As blogged earlier, I’ve recently decided to give radio-controlled touring cars a try. I’m starting out with the Xray T2R Pro 1/10 Touring Car. I’m classing this as “a beginner’s experience” as I’ve never built one of these before – I’ve built a rock crawler recently, and a Tamiya kit many years ago, but this is in an altogether different league.

In the first of a short series of posts talking about how I built the kit, I’ll go over the stuff you need to buy to be able to build the kit.

Things to buy before starting

Ok, so before starting out, make sure you’ve got everything you need – the manual tells you what isn’t provided. If you’ve built kits before you might already have some or all of this, but then you probably won’t be reading this!

I ordered this graphite grease and this bearing oil. The really neat bit about that bearing lube is that it has a needlepoint dispenser, which means it’ll be a lot less messy when you’re using it – I definitely reccomend it.

In terms of tools, I’d avoid buying them from your model shop. Even the mailorder ones charge silly prices for tools – instead, check out Maplin. They’ve got some neat multi-purpose toolkits that are ideal – try this 33-Piece Precision Screwdriver Set for £21, or this Interchangeable Utility Set for £7. There’s loads of other sets to check out too, and of course if you’ve got a store nearby it’s worth going in to see if they’ve got anything else. I got a great little handle-and-bits set for about £9, but I can’t find it on the website. Anyway, these sort of sets are a much more sensible purchase.

In terms of optional upgrades, I found that the plastic servo mounts that come in the kit put the servo arm waaay too close to the top deck, so I’ve had to get the optional aluminium servo mount. I can understand Xray putting cheaper parts in this kit – so composite instead of carbon fibre etc, but the plastic mounts are a completely different design to the alu ones – very odd. Also, if you’re going for LiPo, the optional battery strap makes life a lot easier – no messing about with battery tape! It’s not cheap, though – would it kill them to do a cheaper version?

Finally, before starting, make sure you’ve got a reasonable amount of space to work in, and it’s somewhere that won’t be disturbed if you have to leave everything out overnight. I built my car one bag at a time, over the course of about a week. Make sure it’s well lit, and that the floor is clear – when you drop the screws or washers on the floor, it’ll be much easier to find them!

Ok, so that’s the preparation out of the way – come back soon for more notes on the actual build!