Tamiya Manta Ray Project

Page 1: Assembly

The Manta Ray comes in a lovely medium sized box with traditional artwork on the cover including the silhouette of a real manta. There is a divider inside the box and a smaller box for hardware, but no blister packs.

You can tell by the smallish number of parts that this is not a very complicated model. The main chassis is a single piece bathtub and most of the remaining plastic parts belong to the gearbox housing and the suspension arms.

The rear gearbox uses a standard open differential with 3 metal spider gears. The ring gear is a spur type with a very large face width. The right hand image shows it installed in the gearbox housing.

These are the other gears which are part of the rear transmission. The large plastic spur gear is on a common shaft with a smaller aluminum gear. There's another aluminum idler to drive the differential, and the bevel gear is driven directly by the spur and leads to the prop shaft running to the front transmission.

The motor installs into an indexing mount with holes for pinion gears ranging from 16 to 21 teeth. The kit comes with an aluminum pinion of the maximum size resulting in the highest top speed.

The suspension arms attach directly to the gearbox housing. The upper arms are just beams with a fixed length. The lower arms are wishbones. The drive cups, hubs, and dog bones are installed at this point, completing the rear driveline. The rear shock tower is also attached here. With everything being black, the detail can be hard to see in photos.

Now we'll get started on the front gearbox. It uses the same type of differential as the rear, and the same type of bevel gear to connect to the prop shaft. Note the tiny bearings supporting the bevel gears. This will not be ideal for high torque applications.

The completed front gearbox with the drive cups installed. It is very compact.

Now we'll install the front suspension and steering. It is very similar to the rear except it uses C-hubs to support the red steering knuckles. The lower arms pivot on a large u-bolt which will later be retained by the front bumper.

This model uses the older type of CVA shocks with a longer rod end cap. The piston head is built into the rod and does not have holes so is not adjustable, although of course the fluid viscosity can be changed. The front and rear dampers have the same housing but the front have an internal spacer to limit extended length and they have different springs. These are all long travel shocks.

All of the electronics are installed in a compact way within the chassis bathtub. The steering servo is mounted to the deck with the ESC right behind. The battery sits laterally behind that with the receiver above it. The dual bellcrank steering goes right ahead of the servo. Everything here is almost identical to the TA-02 I just recently built.

The gearboxes and suspension assemblies are modular and can now simply be bolted to the center section which nearly completes the model. All that remains are the wheels and tires.

The Manta Ray was pretty easy to paint, although it is the only polycarbonate Tamiya model I've built which does NOT include window masks. The window needed to be masked manually and painted black.It's too bad that it is not clear with a driver like many other classic buggies. Everything else is standard silver.

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