First up is just going through the truck and making sure every thing is working smoothly. Take the shocks off and cycle them to see if there is any binding or dragging. If there is just set them aside and we’ll go over that latter. Cycle the suspension arms up and down and make sure nothing is binding. The arm should drop under its own weight. If not loosen the hinge pin just a 1/16th to 1/8th turn. If its still dragging make sure the pins are not bent or broken and of course replace them.

The one area of the Slash that needs the most help and will give you the biggest gain in performance is the shocks. Remove the shocks from the truck and drain the oil. Cycle the shocks to make sure the shocks are smooth. If they are tight loosen the bottom cap just a tiny bit. To make the seals a little smoother I like to use Team Associated Green Slime. It’s a seal lube and works great on any o-ring. Just rub a heavy coat on them and reinstall. Also check the pistons to make sure there are no burs or flashing. If there is use a sharp hobby knife and carefully smooth out the piston. The Slash is set-up out of the box for maxinum wheel travel for scale looks. It looks cool in the back yard, but sucks on the track. A good place to start is just leveling the stock pistons and running thicker oil. 45wt in the front and 50wt in the rear is a very good starting point. Even with this thick of oil the front end of the truck still dumps in high speed corners. Just going up to 50 or 60wt will help, but you would loose your low speed steering. What I been trying is change the front pistons to the one hole ones that come in that little bag of extra stuff that a lot of us tend to loose or throw in the trash! (oops.. your local hobby shop might have them or they can order them for you) with the one hole pistons run 35wt oil. What this does it feels like the two holes and 45wt at low speed, but at high speed it “PACKS” up and feels like thicker oil. The one hole pistons set up with the 35wt oil has the same low speed steering (like tight 180’s) as the two hole pistons with 45wt oil, but at higher speeds (like sweeper’s) the single hole won’t let as much oil though at once as the two hole. So it more or less packs up on top of piston and makes it feel like thicker oil. One other thing I do to keep the front end flatter though the turns I swapped the progressive rate spring with the standard rate spring from the VXL Rustler. The spring rate is the same, but it doesn’t have that soft spot. Which if you look at your Slash ready to race the soft coils are completely compressed so there is little change in traction with the Rustler springs.

Last area that needs a once over is the tranny. With the gears being all metal there must be some grease on the gears. Traxxas over lubes them from the factory to make them last longer. What I do is clean the gears with motor cleaner and an old tooth brush. When reinstalling the gears use a very light coat of a good grease like Team Associated black grease. While you have the diff out open it and remove all of the gears. Clean them just as you did with the rest of the gears. To make the diff action work more like a ball diff I fill the diff about half full with Kyosho 300,000 weight oil. YES 300,000!!! This tightens the action and really lets you launch out of the corners. By keeping the inside tire from spinning or “DIFFING”. So there is less lost power from the spinning wheel.

With a little TLC the Slash can be a RACER!! With the truck being mass produced there are going to be screw ups. So the best thing to do is go though your Slash and give a real good once over. A well built truck is going to be a good driving truck.

Setup: Front
Shock position: Out, Spring; Rustler white, Piston; one hole, Oil; AE 35wt, Arms level, Camber; -1*

Rear:
Shock position; Third from the out side, Spring; stock, Piston; two hole, Oil; AE 50wt, Driveshaft level
Camber; -2*
Diff oil; Kyosho 300K

Battery all the way back. Two ounces of lead under ESC. Rear body post in high position. Front fenders cut for tire clearance.

The motor is the first place that you need to look for a little bit more speed. The motor is a closed end bell mass produced Chinese sizzle can. The brushes a super hard and take a long time to break in. Under normal conditions the com will be trashed long before the brushes break in. To speed up the process I use the water dunk method. The water eats away at the brushes, but leaves the com in good condition. The best method is using a charger that has a motor break-in mode. Run the motor at about 2 volts and dunk the motor in a cup of water. (Watch out for the water shooting out because of the fan in the motor!) I run mine for about an hour, because the brushes are so hard, but it’s not a must. If you don’t have a charger with a break-in mode you can use a two cell battery or just use the ESC and run the motor at about a quarter to eighth throttle. Once the motor is broken in, spray it completely out with a good motor cleaner and re-oil the bushings with a race grade bushing oil. One or two drops are all that is needed per bushing. Too much and you’ll just have a big mess. Don’t use bearing oil as it is too light and will burn up fast.

Second, your motor is now running at full power and you still have these crappy nickel plated bullet connectors. The best thing to do is just cut them off and solder them together, but some tracks require the stock connectors so all you to do there is just pull back the covers and solder the connectors together.

Third, I know this sounds stupid, but make sure that the ESC is set-up to the radio. If you changed the radio or the throw on the Traxxas TQ radio it will be off and you won’t have full power. So make sure it is right.

The last on the list is batteries. This is the one thing that isn’t cheap or free. Buy good batteries. The better made side-by-side NiMh packs and Lipo’s make a big difference in speed and torque. For racing stay away from the mass produced shotgun style stick packs. The low grade cells and spot welded paper thin bars than have a lot of resistance. Go with a good Lipo or 7-Cell side by side nimh. The 6-cell nimh can’t compete with the power of a good 2-cell lipo. Even compared to the 7-cell, the lipo is still faster because of the drop in weight and more constant power. The nimh will also drop voltage more than the lipo does under load. If you can; go lipo.

Racing the Traxxas Slash is a ball of fun as long as you just have fun. Don’t act like it’s a national finals and don’t be that guy that t-bones every car on the track because the crowd cheers every time you do. The next report will be about nothing but set-ups. I’ll give you a good starting set-up and I’ll go over tips and ideas to make the Slash drive less live a dump-truck and more like a CORR Pro2 truck. Till next time guys and girls.

