Shocked!

Well, I've decided that I'm going to start uploading smaller pictures. It seems to make things a little easier to read without making the pictures impossible to see things.

After a lazy morning of sleeping in, dropping off drycleaning, and taking the dog to the store to buy her treats, I got around to assembling the shocks. It's a pretty straightforward affair, requiring nothing more than following directions. Fortunately, this is my first time down this road, so it went pretty quickly.

Here are some assembly tips that I took away from this round of Build A Shock. Make sure that the burs from the trees are all trimmed off. In this case, some of them were on the shock body, so it was important to make sure these were smooth so they wouldn't interfere with the coil springs. Unlikely as it is, it just makes for a cleaner look.

The main thing I've found is to just take your time and not rush things, especially when you get to filling the shock bodies with the oil. If you go slowly, you can pretty much get through this part with minimal clean up work afterwards. In the left image, you can see one of the two O-rings used to seal the bottom of the shock.

When filling the shock body, you have to remember that this cavity will eventually need to be filled with oil, and that air will need to be bled out. Also, these O-rings are not currently lubricated, so before pushing the piston up into the shock body, I found it was helpful to twist the piston around to allow the shock oil to start filling the cavity. Once the oil was in there, the piston moved a bit more freely through the O-rings, and eventually was able to move up and down easily. If you simply push the piston up and it sticks, you may force oil out the top by accident once it stops sticking. As you can see in the right picture, there is a disc with three holes that regulates how fast the piston will be able to move as oil is forced through the holes. Oh, one more tip - be really careful when putting the e-clips on (above and below the disc), because they can fly really well! After I got the air out (tapping on the side of the shock body helps), I filled the shock body to the point where the oil climbed up the walls just to the top. There's a green rubber concave cap that sits on top, and its curvature almost matches the surface of the oil perfectly. Slowly screwing the top of the shock will allow any excess oil to come out through a small bleed notch in the threads. You can see it at the 8 o'clock position in the picture.

Once the cap comes into contact with the cap, you simply need to tighten it all the way until the cap is seated firmly. Do not tighten using the part of the cap that will go on the ballstud, as it may break off. Use the body of the cap. I found that even after a few minutes of sitting, the shock oil continued to bleed out from the bottom of the cap. This is probably just the excess making its way out of the threads. It was very handy to keep a roll of toilet paper nearby. An inelegant solution but effective nonetheless. Once the oil is in, it's a simple matter of putting on the appropriate pre-load spacers, springs, and spring retainer.

Installing the shocks on the chassis was a snap...literally. The ballstuds screw into the shock towers, and the loops at the top and bottom of the shock snap onto them. The picture on the left is of the front, and the right is of the rear. So now it's on to the electronics and servo.