The beginners guide to jumping your buggy or truggy

I was out at the Windsor radio control car track last week trying out the new course layout and the jumps.

After completing a few laps and going over the jumps a few times I was getting annoyed that I had to back off the speed so much to make the jumps, otherwise my truggy kept taking off then dipping its nose and taking some heavy knocks nose down.

Then somebody taught me a very simple thing that turned my annoyance into extreme enjoyment. How to take off over a jump at near full speed and launch my truggy (and it works for buggies too) over 4 or 5 metres and land perfectly flat on the ground.

How you say? (if you hadn't thought about it like me up until now).

When you launch off the jump you throttle right off. As the truggy starts to nose dive you simply give the truggy a rev (throttle up) and this pulls the nose back up. You might have to do this again depending on the length of your jump, but its easily possible to make a perfectly flat landing and continue off at high speed.

Be careful not too throttle for too long as you can flip the truggy right over, this is the reason you don't leave the throttle on the whole time when making jumps.

Ive been told different vehicles can act differently, some might have a different centre of gravity or turn position in the motor or drive train that could mean throttle on dips the nose instead of rising, but either way, you'll be able to adjust the technique to work for you.

After I learnt this technique, I was making some incredibly long jumps and having a great time. Of course the trick is to launch off at a dead centre angle otherwise you come down off centre onto the left or right wheel and that's when you start breaking things on the front end.

Happy jumping.

New Starter Box & Hyper 9 Colour Coding

For those that are wondering, I still haven't started the Hyper 9 buggy yet and run in the motor.
Ive put the project down over the last week and instead took my existing nitro's out for a drive last Saturday.

In the meantime Ive also been researching starter boxes and I think Ive found one that will do the job of starting the Go Engine.

My last starter box was a $99 Thunder Tiger box with a single motor. The new starter box is a twin motor OFNA box with built in battery and control panel. I couldn't find one I liked locally, so I ordered one in from A Main Hobbies which should arrive during this week. So I should be able to start the engine and run it in next weekend. Cross fingers!

The new starter box wasn't cheap. With the exchange rate and international delivery its way over the $200 mark, but It should be worth it as the twin motors and high powered battery ensure turn over on high compression engines like the Go Engine in my Hyper 9.

So hopefully next week I can finally post about running in the engine and how the buggy handles.
This week I also changed the springs over to the medium firmness grey OFNA springs from a set of Hyper ST shocks. Ive also gone with a black set of OFNA 5 spoke wheels which look quite good & set Panther Kamodo Dragon 2 tyres onto them. Ive still got the set of wheels & Tyres that came in the kit which might work better on some surfaces, potentially very dry dusty tracks. Ive posted a photo of the buggy as it looks now. So now time to wait for the new started box to arrive and to get a couple of spare hours next weekend.

Cooking a Starter Box - Barbeque bump start

I had an interesting experience late on Monday whilst trying to start my new Hyper 9. I managed to melt down & catch on fire my starter box and explode the batteries inside, an all out cost of $180....whoops!

The motor in the Hyper 9 is very tight and the starter box rubber wheel doesn't seem to really grip the flywheel enough except for about the first few minutes when the batteries were at full charge.

The starter box is from Thunder Tiger and was probably about 9 months old with intimated use.

I was probably a little quick to put the batteries in after charging, one still being warm along with the heat the box seems to create through the wiring once it has turned over a fair few times.

Basically the wires got really hot, to the point they started melting and then the wires inside touched together creating a short and a fire from the plastic wires and parts.

I threw the box out of the garage and let it finish its melt down outside, finally exploding both 4200 7.2v battery cells with a loud pop.

Quite an interesting experience and a little scary not knowing what really happens when a battery explodes, though it wasn't that much of a explosion really, yes you can sense my mild disappointment...I wanted a bigger bang for what it cost me :)


So I now need to consider the purchase of another starter box or I maybe some sort of roto starter, though I'm doubtful I can get this for the Go engine. Its certainly proving to be a little difficult to get things started. This feels quite frustrating after all the work I put into the buggy and how good it looks. I hope I can actually find a way to get it started.

