Light, realllly light

[bestdragon2001]

A few days ago I bought the new vette and I havent been on In a while so I thought this xmod would be pretty much the same as the other evos.when I opened it I was absolutly disgusted.luckily I have alot of extra parts and I replaced it all including the crappy board.
Anyways, I wanted to know if anyone here has made a super light xmod.
I want to get some pics up tommorrow but idk yet. so far I have cut alot of excess plastic out and I might have to take my mini-z motor pod off my other xmod and I might make a custom chassis.

[dccracing]

i have made a super light xmod chassis before, then i gutted the parts out of it, but i drilled a ton of little wholes everywhere there was exsess plastic. i was able to take quite a bit of material off

[bestdragon2001]

Got any pics

for now I want to stick withe the stock battery setup on this car and leave the motor pod alone

[ling427ttvette]

The biggest problem with drilling a bunch of random holes in the chassis is you are going to severely weaken it's rigidity. I hope you don't plan to do serious driving with it because it's going to crack and eventually break.

My biggest suggestion is if you want to go lighter, start it off with a stiletto chassis and some liths. That will take out the bulky battery tray and save a ton of weight.

A full GPM chassis would be the way to do it, but I realize it's expensive as all hell. I'm embarking on that mission right now and got a good start, but it will be a while before I can order the rest of the GPM.

[dccracing]

gpm? aluminum is light, but not as light as plastic...

i did do some serious driving with that thing until the electrics died. i only drilled holes where it either didn't need so much structural integrity, or had an absolute ton of extra plastic. the first thing i drilled out was the battery trey. almost all of that is not nessecary.

[ling427ttvette]

I've never proven it myself but GPM is always advertised as lighter than the stock part it replaces.

Your power source is a huge contributor to the car's weight, too. What kind of batteries are you running? I don't know if the Nm-H rechargeables are heavy, but regular alkaline batteries definitely are. Lithium ion batteries are very light. Go with those if you haven't done that already. If you want to keep the stock battery enclosure, you can run those Energizer Lithium batteries---they're pricey, but very light and they have more power than alkaline batteries seem to.

I agree with ling427ttvette about drilling holes. If the plastic was higher quality, that'd be one thing...but these Evo's are made out of some pretty brittle stuff. XXX was into making carbon fiber chassis' for people; maybe you can look into something like that. Check out some of his project threads...the GTO he just did looks pretty light weight.

[XMDrifter]

the most important thing is not overall how light the car is, but how low the Center of gravity is. the lower it is, the better. the NiMH is best for keeping a low CG because it places neccesary (because it's the power source) weight at the bottom of the chassis.if you feel up to it, get small drill bits, take the elecs and battery tray off, and drill or cut uneccesary plastic from the grey chassis piece or make lightening holes.

reduce the bodyshell's weight as much as possible because it's the highest up part of any car. the lighter the better. get rid of wheel ridges and use double sided tape to hold your tires, cut off the fake brake discs off the wheels, remove bodyshell screws except for the absolutely neccesary stuff, shave the rear mount bulkhead to only what you need, drive without mirrors, shave shave shave what you can without reducing integrity. get a GPM battery cover to bring more weight to the bottom, take off the shocks/springs and use 1 or 2 links of soft truck spring in between the knuckle and top suspension tower.

there's lots of stuff.

[dccracing]

i actually have tested the weights of a pair of gpm front knuckle versus the weight of a pair of stock front knuckle and here are my results...

gpm weighed 4 grams. not heavy at all, but...

the stock knuckles didnt even register on my scale.

gpm is heavier than stock plastic.
i think they advertised it as lighter than steel. lol.

and i use a technique normally found in 1/10th scale pan cars to lower the center of gravity of my stiletto chassis.

instead of just puting the batteries in, i file an angle into the edges of the battery slots. this allows the round edges of the battery to sit lower in the tray.