2015 - Traxxas Telluride

back to Fyrstormer's Garage

After buying a Summit specifically because I didn't need to do anything to it to make it a great vehicle, I found myself simultaneously satisfied and yet itching for a challenge. Also, I wanted something I could hand to a kid who wants to go rock-crawling with me, that isn't as technical to operate (or expensive) as the Summit or my highly-modded Wraith.

I've liked the way the Traxxas Telluride looked since I first saw it -- for some reason, the generic jeepy aesthetic appeals to me in a simple, no-frills kind of way (it actually reminds me a lot of the Nissan Xterra, the only SUV I ever considered buying) -- and I wanted an excuse to get one. eBay provided that excuse in the form of a lightly-used Telluride being sold by someone who only used it a couple times and then got bored with it, so I picked it up for about $100 below MSRP. Needless to say, it didn't stay that inexpensive for long.

This is what it looks like now:

On the surface it looks pretty much stock (that's the way I like my vehicles to look), but a lot has changed underneath. But before I get to that, I want to point out a couple changes I made to the body cover itself. First of all, I lowered the body posts a couple notches, and then cut a section out of the front so it could fit snugly around the bumper/headlight cage, which you can see above. The other thing I did is this:

I removed the stock black decals that covered the fenders, then I spent about an hour and a half carefully masking around the fenders so I could paint them with truck bedliner. As you can see from this picture, it's already scraped against a few rocks, and while it's scratched the bedliner a bit, it hasn't scratched all the way through. It looks a lot better and it doesn't accumulate ugly white scratches like the stock decals did. Touch-ups shouldn't be too difficult; just shield the body with a piece of cardboard and spray another layer onto the scratched area.

I also covered a few bits of the body cover, near where the body posts pass through, with aluminum tape and felt, to keep the body posts from rubbing the paint off. This body is actually not the one I got with the vehicle, and I had the benefit of seeing where the paint had already rubbed off the original body after just a couple runs.

Underneath the body cover, there's...another body cover. Well, a tray cover, specifically. One of the big problems with vehicles that have fenders is, the fenders redirect debris flying off the wheels so it lands in the electronics tray. After about three runs, I'd had enough of that, and I bought a JConcepts tray cover for the Stampede 4x4 and trimmed it to meet my needs. I haven't added any vents yet, because I'm honestly not sure I need any.

And under that, is the electronics tray itself. It doesn't look too exciting, but there are a couple things of note. The stock ESC has been replaced with an Axial AE-5 ESC, so the vehicle now has 50% drag-brake which can be easily changed to 100% by moving a jumper. The Titan 12T 550 has been replaced with a Dynamite 15T 550 with the flux-ring removed, because it runs noticeably cooler and only reduces the top speed by about 1.5mph. (this is not the fastest truck in the world anyway; that's not the point.) And the servo has been replaced with a Hitec HS-5645MG metal-gear servo. Underneath, the stock plastic servo horn has been replaced with a clamping aluminum servo horn, and the steering bellcranks have been replaced with the Hot Racing aluminum bellcranks for the Slash 4x4, with the servo-saver adjuster cranked all the way down so it's basically locked now.

I needed a flat surface to mount the Axial AE-5 ESC on, and one of the techs at my local hobby shop gave me a scrap of extra-thick Lexan from his toolbox. I cut it to the size I needed, drilled some mounting holes, and painted it. Now it looks like this:

You can see a spacer between the motor and the motor-mount, but it's not a normal spacer; this one has slots cut into it, so the motor's built-in fan to pull air in through the front of the motor as well as through the back, so it can cool the armature coils in addition to the commutator. I saw this on AsiaTees and instantly knew I wanted to try it, and it does work; after installing it, I stopped seeing significantly higher motor temperatures near the motor-mount.

The suspension has been moderately modified; The front shocks' lower eyelets are mounted to an extra fourth mounting hole I drilled into each of the front A-arms, which gives them enough extra range of motion that they now have the same ground clearance as the rear shocks. And all four shocks were rebuilt using STRC threaded aluminum bodies and Traxxas TiN-coated stanchions for smooth movement. The lower spring retainers and lower eyelets were replaced with RPM shock-guards, because it can't possibly hurt to keep stuff from getting stuck in the springs when it's running through grass and leaves and whatnot. Travel-limiters were added to all four shocks to keep the tires from scrubbing against the insides of the fenders and rubbing the paint off.

The RPM shock guards work best when they're facing directly forward, but the lower shock eyelets use pivot-balls to mount to the A-arms, so I had the bright idea of adding O-rings to the fronts of the pivot-balls to restrict the lower eyelets' ability to swivel side-to-side. It works very well, and I'm rather proud that I thought of it.

