Construction Begins

Upon opening the box, the first thing I notice is that everything seems to be organized very well. Each tree of parts is in a protective plastic bag, which I'm hoping will make sense when I get into this further.

After flipping through the assembly instructions, I think that I have a pretty good idea of how to proceed, so I go back to the first page and start looking for parts. I'm initially stonewalled by the fact that the instructions call out things like GB5 in reference to the spur gear. Now I know it's a spur gear, and I know what spur gears look like, so it's a simple task to actually find it, but I'm not sure how someone who doesn't already know what they're looking for would locate it. I flip back to the end of the assembly instructions and *presto!* there is the parts diagram. As it turns out, each bag actually has a designation. In this case, GB = gear bag, and the spur gear is part number 5 per the parts diagram. One minor complaint I have at this time is that it would be nice if there were stickers on the bags that indicated which one is GB rather than have to match up parts. No big deal, though.

And as if to answer my prayers, I open the bag that contains the gear bag with spur gear, and I find that a lot of the bags do, in fact, have labels on them. Now at this point, the number of open bags is starting to get out of hand, so in order to minimize the possibility of lost parts or mixed up contents, I'm placing opened bags into ziplocs for safe keeping.

Now that I've got the bag designations figured out, things are going quicker. One interesting thing I've discovered about the TT-01 chassis is that the motor mount has a series of mounting holes whose use is dictated by the size of the pinion that you are using. I assume that this is part of what makes this kit so great for beginners, because it removes the need to set the gear mesh. By mounting the motor in the appropriate holes, the mesh should already be set. The assembly instructions show mounting positions for spur gears of 55T, 58T and 61T (stock) as well as pinions of 19T (stock) through 25T. The table even goes so far as to provide the resultant drive ratio. Now that the drive shaft, spur gear, and motor are mounted, it's time to move on to the suspension.