Hypertastic Hyper 9 - Ready to start

At long last I have completed construction of my Hobao Hyper 9 nitro buggy kit.....and it looks great!

Today I finished off the build of the buggy by installing a hump back receiver battery and connecting the spektrum transmitter & receiver. Once these were connected I had to adjust the steering servo linkage slightly so the front wheels are now dead centre.

The throttle servo adjustment was fine and I adjusted the brake linkages slightly so the brakes work evenly front & rear.

I couldn't find a tool to tighten the clutch nut when the Feroni clutch was installed, so I removed it and installed the OFNA clutch that came with the hyper 9 kit as the OFNA clutch fits the flywheel, the nut (tighten it) then the clutch shoes. This also made the bell gear fit nice and firm.

I then connected the manifold & pipe to the engine & stretched the engine manifold spring around the engine with the help of an extra set of hands and two sets of pliers and screwed the engine back into place.

To finish off the buggy I found a really nice custom painted shell on eBay last week that arrived on Thursday and I have prepared the inner shell with Kevlar heat shield tape and placed it on the buggy. I will paint up the shell that came with the kit another weekend when I'm feeling creative.

The custom shell which is painted black, silver and a fluro green works very nicely with the black rear wing & the dark grey wheels. The Go engine is a black & silver colour which also works nicely with the paint scheme.



I have to say, the Hyper 9 buggy looks fantastic! I'm extremely happy with final product.


The suspension set up and ride height looks really good and the unique engine angle not only looks cool, but I suspect this along with a few other factors will lead to some good handling characteristics. Its one of the few buggies Ive seen actually sit dead straight on the ground.

My next challenge is to get the engine started and run it in. This will be a bit tricky as its a new engine, very tight and needs to be started off a starter box.

Building the Hobao Hyper 9 kit into a working nitro buggy

My Hyper 9 kit arrived during the week and I purchased a Go .21 5 Port Gen 5 nitro engine from MassiveMods on Saturday morning, so now it was time to face the challenge and build the kit into a working buggy.

This is my first kit build, so I thought it would be good to document for us beginners out there the work required. So these are the build areas:

1 - Attach the Wing - This was relatively easy, just 10 minutes screwing in some screws.

2 - Assemble the shocks - I have always thought those shock kits look very complicated. Sure they include a lot of parts, but once I looked at the instructions, I found this step was actually quite easy to follow, sure it took about 2 hours in all, but it was not too complicated and attaching the constructed shocks is very easy with the Hyper 9.

3 - Wheels & tyres - Something anybody who has a buggy should be familiar with, takes about 10 minutes to set the inserts and tyres onto the wheels, the gluing is about another 30 minutes and just requires a bit of patience and care not too glue your fingers together.

4 - Radio gear & servos - This was a little fiddly and took about an hours work. Even though the servo tray comes attached, you need to unscrew it all to set up the servos, lay the wires around behind them and then screw it all back down and feed the wires into the battery box. The receiver and aerial wire needs set up along with the on/off switch. The Hyper 9 comes with two sizes of battery box, I'm going to use a hump back battery, so I'm using the larger supplied box.

5 - Servo linkage - I found this probably the most challenging and fiddly part of the set up. I had to put the buggy away twice during this stage and come back to it, or I would have become frustrated and started throwing things around the room. I think about 2 hours work in all was spent on this and I still need to fine tune the settings once I power it all up.

6 - Flywheel, clutch and gears onto engine - This again was a bit challenging and even though I have it assembled, I will still need to get hold of a clutch nut tool so I can get it nice and tight. The challenge was more around the fact the flywheel moved, but the crank didn't, so I wasn't sure how tight I needed to make the clutch nut. I will do the final tightening next weekend. I saved a bit of time since I purchased a pre-assembled Feroni race clutch instead of using the clutch that came in the kit.

