Quickie update: while googlink for parts for other projects, found some new stuff for this one. First was that one can get differentials for the WPL axles, yay. When I tore these down to grease them, I was surprised to find that even the front one was solid, no diff. Had to Aliexpress these, but they fit right in:
Top, axle with new diff and shafts, bottom, straight shaft with no diff. I did both axles as it's not a crawler and the noise of the tires squeaking on the floor was driving me nuts. White lithium and blue loc-tite make the axles pretty good.
Other thing is a set of more appropriately sized tires. They're still intended for the WPL trucks, but are both slightly taller (greater diameter) and narrower, which is exactly what I wanted. Oddly, they're advertised as "crawler" tires for the WPL's, seems silly since for that usually you want wide tires, but no matter to me. Skinny tall tires were the thing Back In The Day of old Rovers. Rear is new tall ones, front is old shorter/fatter tires.
Bigger tires means new tire foams though, gotta dig through my stash of pool noodles. This one was solid-core, no center hole, so it's either just a weird pool noodle or sold for yoga. ..shrug..
It's eleventy-billion degrees in the garage, so I refuse to go out and use the foam cutter. Turns out you can do just as well (or in my case, just as badly) with the serrated fish gutter blade on your Leatherman:
Red on the blade is Sharpie runoff, not blood =))
And net result is just slightly more scale. Still steers okay, and the tread pattern's about the same, so unless you look really close you don't notice the spare doesn't match. (The new ones come in sets of four and I was too cheap to get a second set just for the spare.)
I keep meaning to look into gear reduction options, but get distracted by other shiny things =)) I see at least two such projects in the background of these pix, I gotta get a move on and in one case do a thread, and in the other, actually finish the dang thing!
-- A