One of the reasons that I say this is because it gets a little rough during the races. With the Slash being so cheap to get in to, there are racers from all levels in the class. There are novices with this being there first class, and top level racers using this class as a stress reliever. At my local track there are two 2008 IFMAR Fuel Buggy World’s racers that run the class. I’ve also seen beginners show up and open their kits and start racing that night!

Full Fender Racing = Full Contact! With these trucks being full fender, drivers tend to get a little aggressive… ok, they will slam you like a 350 pound line-man would! On top of that the tires have so little traction that a good hit will send you spinning down the straight-a-way. Don’t think that if you’re in the lead that they are not going to hit you also.

The last issue I have about the Slash box stock racing is that mass produced gear is not all made the same. These motors and esc’s are mass produced on huge a scale by machines. I’ve heard of box stock slashes doing wheel stands on a 2s lipo at 7.4 volts. Some Slashes are so slow that you have to run a 7-cell nimh at 8.4 volts to just keep up. I really believe that the class needs a better controller motor, but that’s just adding more money.

So get your Slash, race it, and just have fun!!!! In the next report I’ll be going over so tips and tricks to make your Slash a little faster in both speed and lap times. So if you get slammed just laugh about it and just remember pay back is a …..

Jason Annis

The c-hubs, steering knuckles, and axle carries are all a point of interest and can be fixed in the same way. The strongest option is of course aluminum. The aluminum will keep these areas from breaking as long as it doesn’t get run over buy a car.  There are two problems with the aluminum. First is of-course price. With the aluminum parts ranging from $20 to $30 it’s not really worth it. Second is that they are so stiff that they will make other parts break. The one other option that you can consider other than just keeping spares is RPM products. RPM parts use a very flexible nylon plastic that will bend, but not break. With the parts running about $9 they are a lot cheaper than the aluminum parts and week links won’t be created down the line. Only problem that might end up happening is that some tracks won’t allow the aluminum or the RPM parts. So be sure to check the rules at your track.

One other problem only happens in really dusty conditions or really high horsepower. The spur gear in the Slash is a really tough chunk of plastic, but it can be destroyed. In dusty conditions the huge hole in the stock spur gear cover allows a lot of dirt to eat up the spur gear. The cheap fix is just a simple little piece of tape. This works good, but you’ll need to replace it often, because it will fall off. A more permanent set-up is the RPM gear cover. The RPM gear cover has no hole and is made of the same nylon plastic as their arms, axle carriers, c-hubs, ect. So you know that it can take a beating. When running brushless and lipo the will even get pushed past its limits. To keep from striping the teeth right off the gear just simply loosen the slipper clutches nut till the slipper will slip for about a foot or two. If you have enough power it should pull a nice little wheelie and keep your spur gear intact.

All of these points don’t really need to be hopped up. Its all about how hard you are going to drive your Slash. If your just tooling around your drive-way then you may never break anything. However; if you plan on strapping in tons of power and getting 25 feet of air at I-Hobby. You’re going to want to a little bit of modifying. Till next time. Keep it rolling.

Jason Annis

On the shocks caps you have a couple options. It all breaks down to your budget and track rules. If money and rules are not a problem then go with Traxxas’ Big Bore aluminum shock kit. They are very strong and SUPER smooth. The problem is that most tracks are not allowing full aluminum shocks, but they are allowing the aluminum shock caps. These really beef up the shocks and work as expected, but they are really, really tight. They are so tight that its a little difficult to bleed the shocks the right way. The last option is new shock mounts. The stock shoulder bolts allow side to side pivoting, but zero front to back movement. The shock towers are so soft that they do a lot of flexing. This puts the caps in a bind and pops them right of the bodies. To help this problem I run a button head screw and a short piece of fuel tubing. This allows the shocks to pivot front to back and relives the stress. I run this set-up, because it helps keeping the shocks together for spec racing and I can still change shock oil easily. I don’t think they will be strong enough for a brushless Slash though.

The shocks are the very first thing that needs to be looked at. They are good shocks; they’re just not good enough for hardcore racers or bashers. When you’re going fast you are going to crash. In the next Slash Report I’ll cover the rest of the points that brought up and how best to fix them. Till next time.

Jason Annis

The Slash is nothing really that new. The idea for RC CORR tucks have been around for years. Kyosho had a truck based on the first generation Inferno. Tamiya had the Pre-runner series of trucks based off of their TA-O2 touring car chassis. Team Losi sold a body conversion for the XX-4 four wheel drive off-road buggy. Team Associated SC8 is the one of the newest additions to the field, the idea is not new. So why did the Slash explode onto the market and the others didn’t?

The Kyosho, Tamiya, Team Losi, and Team Associated CORR trucks all have one thing in common that kept them from growing a new class like the Slash did. Price! They were either a kit, a conversion, or a nitro. It takes a good deal of money to get one. The Slash is only $200 RTR. And with every track and organization requiring them to run almost box stock (Servo, motor, ESC, tires, chassis, ect.) its rather easy to get int one. Figure $300 for a Slash, two cheap batteries, and a charger and you are Ready – To – Race or just blast it around the house.

The Slash Report will cover everything about the Slash. I’ll cover the bashing and racing side of the Slash, and also everything in between. So if anybody has any ideas or questions; please shoot us an e-mail. Till the next report, keep it rolling!

Jason

Welcome Jason! I’m glad to have you on board!