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Blakbird's 58519 Bruiser Build 5 years 7 months ago #51414

One modification I made immediately was to use a Dremel to enlarge the end of the battery tray slightly to allow the use of longer batteries. This made my standard packs fit much better. LiPo batteries tend to be even longer, but they honestly don't offer much advantage on a model like this.
At this point it seemed only reasonable to dry fit the hard shell body onto the chassis to see how it looks. It looks real good!
The body consists of two primary pieces: the cabin and the bed. But there are also several other large parts including the sleeper, the seats, and the grille. All the main parts come molded in white so everything needed to be painted. The instructions call for TS-15 Blue, but I used TS-53 Deep Metallic Blue instead. The sleeper is TS-7 Racing White, and the interior is TS-1 Red Brown. All of the black bits are TS-29 Semi Gloss Black. At this point everything has just been sprayed.
Time for some more detail painting. The sleeper needs black windows and the interior needs a black floor. Silver trim is needed around all the windows, behind the marker lights, and on the door handles. All of the lenses came in transparent clear, so trans red and trans orange were needed to tint them. You can see the fine detail work that was needed on the tail light lenses in particular. All of this was done with a fine brush. When I was done with the detail work, I also painted the entirety of the inside of the body black. Since some of the underside may be visible when the body is mounted, I wanted it to blend into the chassis. It worked well, but took a whole bottle of black paint. I did it with a brush because I couldn't think of a good way to mask it for spraying.
Step 43 installs a bunch of detailed lighting bits on the body including the front and rear side markers and the tail light lenses. The tail lights are screwed on from the outside, and the markers are screwed from the inside. I was glad to have mechanical connections and not to have to use much glue here which can screw up the paint.

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Blakbird's 58519 Bruiser Build 5 years 7 months ago #51415

Steps 44 and 45 build the headlight buckets, the grille, and the front bumper. I painted the turn signal lenses orange before I realized they were actually supposed to be clear, but I actually like the way it looks.
Now the front grille can be installed on the cab and this is really starting to look like a truck. The side mirror is also installed. The kits comes with a passenger side mirror as well, but the instructions say not to install it for some reason.
The sleeper is just two parts, the main body and the rear louvers. This part is supposed to be glued on but it doesn't stick very well to the paint. Once the sleeper is screwed to the bed, the back of the body is complete. The opening you see is for the power switch, and the tub area in the rear is for the body pins.
Step 48 attaches the front and rear body halves together with only two screws. They will be further reinforced when the interior is installed.

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Blakbird's 58519 Bruiser Build 5 years 7 months ago #51416

The interior is only a couple of parts, but still looks really good. Most of the detail comes from stickers on the dash for the instrument panel and controls. The seats are nicely detailed and the steering wheel looks great. Installation of the interior does much to add rigidity to the body as well.
The interior is clearly visible through the large, clear windows. Sadly, the doors do not open.
The left hand image shows the completed truck before the stickers were installed. This model comes with a lot of stickers and many of them have that classic '80's Tamiya charm. I wanted this to really look like a scale truck though, so I chose to only install the striping and not all the other graphics. The large stickers are quite a challenge to install because they have to wrap around details like the marker lights and therefore need to be aligned perfectly. There are also some really nice, intricate metal transfer decals for the logo. After the stickers were on I wanted a nice glossy clear coat. I wasn't happy with the level of gloss in Tamiya clear, so I bought a Model Master oil based lacquer. This produced a beautiful deep clear, but is also reacted chemically with the paint and caused some runs of the wheel arches. I have decided they are artistic character patches. Both of these images also show many of the upgrades which I'll be discussing next.

