Ultima red shocks

I've made few changes to the blog The only one the average reader will notice is that I have enabled anonymous commenting, so that anyone can comment on what they read here. Please feel free to post your likes/dislikes/turn-ons about anything you read here. :)

I've cleaned up the Ultima parts, and I'm just about ready to put 'er back together again. All I am waiting for are the new upper plate and taller rear shock tower that I ordered from an rc10talk.com guy named 'DW911'. The upper plate is to replace the busted one that came with the car. The taller rear shock tower is so I can install a set of Kyosho gold shocks that I got from Joe Bielski a couple of weeks go. (Go Team Venture!)

Even though I don't plan on using them, I figured I'd still spruce up the original/stock red shocks. As you can see they are little dirty and scratched up. What you can't see is one of the collars is broken. A couple of the shafts have some slight binding, making shock travel a little sticky. Hopefully it's just a matter of cleaning out/oiling the o-rings to free up the movement.

After wrestleing with them a little bit, I finally managed to get the bottoms unscrewed from the bottom of the shocks. After pulling out the shaft/piston, I realized it was quite a bit different than modern 2 piece shaft/piston unit. (see inset) The piston and shaft are one piece, with no holes in what would be the piston. I guess the piston is quite a bit smaller in diameter than the shock body, allowing the oil to pass around the outside of the piston, instead of passing through the holes. (I guess it's a good thing I decided to install the much better gold shocks)

Tim Sanderson