Traxxas TRX-4 Project
Page 1: Upgrades!
These pictures show the updated brass portal covers,
steering knuckles, link supports, shock spring cups, and brake rotors
that I installed. At first I was reluctant to put the rotors on
the rear since any real Bronco would have drums, but once I realized
that no real Bronco would have 4-link suspension in the first place
unless it had been heavily modified I became accepting of it. It
also looks cool. The left hand image shows the front suspension
and the right hand shows the rear. You need to look closely at the
brass colored chamfers to see what has been changed.
I waited quite a while for the spare tire mount to become available and
knew I wanted it. Unlike a lot of Traxxas accessories, I actually
found this one to be quite reasonably priced. The kit comes with
the support bar, some internal brackets to support the body, and a
two-piece spare tire. There is no actual tire, this is just a
cover.
Here are the before and after pictures. I think the spare really
adds a lot to the scale appearance. The graphics on the cover are really well done. Because it is just a hollow
plastic cylinder, it is very light and doesn't add much in the way of
weight so the CG is not negatively affected (much).
I also added a simple bull bar to the front
bumper. It is plastic and would not take much abuse, but it makes
the truck look a bit more serious.
It took almost a year after the release of the Bronco body for Traxxas
to make the light kit available. This model doesn't use regular
light buckets so you can't just shove any old 3mm or 5mm LED in there,
you need a chip based system made to fit. The kit shown above
comes with all the chips, lights, wiring, and controllers necessary for
headlights, tail lights, and markers. You can separately add rock
lights and/or a light bar.
This is a pretty complex lighting system. You have to start by
wiring the power system into the receiver, but this is not for actually
supplying power. The system just uses the receiver as an on/off
switch; it does not respond to throttle (brake lights) and does not have
turn signals. Power actually comes from an accessory lead on the
ESC, and is presumably at a regulated voltage from the BEC. Since
this power source is already switched, I'm not quite sure why the
receiver connection was necessary. (Update: Turns out the
power supply from the ESC is not switched;' it is on whenever the
battery is plugged in. The receiver connection therefore acts as a
switch.) The left hand image shows the
power block. It is the black rectangle just to the left of the
blue shift servo. It attaches to the chassis. The rest of
the system attaches to the body as shown on the right and therefore the
wiring lead must be disconnected to remove the body. The body
contains a lot of tie down spots for the wires so they end up very neat.
Finally, this picture shows the rock lights. There are two light
buckets per wheel well (8 total) with three LEDs per bucket.
That's a lot of light for under the truck. It would be nice to
have a switch to disable the rock lights since you don't necessarily
want them on any time the headlights are on. The only way to do it
is to pull the plug from the power supply to the rock lights.
More than 2 years later I added the new (at the time) Pro Scale lighting
system which includes functional turn signals, brake lights, and
reverse lights.
©2018 Eric Albrecht
