RC Tank Warfare community hobby forum

Some time ago I picked up an incomplete static tamiya abrams with the intention of mating it with my armour creations chassis.

However I was able to pickup a gearbox, turret ring, rotation unit and tk60 g2, it seemed rude not to build it properly.

I've ducked out of posting the main build.as its out the box and probably a bit boring.

Some of the mods required were on the elevation. The static build uses a counter weight and stiff poly caps to allow you to position the barrel, but doesn't make for a good elevation!

I replaced this with bearings and added new trunnion from brass



The recoil was adapted to take a mini servo to make best use of the tk60



Couple of the build



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Tom if anyone can build it properly, its you I'm afraid

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Here it is complete as stock (minus glazing which will be painted and installed separately). Its not going to stay that way, ive got a tusk 1 kit from armoured models to install next but I wanted to get it mechanically sorted first.

I would highly recommend the kit, its nicely detailed and is really well thought out. I love how the turret and lower are accessed.

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The next stage of the buils was to get the electrical side sorted. The abrams turret is nice and roomy but the layout meant 8 couldn't get it where I needed without some gentle trimming as it neede do sit where the battery was originally placed.

The gyro is screwed to the tk60 base and a 6 pin cable soldered on.

For the first time im using the higher current solder pads for motors and battery and used deans connectors for this purpose. Im strongly considering a slip ring to give true 360 ability, rctanklegion do o e with 4 10a tracks and 10 2a tracks which should be enough.

The setup process for the gyro is pretty straight forward. When you turn the tank on it calibrated its self. Then you have 3 parameters for rotation and 4 for the servo elevation to setup.

For rotation you have an acceleration, deceleration and overall response (gain) parameters and for the elevation therws a slow speed and fast speed response parameter.

I initially had some issues with rotation not keeping up and over running, but it was because my rotation was too slow. The elevation leveller worked pretty well out the box.

To sort this out I attempted a mod to speed up rotation. From the distant past I remember using the black cap motor from henglong bb units to speed up the stock rotation units. Luckily I had a bb unit to hand, the motor was taken out, pinion pulled and replaced with the tamiya worm gear. The rotation casing needed slight mods as the new motor had its terminals on the top and not the end.

The results were really good, rotation speed went from 9 seconds to 3 seconds and now the gyro can keep up it works much better.

Heres a short test video (excuse my driving)





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very nice, Tom! Until you mentioned getting a slip ring for 'true 360' ability, I'd assumed that you already had one in place- given the contra-rotation of the turret and hull, in the video clip.