Tamiya Wild Willy 2 Project

Page 2: Upgrades!

I much prefer the look of the original M38 Wildy Willy to the re-release version, mostly because of the tires. I thought the narrower tires on the original seemed way less ridiculous (although still ridiculous). These were the same tires used on the original Blazing Blazer. Luckily for me there is an eBay seller making reproduction tires for the Blazer, so I picked up a set. These are narrow, paddle style sand tires with foam inserts as shown. The wheels were a bit harder. The original wheels are very difficult to find and they wouldn't mount to the new chassis even if I could find them, so I ordered some steel 1.9" spoked wheels from RC4WD which look reasonably similar to the originals. Everything is shown on the right.

I had heard rumors that the reproduction tires didn't fit well on standard beadlock wheels, and I suspected this was because the rubber is too thick. This is a common problem with Proline tires as well, common enough that you can buy a set of Proline compatible center rings for the wheels. You can see the subtle differences in the pictures above. The black ring came with the wheels, and the blue ring is specifically for Proline tires. It is slightly larger in diameter and a bit wider. The tires fir perfectly with these.

Now that the tires are mounted we can compare them with the huge balloon tires that came with the WR-02 kit. You can see that the diameter is quite similar, but the new (original style) tires are much narrower.

The RC4WD wheels use a 12mm hex drive which is just fine in the rear, but doesn't work at all in the front. The kit uses a spindle which assumes the bearings will be mounted inside the wheel. We need the bearings in the steering knuckle. Luckily, the WR-02 kit happens to come with these knuckles on the B parts tree, they are just not used. Assuming you didn't throw your spare parts away, they bolt right on. In the image on the left the stock knuckle is white and the needed part is black. Use of this part also serves to narrow the track width which is a good thing in my opinion. You'll also need a spindle for the hub. I stole the front spindles from a Bush Devil II kit which worked perfectly. The wheels fit fine in the rear, but the wheel nut will not clamp tight against them because it bottoms out on the step of the spindle first. I was able to steal the rear spindles from the same Bush Devil II kit which worked perfectly. You can see in the picture on the right that even though the black part is slightly longer than the silver, the shank is shorter.

Because the front track width has been narrowed, the stock steering links won't work. I swapped out the 50mm stock links for some 37mm links I had in my parts bin. These fit just right as you can see.

Here's an overhead view showing the footprint with the new tires and wheels mounted. The footprint is much more reasonable than it was with the balloon tires.

Here are before and after pictures of the wheels and tires. I think the updated version looks 100x better, though it is obviously a matter of opinion.

The new wheels are quite a bit heavier than the old and the diameter is also slightly different. This changes the wheelie behavior a bit and tends to make the front end come down harder than it did. For this reason, and because I always do it anyway, I replaced the friction dampers with CVA oil dampers as shown. They don't look much different, but they sure do perform differently. I also saw a fascinating new product from Yeah Racing: a full aluminum wheelie bar with its own shocks. It only comes in blue which would look terrible with the green Jeep body, so I stripped the dye from the anodize. You can read about the method I use for this in my CR-01 build.

These pictures compare the original plastic wheelie bar with my new aluminum version. The new version looks incredible and I like the rubber tires, ball bearings, and shock absorbers. Unfortunately, the geometry is different which results in a lower wheelie angle with the new bar, and that in turn leads to shorter wheelies instead of longer. The upgrade was a bust and I can't recommend it even though it looks great. The shocks needs to be shorter to increase the angle.

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