RC Tank Warfare community hobby forum

Jimster wrote:Beautiful, fun videos! Nice looking tank and great choice going with a Clark board.

Thanks mate. Looking forward to the next stage - GBS

Unfortunately the Megatron kit includes all the bolt-heads that secure the biscuits (slab armour) to the frame - 238 pieces per side!!! Wibble wibble wibble!

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So here she is so far - gun & mantle removed in preparation for the recoil system

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The next steps(s): My servo rotation/elevation & recoil kit has arrived and I have begun to crack on with the instalation.

Unfirtunately I have discovered that the GBS unit needs to be within 80mm of the control board in order to function correctly (something to do with lead length & signal degredation!) which has necessitated some significant changes to my overall plan.

I will now need to mount the board and GBS unit inside the turret so a major re-think is in operatio. I have (thanks Stain) been sent a couple of photos of a similar instal done by someone else so I have a fair understanding of what to do.

Step 1 for me = lining the hull with velcro because it looks like carpeting and will allow me to jiggle around with the battery & speaker positions and then magnetising the turret.

I glued the first set of 10 magnets into the lower half of the turret then (after careful measuring) cut and shortened the posts on the upper part of the turret to the required length and glued in the second set of (10) magnets.

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The next stage was to try and make sense of several bags of gubbins sent direct from Clark (whilst James Canham sorts out soldering the power cables onto my new TK60-SPG2)

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Onto the rotation kit and deck level switch:

The ramp needed to be fitted to the underside of the turret ring first then the servo and switch needed to be mounted and aligned with the turret ring and the deck level ramp. As you may note from the photos I had to use some plasticard to shim out the deck level switch so it ran up and down the ramp properly.

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gI finally got around to fitting televation & recoil kit! Possibly the hardest part was actually finding a suitable piece to act as the barrel gaiter. After some trial and error I found a motorbike gear/clutch cable boot that fits well (ok, so it's actually too big/not to scale but who's counting rivets?).

All that's needed now (I hope) is my control board and GBS unit all soldered up and an afternoon of setting up/programming followed by some field testing!

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Whilst waiting for my electrical bits I decided to get a little more structural work done and completed the armour setup by fitting the rear hull bar armour.

I had to remove the rear fuel drums and cradles, Jerry cans and cradle, troop phone and first aid box first so that the rear armour would clear the rear panel when the hull was separated.

I also beefed up the fixing points on the side skirts to make it more robust when the hull is separated (or if I crash).

I could have fixed everything to the rear panel and then had the panel lose but I wasn't keen on that as I was unsure how strong it would be.

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I’m really enjoying this build thread! I can’t wait to see a video of the finished product. I’m about to dive into a Taigen Leopard 2 and I’m adding a TK-60 as well so your build is a good read for me. Thanks for making the effort to share your work.

Good morning,
Your Build is a great example of taking an RTR tank and making it into something truly amazing. Excellent work and all the more impressive for that you learned as you went and did it yourself.
regards,
Painless