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Jiabaile 1/43 RC Project Car

04/10/2025

Yes yes I've been dead for ages. My life has essentially completely changed in the last 6 months.

With that out of the way, I have recently embarked on a secret project. Now posting it here is risky, as the target of this project does know about this website, but it's been too interesting not to write about.

I've been curious about RC cars for a long time - especially drift cars. Being into cars, that makes sense, but I never actually took the plunge. My main concern is space - you need a large, flat space. Kitchens or bathrooms with good smooth tiles could be perfect - however all RC cars I've seen (that're actually good) have been 1/10 to 1/24. Far to big to run around a bathroom.

Now the obvious solution is to do what many others do - go to a track. The issue with that is my nearest track was over an hour and a half away until very recently (I've moved, and it's now about 30 minutes). I could've been at castle combe in my actual car in that time. This has put me off. I know from experience that having to go to a specific location to do something makes me far less likely to do it, if that location is more than about 15 minutes away.

However, I have recently discovered a handful of 1/43 RC cars, that seemed very cheap, yet apparently performed quite well. At about 10cm long, that could be ran in the bathroom. I just so happened to be trying to come up with ideas for a gift for someone, when I found an AE86. I've always known that if they could buy and car to do crimes in, it'd be a AE86. So I bought it.

With the low price of 30, I wasn't expecting it to be perfect out of the box. But that would be boring anyway. I wanted to put some effort into making the car fun and easy(ish) to drive out of the box. I have about 2 months to do this.

Initial testing

Once it arrived, I immediately used it to see how it could be improved. I was impressed at how well it worked. I've owned some cheap RC widgets before (mostly aircraft), and I always found the controller-vehicle interaction was terrible on cheap stuff. That wasn't the case here - the controller and car paired almost instantly, and the response from the controls is essentially instant. No need to change the controller or reciever in my opinion.

In terms of driving however, it was interesting. The car comes with two sets of tyres - drift tyres, and grip tyres. Grip driving with the gyro on full was very enjoyable. The car is comically fast given its size (scale speed is over 400MPH!), and corners well too. Drifting has its issues however. I noted 3 main ones:

  • When the car bumps - including gaps between floorboards or tiles - it often destablizes or jumps.
  • There's a very fine line between sliding normally, and spinning. Drifting is easy, holding a drift beyond 90 degrees is hard.
  • The turning circle is poor, to the point where getting the backend out at lower speeds is very hard. The previous issue is exagerated when in tight corners.

That may sound bad, but actually it was still very enjoyable and on a surface actually fit for this use, it would probably drive very well. The dips between tiles in our bathroom are significant. I did some research and teared the unit down to see what I could do to improve this.

Modifications

I have a number of ideas for mods that should improve this car significantly. Some I have acted on, others I have yet to do.

Chassis/Body "Bushing"

The chassis and the body are not directly screwed together. The bumpers on the body are screwed to the body, and the chassis is sandwiched by the two. I feel this is partially the cause of the car often having issues over bumps - although the lack of rear suspension certainly makes this worse. I slightly cut the groves in the body at the rear where the chassis slots in. This allows the chassis to move upward a few mm. To return it to its normal position and help dampen shocks, I have placed some foam - straight from the packaging - inside the body. It presses down on the chassis.

Weight

The car is extremely light. Some weight on the body might improve handling over bumps, grip, and might help the car drift at slower speeds if done right. I have placed a small socket inside the roof of the body with just duct tape for testing.

Steering angle

The max steering seems to be what limits the turning circle. There are two stoppers in either side of the driveshaft that the track rod hits at the points where it arcs downward to then connect to the hubs. Cutting these out will allow the tierod to move until the part where it curves towards the hubs hits the holes for some of the screws that hold the chassis together. I don't see how this setup would cause any more wear than the standard and the additional few mm of movement significantly increases the max steering angle.

I found that this can cause the inside of the wheels to rub against the chassis slightly where the hub sits. The friction from this significantly slows the wheels, to the point where the car won't move with the controller set to the lowest speed mode. To resolve this, I simply used a knife to cut a tiny amount of these areas.

Rear Suspension

The car has no rear suspension at all. However the gearing at both axles (the car is AWD) is the same. I think some holes for the wheel hubs to sit in could be all that's needed to essentially put the front suspension into the rear. I'd then screw the tie-rod into place to hold the wheels straight. This should further improve the handing on bumps. I have ordered another car to test this out.

Sound

Purely for fun, I reckon a DasMikro will fit in the hatchback body easily. I will use some sound clips of a 4AGE with ITBs to make some driving sounds.

One difficulty with this is power - typically you would fit such a unit between the receiever and ESC. This car has both of those things, but they're on the same board, to being inbetween them is hard. The alternative is to get power from any 3-5V input. I used an LED to test several possible sources of power:

  • Battery connector - you would want to have a switch as well otherwise the chip will be on at all times (even with the rest of the car off).
  • Front LEDs - this would allow you to have the sound only active when the lights are on, but it significantly dims the lights in the process.
  • Switch - from the front of the car to the back, pin 2 on the swtich is +, and pin 3 is -/ground. Tapping from here doesn't seem to effect the power availbile to the rest of the board (that is, the lights don't go dim), although I've yet to try driving it.

I am planning on using the switch as it seems like the best overall, but it will reqruire careful soldering.

Results

I have tested the car on 3 types of surfaces. Two of which I had previously driven on, but the third I was driving on for the first time.

I would like to also test it on those interlocking foam pads you can get - they seem to be used for RC a fair bit and they'd be smoother than anything else I've tried.

Victorian floor boards

The planks themselves are fairly smooth, but there are significant spaces between them in some cases.

This was where the car would jump the worst. I accept this is far from an ideal surface but the car could barely drive at all here. Now, the car can actually quite consistently slide around, even across multiple boards. The increased steering angle really helps here as I can execute drifts in a smaller space than before, making it easier to avoid problematic gaps. There are some places where the car becomes beached, but that is probably unavoiable and not really the car's fault. When driving grip with grip tyres, the car drives brilliantly at almost all times.

The target spends significant amounts of time in a room with this type of flooring, so it's great that the car can now drive well here. Probably not the ideal place for drifting, but it can drive grip all day long without issue.

Tiles with big dips

The bathroom has tiles that have quite significant dips between them. The dips, although fairly deep, are smooth.

The car would often hit a dip and suddenly spin out in response, that is quite rare now. You can quite consistently hold the car in a sliding figure of 8 in the bathroom. Again, the steering angle really helps in the tight space. I am still struggling to hold a drift beyond 180 degrees but honestly, I think that's driver error. This is great fun. The target's bathroom has similar flooring to this.

Wet Pour Surfaces (Rubber)

A common feature of parks in the UK is Wet Pour Surfaces - imagine cement or tarmac, but rubber. You get a flat, slightly bumpy, rubber surface.

These surfaces are generally smoother than tarmac and whilst being less smooth than indoor tiles, they are more consistent as you don't have to deal with gaps between tiles.