Lexan Front Shock Tower - Ok, so I got tired of replacing the front shock tower. It never gave out completely as long as the front body post holder was mounted, but I found it would crack from once incident or another every other month or so.
As you all may know a router can do some pretty amazing things. However I needed one the other day and realized that I gave all my less used tools to my father during our last house move.
So I was cruising the local hardware store and picked up $20 simple router attachment for the Dremel tool and a couple cutter and mini-router bits to see how it worked on Lexan. Holly cow (G-rating), you can do some amazing milling and routing with this set-up. It has depth adjustment settings... yep you can mill your own custom battery tray in Lexan. ( I did it and it looks good.)
Along with some chassis configurations, I went nuts on a sheet of Lexan and made a couple front shock towers. Not a quite project, but pretty easy tracing and cutting project. If you are interested in making pieces out of Lexan, this is a pretty cheap way to go.
What I came up with was this:
I used 1/4" gray Lexan and simply traced the shape of the original shock tower but left the top connected with a 1/4" stripe. This worked a lot better than a screw on brace because it provides a lot of side to side strength and obviously the Lexan is much stronger than the stock plastic tower. There is obviously a performance advantage in that the shock tower now is much more rigid, but I did this because I hate replacing parts more than once. To mount the shocks I used some of the spare shock parts that came with the Traxxas. I used a 3 hole shock plunger for a spacer, a stepped shock mounting piece, and a double worm bolt. I later, went to the slightly lighter Rustler Nitro shock tower and haven't had a problem.
Update - Just buy the FLM shock tower, believe me... much easier.
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