1969 El Camino - custom / lowrider

[frizzen]

Time marches on, computers die, and servers shut down, plus Photobutt ruined quite a bit of the internet back in 2017. So much of my original reference materials were long gone. Places like The Mad Modeler forum, LayItLow, and even Lowrider used to have some really great content on making these things more awesome.

Jevries website keeps getting changed up as years go by, here are some useful links to get an idea what's up.
https://www.jevries.com
https://www.jevries.com/rclowriders
Check out "Beswitched" and "Lost Angel" plus some "switch action'' for inspiration. There are several other guys building customs than just Jeroen, but it's easier to get ideas off these pics.

[frizzen]

Yes i DO know the convention was that i'm actually building a "Custom", and the "Lowrider" here is actually whoever is holding the remote driving it. Meh, everything is a "custom" to some extent once it leaves the dealer.

If Frizzen builds a lowrider...
https://youtu.be/JqmGOKTK5Ns

Anyway. We're skipping around in the build so that you don't suffer through the down time since it arrived back March.



There is a horizontal cam on the top of rear axle that works against an arm coming off the 3-wheel yoke, this changes ride height. I lowered the 'dumped' side of the cam, trimmed the arm to where it no longer touched the center top of the cam. Then added some epoxy to the bottom side of the cam so it wouldn't flex as much. I'd rather just run a servo on rear axle that can work against the 3-wheel yoke, but that's maybe version 2?

The "3-wheel yoke" is held into the chassis by a top cap with 4 screws. This has a limiter bar that can be trimmed down for more articulation. Everybody likes a high 3, but if you went too far it could fall out of the chassis. So that was trimmed to just shy of body contact.

Front end is where it gets fun, so I hacked off the front of the chassis.
Kept the knuckles, tie-rod, top steering alignment plate. Made some aluminum lower arms, brass stiffener plates. Basically it now became a scaled up ''U - bar'' that can be pushed down, or pulled down.
It still needs some hingey thing, so break out the brass tube to make a chassis tie in. Then i grabbed some rod, balljoints, and too much triangulation. It keeps it centered, but i kinda wanted to hit more 'sides' before it lifts into 3-wheel.

I'm not sure if this would be better off with a front 'fishing line PULLdown' or a ''servo PUSHdown' . Traditionally when hopping models or rc cars, guys run a motor for a pulldown line to snatch the cars front end up. Most seem to run a stance servo with hop motor, but now we can also get much more badass servos that have can have the power and speed to do both.

The new production Redcat 64 uses a push-down hop servo. The older creations based on these tended to run pull-down motors