Eagle Loader - new axles

[Rimrock]

The axles are aftermarked parts for Tamiya trucks. I am very impressed of the overall quality level of the newest generation of these axles, at a good price. All parts CNC milled, and the gears and diff. seams the same as one would see in a good quality 1:10 RC car, fine engineering. I usually use www.wtbcar.com for purchase of different kinds of Tamiya truck 'hoop-up' parts, I am happy with their service and good prices. These are the axles I used for the loader, with diff. lock http://www.wtbcar.com/shopping/index...product_id=194
There are some other similar axles with a bit different design, I have not looked closer at them, but I would guess they are from the same fabricator, as they also have the ration of 1:3.09 . Most suppliers try to copy the 1:2.7 original Tamiya ratio into their axles. The same webshop also supplies the Armageddon Truck axles, yellow, which Eagle has got their axles from (with some modifications) It says 'Version 4' now in the webshop, so there has been done some modifications obviously...But if they are now at the same quality level as the 3.09 ration axles..? Who knows..I stay away from them, better like the design of the black anodized axles. I guess one reason why Eagle did go for the Armageddon axles as they are a bit more detailed on the outside. Anyway, it is said that fabricator is working at modifying the axles, so generation 2 will hopefully be better. Great..I hope they have success, and it will save dealers and customers for some head ache. There are also some other issues with the loader that they are working on to improve at the moment, but I don't know the details.

The 'connection bracket' (I don't know the best English word for it) is the part with the milled rectangular hole in one end, to connect to the new axle, and the other end is circular to connect into original wheel hub. There are some set-screw keeping all parts together. So we got away from the strange original design with 4 small internal hard to reach bolts that connected the wheel hub and original axles. This was another week link in the original axle setup. Quite a big job actually with the new axles, but I just needed to help my friend out of this 'head ache'. He got at first some new parts for the original axles from Eagle, but they were not any better than the original stuff. The loader costs 4000 USD incl. VAT in our country (2014), and it is naturally sad when things are not functioning as expected.