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Blakbird's 58519 Bruiser Build 5 years 7 months ago #51417

Here sits a pile of upgrades that I planned before I had even started to build the model. They include a bunch of steel bumper parts from RC4WD, aluminum beadlock wheels, and a brushless system from Castle. Buying upgrades before ever even trying the stock model is not a great idea because you might not buy the right things or you might get things that won't work. I ran into a series of problems with this strategy.
Let me start by saying that a brushless system on this truck is completely unnecessary. It was still fun though. The truck is pretty slow stock, even in high gear. That's actually a good thing though, because the suspension can't handle high speed. Since many of the modern Tamiya kits come with TBLE-02s speed controllers which work with sensored brushless motors and since I had never used a sensored motor before, I decided to give it a shot. I used a Castle 2280kV motor. The first problem I ran into is that the motor is in the very front and the controller is in the very back. The longest sensor wire you can buy is 270mm and that wasn't long enough. That means I had to buy 2, cut them in half, and carefully splice the wires together. I didn't even have any heat shrink tubing so the resulting wire is a kluge but it works and I will never touch it again.
With a 2280kV motor on 7.2 volts, the truck wasn't really any faster than stock. On the plus side, it operates almost totally silently. There is no gear or motor noise. Still, I figured I could put a larger pinion in there without hurting anything. I went from the stock 19 tooth up to a 23 tooth steel pinion. I think this combination is perfect for this model. I love the speed and torque. There is adjustment space for an even bigger pinion, but Robinson doesn't make anything with more than 24 tooth in 0.6 mod pitch.
RC4WD offers a beautiful set of aluminum beadlock wheels specifically for the Bruiser and I had to have them. You can see the original plastic (and very nice) wheel on the left and the aluminum on the right. This was another totally unnecessary upgrade, but I really like the solid feel of the aluminum and, in case I needed to justify myself, they help lower the CG and prevent rollovers.

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Blakbird's 58519 Bruiser Build 5 years 7 months ago #51418

Here is the before and after wheel with tires mounted. You can see that the stock wheel actually looks really good and you can't even tell it is plastic. The aluminum wheel hides the mounting nut behind a center hub which looks good but makes them difficult to remove.
Now all four are installed and I was able to go drive the truck around the yard. It is really a good machine with easy characteristics, but it is neither a speed demon nor a hard core crawler.
All of the bumpers on the model are white, very flexible plastic. This is probably a good thing for bumpers, but since RC4WD offered tube steel versions, I had to have them. This shows the stock rear and upgraded bumpers.
Here is the steel front bumper. I am sorry to say that the quality isn't great. The holes are not drilled quite evenly and the result is that the bumper sits a little crooked on the chassis. It is not very noticeable in the picture, but once you put the body on you can see that they are not aligned.

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Blakbird's 58519 Bruiser Build 5 years 7 months ago #51419

Now the front and rear bumpers have been installed, and so have a pair of steel skid plates below the doors. There's a lot of metal on display here. The skid plates are actually attached to the body and come off with it.
The stock Bruiser never came with a roll cage, but the Mountaineer which came out later and used the same body did. That means this aftermarket steel roll cage should fit, right? Not quite. The sleeper means it needs to sit farther back. You can see that the front mounting feet are up on a little pad, but there are no pads in back. This makes the whole cage tilt backward.
I used some sheet styrene to fabricate some rear pads to look mostly like the front pads. I just glued 4 layers together and then sanded them. The left image shows before and after sanding. The right image shows the installed roll cage, now sitting straight. It also attaches to the body like the sliders, so that makes the whole body very heavy.
Most of the upgrades so far have been for fun, but the steering crank is something that really needs to be changed. I don't know why they used a soft plastic crank, but it is completely inadequate for turning the wheels. There is so much flex in the crank that the steering wobbles all over. Luckily, Hot Racing offers an aluminum crank. You can see the old and new parts in the right hand image.

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Blakbird's 58519 Bruiser Build 5 years 7 months ago #51420

You have to look closely to see that the crank has been changed, but it made all the difference in the world. The truck now turns on a dime with the new steering crank. Best upgrade I've made.
When I first bought the truck this next upgrade didn't even exist, but the detailed interior door panels from RC4WD that came out and are very nice. You can see how much they improve the realism of the interior. At least as importantly, they ended up hiding all of the wires that I had to attach to the side walls for lighting. I still need a scale driver though .....
From the beginning I knew I wanted to add lighting to this model. All of the light buckets are already part of the body, so it is just screaming for an upgrade. But how far to go? The stock body has these light buckets:
  • 2 headlights
  • 4 tail lights
  • 4 side marker lights
  • 2 front marker lights
  • 4 turn signals
  • 2 reverse lights
If you are counting that makes 18. The Tamiya TLU-01 light unit supports 16. So which should I leave out? My original choice was to leave out the reverse lights since I didn't want them on all the time anyway, but I later came up with a better solution.
Here's my first attempt at a lighting installation. I was not at all happy with the stretch in the wires and I knew they would up getting snagged on something. Still, it was good enough to try it all out.

