TOPIC:

I just realised - I still have to do the letter writing .. 

Yep, they sure look like maintenance stands - very cool!

Really enjoyed this, thanks for sharing!

The hotshot has a piece like that for maintenance stand

silvertriple wrote:

(for the small story, they call this differential LSD (for limited slip differential), and maybe the name of this thing stands for the magic mushrooms they were using during their brainstorms... This thing is feature over features, and it pays in the amount of screws you need to unscrew to tear the car down completrly to change the pinion or set the slip feature of the diff...

In short, a nightmare of engineering, with a nice set of potential issues (which may be what it has very common with some Tamiya 4WD cars of the same period)  

 

That's essentially a clutch-style LSD, which is used on full-size race cars.  Very effective, very 'tuneable', but also very high on maintenance as the clutch packs wear out.

Well, tuneable is not making any sense when you have to tear down the car all appart to tune it... Over engineering at its best... 

"Tuneable" in the sense that you can swap clutches/springs to control the amount of slip and therefor how quickly the diff locks.

But yes, it's not really a part that you would change in between runs (like say dampers).  But if you were running on a loose surface at one meet, and next month running on tarmac, you might consider changing the clutches/springs.