic you accomplish. :clap:
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tankme
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Re: Hooben ZTZ-99A - Bought on a whim

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Herr Dr. Professor wrote:I have the two HL ZTZ tanks, but I had no idea the Hooben existed. Some of the turret and hull detail looks a bit better than on the HL versions; however, I am not a good observer, as I am still in need of a "what's this thing" primer for modern tanks. :{ I am glad you are reviving this ZTZ and I am eager to see what new magic you accomplish. :clap:
The Hooben version isn't well known. I saw it a long time ago on their actual website when they "supposedly" made an Abrams that I can't say anyone every purchased. Then when the Merkava came up for pre-order they put the ZTZ-99A on sale. It was just too cheap to pass up. It definitely has a bunch of issues, but it is an interesting tank model.

Technically Heng Long calls the Type-98 (or seen it as ZTZ-98) a ZTZ-99. Then the Heng Long ZTZ-99A is actually modeled after a ZTZ-99. Then there is also a ZTZ-99G model, but no one I know of makes that model. This is the newer ZTZ-99A as Hooben depicts is. This model departs from the others in that they are elongated derivatives of the T-72. They are elongated to house the Leo like engine pack. The ZTZ-99A is closer to a western design than a Soviet one. In the more modern era the Chinese seem to be diverging from the Soviet design to some hybrid of western and Soviet. They stay with the Soviet calibers, but have cloned the Leopard tracks, sprockets, and engines. The ZTZ-99A and a lot of their newer AFVs are a higher profile like western designs. Good information and detailed pics of Chinese vehicles are hard to come by due to the nature of the Chinese military machine. There are lots of distance shots, but not much up close.
Derek
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tankme
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Re: Hooben ZTZ-99A - Bought on a whim

Post by tankme »

Sub wrote:Hi,
Looks like a nicely detailed model.
Its great to see another Open Panzer TCB in use, a most underated product in my opinion, the settings and parameters for customising personal settings are nearly endless, you can also use a Taigen Leo turbo diesel sound unit with it too with a slight mod, they sound great when used with the TCB.
Looking forward to a video of it when its completed.
Regards.
Sub.
I am having a weird issue with my TCB that I might bring up in the forum over there. Whenever the tank takes a hit through the battle system, it stops moving forward and reverse. It will turn, but not move straight. It may be something I've configured wrong as it's happening to both my ZTZ tanks which both have TCBs in them. I cloned the config from one to the other and then tuned the Hooben config from there. Really the only difference between the configs would be some reverse settings on channels. I'll be playing with it today. There might be some configs in the ESCs that need to be tweaked also. Gotta play with it.

The other ZTZ tank in my collection uses the Leo sound card from Taigen. I thought I bought another one, but simply can't find it right now which is why it ended up with the JS-2 card as a stop gap measure.
Derek
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Re: Hooben ZTZ-99A - Bought on a whim

Post by tankme »

Now that the KV-1E is at a standstill I decided to attack some low hanging fruit. I decided just to repaint this thing and then I saw a pic of the tank with anti-slip texture on the front of it. I just couldn't let it slide so I had to add it to the tank. I couldn't find any really good photos of the pattern so I just used some artistic license and common sense as to where it would be on the tank. Once again I used Tamiya Diorama Texture Paint in Light Gray just like I did for my Abrams texture.

I was considering changing the camo pattern to the green one, but that would require a lot of work to mask the digital pattern. I'm going to try my hand at applying the provided digital decals and leave it in a desert scheme.

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I also had some old window screen that I used to make the engine guard out of. I also spent some time making some periscope glass out of some 1/8" junk acrylic sheet I had saved for just this purpose (not shown).

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Derek
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