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Blakbird's 58519 Bruiser Build 5 years 7 months ago #51421

Here's my first edition light system on the truck. Note that I used halogen colored headlights instead of white which I think looks much better. Tamiya had just released these so I was one of the first to try them. I think they look perfect for a scale appearance.
My lack of using two of the light buckets was bothering me, so I came up with a crazy solution. You can use two TLU-01 light units and control them with a TLU-02. This costs a fortune, but it means that I would now have 14 extra light channels instead of being two short! I couldn't think of a use for all of them, but I did decide to install some fog lights on the front bumper and on the roll bar. This picture shows some of the wiring before the TLU-02 arrived. You can see the light bar lying on the right.
Figuring out where to hide all these electronics was a problem, so I decided to use the sleeper. It has plenty of room for all three light controllers, but it introduces two new problems. First problem is that the TLU-02 needs to be connected to the servo wires to control the lights. To solve this I needed to use a bunch of extensions to go from the servo and ESC to the controller, then back out to the receiver. They all needed to have connectors so I could still remove the body. The other problem is that you need to access the TLU-02 to turn it on and change modes. I solved this by removing the louver on the back of the sleeper and then converting it to install with magnets. This way I can easily remove it and reach my finger inside to switch on the lights!
The TLU-02 needs to be connect directly to the battery, so I also needed some detachable wiring for that, and yet another connector for the front fog lights which are connected to the chassis and not the body. Finally, I had to solder extensions onto many of the LED wires because they were not long enough. It was probably a good two weeks of soldering before I got everything done and looking nice. The image on the left shows the final wiring. You can see the leads going from the battery and from the front fog lights to the body through JST connectors. There is also a bundle of 4 servo extensions. Everything is routed neatly enough and hidden that you hardly know what a mess it was. When everything is hooked up and working, it looks like the picture on the right. The headlights are halogen colored, but the foglights are white. At one point I also had 4 more fog lights on top of the roll cage, but I didn't like the way they looked. They ruined the scale appearance somehow so I took them off and also pulled off the ugly brazed brass light mounting tabs from the roll bar.

There's one little bit of hidden trickery. The TLU-02 supports a total of 4 running lights, but I needed 6. This means I needed to wire the last pair into an AUX channel. Sadly, all the AUX channels flash at full throttle which looked stupid. To solve this, I set my radio to 120% on the throttle channel and then calibrated the TLU-02 using the radio. When I set the radio back to 100%, the TLU never registers full throttle and therefore never flashes! Just what I needed. The turn signals blink when turning, the hazards blink when stopped, the brake lights get brighter when braking, and the reverse lights come on when backing. There are 3 modes so you can have only the marker lights on, add the headlights, and then add the fog lights. I usually run in Mode 2 with the fog lights off unless it is night.
The following user(s) Liked this: stingray-63

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Blakbird's 58519 Bruiser Build 5 years 7 months ago #51422

This image shows the very expensive RC4WD detailed tail light lens (left) compared with a stock lens (right). Sadly, as you can see, they are not the right size. They are too small so when you install them they look bad. I had to revert to my stock painted versions. These are really for the RC4WD Mojave body and should not be advertised for the Bruiser or Mountaineer.
Here are a few photos of the completed Bruiser. Note that I hadn't made some of the final upgrades when these photos were taken.
Here are a couple of pictures of the real thing. The first photo shows a Toyota truck configured much like a Bruiser in the wild. I have no idea if it was intentional. The second, on the other hand, was intentional. They even copied all of the stickers from the model and it looks amazing.

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Blakbird's 58519 Bruiser Build 5 years 7 months ago #51423

Here ends my first build thread on Tamiyabase. How did I do? Should I post more of these? I have a couple dozen of them ready to go.

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