7 - Engine & exhaust - I mucked around on this stage a bit, but reality is that its reasonably straight forward to attach the engine mounts, attached the manifold and pipe, hook up the springs that keep the exhaust tight and screw this into the supplied body mount. All straight forward stuff, the spring around the engine holding the manifold is the hardest part to attach as its very tight, long nose pliers are a big help.

8 - Fuel line & air filter - Straight forward, nice easy fit with this kit, though I'm not a big fan of the Hyper air filters as they are fiddly when removing for cleaning, so I have used a Thunder tiger filter and custom tubing and it all fits under the cover nicely.

So as you can see the kit is all ready and constructed. I'm going to short cut the body painting side of things for now as I have a custom painted body arriving during this week, I'll paint the one that came with the kit another time.

Next weekend I will need to get the clutch up to scratch, install the receiver battery and then fine tune the servo linkages and the brakes. Then I will look to start the engine and go through the run in process. Stay tuned.....

MassiveMods Sydney & Gen 5 .21 5 Port Go Engine

I visited the MassiveMods shop in Camperdown Sydney, down Purkis Street, for my first time today so I could purchase an engine for the Hyper 9 buggy I'm building.

I have to say I was very impressed by the service provided by Mark. He is very helpful and obviously very knowledgeable when it comes to Nitro engines.

Mark was more then keen too discuss the different engines, work through which best suited my needs and once we honed it down to the engine of my choice, he ran through everything with me that I would need to do to get the engine ran in and offered to give it a tune up for free once I had run it in.

What a refreshing change this was. This is how I imagined a local hobby shop should be, friendly, informative and helpful. Good on you Mark.

Anyhow, I think I got a really good deal on the engine. I chose at the Gen 5 .21 5 Port Go nitro engine with a listed value of $279. The horsepower rating is a very nice 2.79 hp, which should be more then enough to make me competitive at the track.

After chatting with Mark and also based on what I had read from other users, I decided to get the Go tuned pipe as well. The listed price is $109, but MassiveMods have a package deal with the engine meaning it only cost another $50. My understanding is the engine will run just that little bit nicer with a Go pipe rather then the Hobao pipe that came with the Hyper 9 kit.

I chose the 2047 pipe which has a tamer low end but should perform better at the top end. I figure a little less power off the mark might keep the car more under control as the Go Gen 5 engine is quite powerful as it is.

Whilst I was there I also picked up some glow plugs, some run in oil and I'm also trying out some of the famous fuel sold by MassiveMods. At $49 for 4 litres the price is comparative to the synthetic fuels I buy down at other shops, but Ive heard some good things about this fuel and its a more race bread fuel, so again, worth a try.

OK, now onto the buggy build.....

A custom Thunder Tiger EB4 S3 Buggy

Ive only just got back from holidays and my Hyper 9 kit has arrived in the mail, so next weekend I will start building up the kit and post my progress.

In the meantime, I thought I would post a picture of my completed Thunder Tiger EB4 S3 buggy now that I have the black spoke Hobao wheels on it with Panther tyres. It's quite good to know that many parts, especially wheels and tyres will work across the various brands, it gives you more options to customise and often a cost saving. The Hobao rims were 1/2 the price as the Thuder Tiger Black spoke rims I was orginally going to use.

I thought I would display a picture before I take it out for a drive next weekend, its doubtful the buggy will look this good again for a while as any nitro owner will tell you, it doesn't take long for a really nice looking buggy to gain a whole lot of scratches, dirt and oil, so take a photo and remember when it was new :)


I wont be doing anymore upgrades and changes to the Eb4, I will now put my focus into the hyper 9.

I'm expecting the EB4 to go quite nicely, hopefully I can get a few good weekends out of it without any major damage, I'll need the time to focus on the new Hyper 9 buggy build. Im hoping the skills learnt on painting up the EB4 will come to good use when I paint up the Hyper 9. Until next week....