I ask because I saw one of these babies, an M8 Armored Car made to go with 12" G.I. Joes, at a local Toys “R” Us.*
Now, this particular toy vehicle is just an unpowered piece of plastic…but I immediately began thinking how fun it would have been to “RC” the thing around the ol’ backyard.
And then it occured to me; I’ve seen Radio Control hobbyists’ shops. People build their own Radio Control vehicles all the time.
But…what are the chances that I—a person with no real mechanical or electrical building experiences outside of replacing the CPU in my Mac—could build my own RC car? Or, specifically, retrofit a preexisting G.I. Joe vehicle like the one above into a radio controlled vehicle?
I’d have no idea where to start…“I wouldn’t even know what to make the nose out of,” so to speak. Is there a book I could read? A reliable web site? Or is this one of those skills you can only learn by years of experience?
Ranchoth
*Gads, I wish they’d made these when I was a kid…when I stopped buying G.I. Joes, they were just making disco-colored “Cobra Mutant-Space Ranger EXTREME!” vehicles, or some other such nonsense. Sigh.
If you don´t have mechanical and electrical building experience your chances are small, not to say that you´re screwed. What you´ll need to do is: A) an electric motor and transmission and B) Servo motors to control steering. Of course you could use a small gas engine, but you´ll end up VERY screwed up
With some mechanical abilities the whole affair is not really difficult, what you have to do is buy the parts from a RC cars store, and then fit the gizmos into the chasis; but you HAVE to know WHAT you´re doing and HOW to do it.
If you´re serious about this you may want to contact a RC cars club or something.
You could avoid the electrical aspect easily enough by removing the RC parts from another car and sort of fitting the parts into your pre-existing frame. In cheap plastic RC cars you can just remove the whole plastic cover.
Unless you do go the “GI Joe retrofit” route, you’ll need access to a vacuum former to produce a plastic chassis and bodyshell, as well as some of the suspension parts (although I suspect suspension will be optional in your case)… you might want to find out where you can do that, to begin with.
(they aren’t hard to use though, as long as you can make a fairly good mould)
You can certainly buy similar stuff from a hobby shop. There’s one here in Edmonton that has helicopters, hovercrafts, boats, tanks… ya know those snow-cat things you see on ski hills? They have one of those for some reason. Take a look around town, you might be surprised.
If you don’t find it, my advice is to take a chassis that looks kinda like what you want, replacing the rest with Sgt. Joe’s equipment. I see big problems trying to get a free-wheeling, non-turning model into action; best to go the other way.
BTW, My friend and I have two model projects right now… an airboat driven by a trimmer engine (we’re cheap), and a car driven by a chainsaw engine. ('cause electric seemed a bit dinky. ;)) You may also want to note that as C.S./Engineering types, we are wholly interested in cost/performance, and not at all with looks, which is why the boat is made out of plywood siding and painted bright purple.
My suggestion would be to take an existing RC car kit, and retrofit the GI Joe shell and wheels onto it. You would probably have to lose wheels #5 and 6, though.
I just built a Tamiya M1025 Humvee kit, mostly because I wanted something to chase the cats around the backyard. I didn’t have any R/C car experience when I did it, and I didn’t have any problems doing the build, mostly because Tamiya has excellent instructions. It took about 15 hours to complete.
(Note: I don’t think they sell the kit from their website, this is the same thing as the kit I built, but pre-built ready to run with all the radio gear installed.)
You basically build the chassis, which is a common part that they use for a bunch of different models (click on the picture of the mechanical parts in the “gallery”, it shows the chassis put together), and the top, which all you really need to do is paint and attach a couple of parts. Then the two connect up with hooks in the front and a couple of c-clips connected to the posts in the back.
You could probably go to a hobby shop and find an offroad chassis that can fit under the GI Joe car’s top, and figure out a way to attach it. Since that thing looks pretty big, it would probably replace the front and middle wheels, leaving the back wheels as decoration.
I’ve built two remote control cars, a Traxxas monster truck and a Tamiya Beetle. The Tamiya kits are by far the better ones in terms of instruction quality. It usually takes less than a day to build the basic kit, then the modding begins
BTW: it’s possible to replace the “shells” used on the kits to make one body fit another chassis. Remember though, with some kits you must paint the shells yourself, using special acrylic paints.
I built my first one when I was around 13, so it isn’t too hard to do.
I’m with MDI… Tamiya kits are easy to build and a lotta fun… Ranchoth, have you looked for a pre-existing kit with a similar look? I know Tamiya and Kyosho both have 1/12 tank kits- I’m sure on or the other has an armored car…
Tamiya has a HMMVVE (?) in it’s catalogue, last time I checked. The problem is, they also do static models, not R/C ones, and I can’t remember whether it was indeed a R/C model. It’ best to browse their site.
Oh, I misread the OP. Just to prove the point, though, the Junkyard Wars contenstants were asked to build a real, full sized car that operated from RC.
Hrm. I don’t actually have a photo of our airboat yet, that was just a similar design I found by searching. Ours is actually about 4.5’ by 2.5’ (Shoulda thought that one out a bit more… it’ll barely fit in the van!)
Our motor is mounted the same way - that’s the way the motor goes, and all the props were pitched that way. Ours also looks a bit top-heavy, but it’s really not. (Plywood is heavy.)
I think we started it shortly before Junkyard Wars came on over here. Sadly, we’re often more interested in thinking out designs, so our 10 hour time limit passed by a looooong time ago.