For the most part I left the stock suspension linkages alone, but on the front, the camber links were attached to the caster blocks using a different method than all the other camber-link pivots, and it presented the very real possibility of causing binding in the front suspension if the retaining screw was tightened just a little too much. So I cut off one of the tabs that the retaining screw passed through, and I replaced the plastic pivots with the same sort of steel shoulder-screws that all the other camber-link pivots used. As an additional bonus, cutting off the front tab on the caster block gives it a little more clearance to avoid bumping against the support webbing on the inside of the wheel.

With the modified suspension, the Telluride now has excellent articulation and ground clearance:

In fact, I think it may actually have better articulation in the rear:

Of course, excellent articulation and ground clearance are no good if the vehicle can't get traction, so I replaced the stock tires with Pro-Line Badlands SC tires, with HPI Blitz soft foams inside to maximize what little compliance short-course tires can offer. The wheels are Pro-Line Renegades with Protrac offset, which actually narrows the vehicle's track-width by about 15mm compared to the stock wheels. Yet despite the narrower track-width, the Telluride has excellent side-hilling capability, because its center of gravity is a lot lower than it looks:

That is actually slightly better than my Wraith can do, probably because the Telluride's body is just a hollow Lexan shell instead of a nylon rollcage. But I didn't need to add any wheel or chassis weights to get that center of gravity -- though I did replace the axles with MIP X-CVDs, partly for better durability vs. the stock plastic axles but mostly for the extra weight down-low.

The center driveshaft was also replaced with metal, to eliminate flex that was causing the front wheels to stick-slip when climbing over obstacles. I went with the Stampede 4x4 VXL aluminum driveshaft instead of something fancier, and I added a couple foam donuts to take up the slack so the center driveshaft wouldn't rattle around. However, if I had to do it again, I'd probably get the Tekno RC "Big Bone" center driveshaft, because it would be easier to assemble the front and rear axle assemblies onto the chassis if the driveshaft didn't demand that the outdrives be perfectly aligned. The splined outdrives on the Stampede VXL's center driveshaft are kind of a pain that way.

The stock slipper clutch was a pathetic little thing, made from parts that were originally intended for the Mini E-Revo, so I replaced that as well. The Stampede 4x4 slipper clutch was a direct replacement and allowed me to use 32-pitch gears. I bumped the spur gear up from the stock 54t up to the 56t used in the Jato, which required some grinding inside the lower spur-gear cover, but the resulting ratio of 9t/56t is almost exactly the same as the stock gear ratio.

The diffs were rebuilt with lower-ratio ring and pinion gears from the brushed Stampede 4x4, which have a 12/47 ratio instead of the stock 13/37 ratio. That's a 27% decrease, which goes a long way towards helping the motor stay cool while climbing over rocks. The rear diff was filled with OFNA diff-lock putty, which is really about 500,000wt silicone with some sort of additive that makes it way more sticky than normal diff oil.

The front diff took more work. I knew I wanted the front diff locked, because it would greatly improve the front tires' ability to lift the vehicle up and over the edges of obstacles, but the Hot Racing diff-locker insert was out of stock. Also, it looked kind of chintzy, because it still relied on the cross-pin that the spider gears used to rotate around. So instead I bought a Revo spool, ground-down the outdrives from 6mm to 5mm, and used that for a while. I quickly figured out there was a problem, though; with both of the outdrives on the spool in the same orientation, the front axles would chatter in-sync with each other when the vehicle was cornering, and it made an awful noise that I'm sure was going to lead to premature failure. So ultimately, I ended up buying some JB Weld and filling the original front diff with the stuff, after making sure to rotate the outdrives 90°. This means the vibrations in each wheel when the vehicle is cornering are opposed to each other, so when those vibrations propagate through the axles to the diff, they cancel each other out. It's the sort of thing that wouldn't matter on a locked rear axle, but it makes a big improvement on a locked front axle.

That's pretty much it for the functional changes. I haven't addressed the lighting yet, though, and there are a few nice touches there too. The headlights use the Traxxas light bar for the Stampede 4x4, nothing exciting there, but I put some tiny O-rings on the hooks that hold the LEDs in-place, to fill in the slack-space so the LEDs don't move around.

The taillights are what I'm really proud of, though. I've seen lots of builds that use the Summit's rear bumper, which has LED mounts integrated into it, but I didn't want to do that, because I already have a Summit. So I got the RPM rear bumper for the Slash 4x4 instead...only to discover that the mounting cage would've stuck the rear bumper about an inch out past the back edge of the body cover. I didn't like the way that looked at all, so instead I took some spare plastic bits, and bought some extra-long screws, and custom-mounted the rear bumper directly to the wheelie-bar cage that came on the truck. (I also threw on some RPM wheelie-bar wheels onto some spare screw-holes, just in case it helps keep the rear bumper from getting stuck when descending off the back edges of obstacles.)

This let me use the RPM lighting kit designed for this bumper. The light buckets came in plain black, but I bought some chrome airbrush paint from my local hobby shop, and much to my delight I discovered it also produced good results when applied with a normal paintbrush.