[RCP57]

I know these have been done by a lot of different people so there isn't really anything earth shattering going on here but I thought I would post what I did anyway. Maybe something is done differently and it will help someone out and if not it will provide a hand full of pictures to look at.

I asked my wife for one of these for Christmas. Like the good little woman that she is, she made sure that there was one under the tree for me Christmas morning.... I also asked for a new YZ250 MX bike but she didn't buy me that...

Anyway, I spent a few hours staring at it Christmas day, took it apart on Boxing day and then worked my a$$ off the last two days to get it nearly complete. My mode of thinking here was to try and keep it as stock looking as possible through the conversion and add some metal parts as needed later on. I did order up some cheap crawler tires yesterday and had no intention of trying to use the stock tires but I wanted to see it move. Those who know me well, know that once I'm "feeling it" I have a hard time stopping for anything until it is finished. This is what happened here and if I wasn't short an actuator and had the right ratio gear motors in hand this thing would be complete! It is however, up and running and fully functional as is. When I get the parts I need I will clamp the motors into their tubes and everything will get painted to match the rest of the machine as needed.

Being a hoarder, I of course used some parts from my stash. For instance, the tubes that hold the motors are stainless steel pieces from old solar yard lights. They are very thin but also very strong. Using them allowed me to retain some of the plastic diff housing on either end. I also mounted the steering servo in the front and modified the stock Bruder "steering rams" to be used as the push/pull rods. I think doing this kept it looking unmodified in that area. I also spent about two hours yesterday machining a "fancy" bracket to hold the lift cylinders to the boom. It was a bit of a pain to get the positioning just right but I think it works good and there aren't too many extra holes from screwing up.