Some may ask, why would anyone want to bother with adding these plates? Well the best answer would be, is because the way they mount the gearboxes is weak, and marginal to begin with. the factory gearboxes are mounted with 3 sheet metal screws going into the plastic. It works for a while, it is cheap, and it is good enough to get the tank out the door so that's how they do it. This is fine for the majority of model tankers, who just have plastic tracks and gearbox, drive the tank 10 minutes and put it away, and never add any weight to your tank.
But if you change anything though, like adding metal tracks, the stress on the gearbox mounts obviously increases. The gearbox will flex, possibly too much, because they are only mounted in plastic that flexes a lot - and the gearboxes are dragging a lot of weight, all while just being attached by those 3 screws! This flex can mean your mount screws will loosen, the hull mounting holes may split or strip, and even can contribute to thrown track problems. So if you run your tank anything other then plastic everything, or you change your tracks to metal (or it came with them), or add any weight to it such as metal panels and hatches or even a metal turret or some such, the factory way is not the best way for you to mount the gearbox - the best and most structurally sound way is obviously to use, those metal plates.
The cheap alternative is to drill several holes in the hull, and use long screws to mount the gearboxes more solidly. Many people do not want to drill such holes as it mangles the tank basically, and who can blame them? So instead of doing that, using these plates will mount the gearboxes much more solid and eliminate the hull flex completely. It is also a fix you can use if the gearbox mounting holes in the hull have cracked or broken off.
The problem is finding these plates! They used to just sell them separately, now you have to go a little bit out of your way to find them. But there are still places you can buy them cheap, So here are the two places i have found them available, one is fast and one is cheap!
1. Ali express/mato outlet. Jack Wang is the salesman and he will get them for you, but he has to get them in a roundabout way, because they are not a storefront item and they are not just click-and-buy. So to contact Mr Wang, and maybe look at all the other thousand and one tank goodies they have there, alls you have to do is go to ali express, do a search for "heng long tanks parts" and just scroll down keeping an eye on the "sellers" field (there's only about 6 or 7 vendors so it's easy) until you see a part sold by mato outlet like in the arrow
Just click the "mato outlet" words and it takes you to their store, click "contact" and send Mr Wang an email asking for the plates. Because these are not a storefront item, he gets them from somewhere else in China. But again because the plates are an item that is not just click-and-buy, it is in a roundabout way, it will sound like a shell game of some kind the way he tells you you have to do it! But you can trust jack, have done too many transactions to count with this gentleman, i can vouch for Jack he's on the up and up and you won't get cheated! So if you want these plates; so follow his instructions, he can get you as many plates as you want for $5 each.
If you are wary of buying in the odd way i described, i don't blame you, but i just ordered 3 of the plates since theyre only $5 each SHIPPED which is pretty dang cheap if you ask me, which is why i went for 3 at once. I have no real idea of exactly how they look, but when i get the plates i will post pictures of 'em. That will probably be in at least a month when i get em...the slow boat from china bringing my goody stuff happens to coincide with chinese new year, which begins this sunday Feb 16 - and all that means for us tankies, is every consumer good shipped out of china might grind to a crawl since the holiday lasts two weeks! Anyway i have 5 HL tanks i will find out exactly how well these fit in each one, pics on that too.
2. From Erik at Imex tanks. At this link
http://www.imex-model.com/category/87/R-C-Tanks.html
At the lower left of your screen, click the "contact us" button and tell him you are looking for the plates. He quoted me a price of about $20 shipped, per plate. This model tank retailer is based in Florida so, for those in the USA it would certainly be faster to buy from them. But again, it is not listed in the products section so you have to email them more info back and forth a bit to get the plates.
Honestly you'd think the tank part retaillers would get the idea by now that people want these plates but until they do, this is one way to go about getting the mounting plates if you want your gearboxes to mount in your hull and in there nice and strong instead of just 3 screws into the plastic!
shaun
