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Last Update: November 23, 2006

Kjr2, Kenny, reviews the Gmade Spider.

Part One: Building

What You Get
I received the Spider crawling kit from www.JUNFAC.com. The kit is produced by GMADE. It is a complete rolling chassis kit. Required pieces are radio, receiver, battery, electronic speed control, body, type 540 or 550 motors, and shocks. What makes this kit different than ALL the rest of the Clod Buster conversions out there? The GMADE axles! GMADE has produced their own drive axles. They are similar to Clod Buster axles, but are better due to the improvements GMADE has made, which you will see below.

The first thing you notice is the cool flat black box with silver GMADE logo and a factory seal. Here is the box as it arrives:

Opening the box you find 2 large decal sheets (one black/pink, one silver), a CD with the assembly instructions, and a very neat and organized kit. I was amazed with how carefully every piece was packaged at the factory. All the parts/screws needed for each step are together in a bag. It makes building very easy.


Here you can see one of the awesome chassis plates--they are separately wrapped to prevent wear during shipping:

Here you can see the wheel/tire combo you get with the Spider kit. They are the GMADE Ultrac tires with black & chrome wheels. They are packaged two wheels and two tires per package:

Assembly, Chassis
They first thing you notice when you open the chassis is the brilliant finish and awesome machining. The design is very intricate and unique and it's *flawlessly* CNC machined (from 7075 T6 Duraluminum). Chassis assembly is very straightforward. The side plates are held to the radio tray and battery tray (which also serves as a skid plate) with 4M screws. The nuts are held in clever way--they drop into little slots on the radio and battery tray where they cannot move and the screws simply tighten into them. It's really cool:) The skid plate is made out of fiberglass and is curved to slide more easily over rocks. The web site doesn't say, but it looks like the radio tray is made of the same fiberglass material. They chassis as pictured below is incredibly light! Notice that the 4M screws that hold the chassis together are recessed for a clean look.


One thing you will notice during every step of building is how well thought out the components of this kit are (you can tell that A LOT of CAD time was involved to design this stuff) and how heavy-duty everything is. In the pic below we have a standard ESP Racing link and ballend from a CLodZilla racing chassis, and on the right is the GMADE 10mm nylon ballend and lower link. GMADE states that a larger ballend gives a wider range of angle for the links to move around which makes sense but also massive ends like these looks cool and I cannot imagine damaging these! The suspension links all have 10mm ends on both sides, while the steering rods use 6.8mm ends.

Assembly, Axles
Ah, the part you've been waiting for! These axles show some similarities to the Tamiya Clod Buster axles, but there are no Tamiya parts used. There are several features added to these to make them superior to the Tamiay Clod axles--
1) they feature adjustable motor mounts that accept 9-20t pinions for wide range of gear ratios(12t pinion gears included)
2) axle mounted servo system for powerful steering and a cleaner look
3) triangulated top-mounted upper-links for maximum suspension articulation
4) O-ring sealed differential gears which can be filled with oil to match your needs
5) complete ball bearing kit is included
6) wheel adapters in both 12mm and 14mm sizes so you can run Clod Buster wheels/tires as well as Maxx/Savage size wheels tires without any extra adapters.

They are also 1"-2" wider than stock Clod Buster gearboxes.

Here you can see two axle halves. They are made of polycarbonate and are really neat looking. The pics tell the story:


Here are the differential parts. Notice the O-rings to seal the diff on the right:

I opted to install the optional GMADE Diff lockers in place of the gears for maxium traction on rocks:


Here are the gears installed into the bottom half of the transmission case. The metal axles that go into the diff look like Tamiya parts but are actually much bigger in diameter than the Tamiya parts.

Here is a partially assmebled axle with servo plate mounted:

As with the chassis, assembly was a breeze. If you've assembled Clod Buster axles, you can do these. Very similar. Here are the axles completely assembled with servo plates, motor covers, and bumpers:


12mm and 14mm wheel hexes allow use of many 2.2" wheels, Clod Buster/Juggernaut/TXT wheels while the 14mm hex allows for use of Savage/Maxx wheels and of course the GMADE wheels the kit comes with!

Here is the whole kit assembled. Everything seen in the pics but the shocks is included in the kit:


Here are a couple close-ups of the axles:

Here you can see the multiple link mounting positions on the axle mount. I used all the mounting position show in the manual to start. The mounts are made of Nylon to be super strong.

Here you can see under-axle clearance is very good:

Impressions, so far
Man this thing is AWESOME! Not only do I NOT have any complaints, I can say without a doubt the Spider is the nicest, most well-designed RC truck I've owned. It's truly awesome. The design of the chassis/axles is really neat looking, plus everything was designed with functionality in mind. There are mulitple mounting points for the shocks on the chassis AND on the lower links, and there are multiple places to mount the lower links on the axles, which make for a lot of adjustability in the suspension. The quality/finish of the chassis and axle parts is second to none. Nothing needed trimmed or filed or tweaked to fit. One of the coolest things about the truck to me is the skid plate at the bottom of the chassis. It looks really neat with the curved, ribbed design. It (the skid plate) weighs next to nothing in your hand and is SUPER stiff and slick. I also like that the bumpers don't protrude past the tires so they do not affect approach/departure angles but will keep you from bashing in the front of the axles or your steering linkage. I can't wait until next weekend when I get the electronics installed and take it to the rocks:D

Here are a few pics with the body on:

Here it is fully RTR:

Part Two: Driving/Rock Crawling coming soon...

www.GMADE.net
www.JUNFAC.com
www.CRAFTLAB.net

UPDATE
I added a fan to the ESC

And I've been testing it here!

click the link below to see part 2--crawling!

Part Two: Testing