Finally I'm back to work on the fledgling Ultimate Tamiya stable, and the CR-01 Land Cruiser is the first in line to be fast-tracked through the build process. Since I'm starting on a weekday, the build will go in stages, so I figured I'd make the most of it and do a little typical build thread.

So here we go!


Day 1

First off, a word of warning. This kit contains more than 1 billion pieces. If you don't like long builds, don't ever think about getting a CR-01 in kit form. Ever. Just unpackaging everything and getting the photographs actually ended up taking all of the time I had available this evening, so realistically, this is day 0. The real build process will begin next time.

For now, you can see all of the evening's photos in the Tamiya CR-01 Toyota Land Cruiser pictures gallery, including box art and all pages of the long, dense assembly manual. Here are just a few quick samples.

Yesssss! finally! I have been waiting for you to build that thing. I subscribed to this thread

i can't wait to see more



now i too have subscribed

Looks great. Looking forward in seeing it in action!

Day 2

Whew! Got a fair amount done today. First came the cantilevers, then the instructions actually let me do something that seemed really big important, attaching the frame rails to some inner chassis structures:



I actually made several mistakes assembling the canti's, using the wrong hardware or missing the orientation of one or another slightly assymetrical part. The important part is recognizing your mistake early, not being too proud to back up, and next time measuring or checking every part 3 times instead of 2. I have to admit, though, it's entirely too easy to mix up the screws when after an hour of assembly, the remainder of the very first screw bag still looks like this:



They seem to have every length of 3mm phillips head screw from 8mm to 22mm!

Then came the axles, "make 2." The inner construction is truly, truly all-metal. Observe:



Pretty beefy! You'll notice what looks like a hole in the cone-like extrusion on the left side of the diff. That's where the locking screw pin goes in. It's accessible through a port on the outer housing, allowing you to lock or unlock either diff without doing any disassembly.

Eventually the axles were sealed up in their first layer of screw-laden thick plastic armor, and the uprights & knuckles were assembled as well.



Tamiya included a much heavier-duty servo saver than their standard fare, with three concentric metal bands instead of the usual flexible plastic semi-ring:



Finish that up, mount it with another two layers of armor and you get this:



Next up, I get to finish up the other axle and affix some links to the chassis, and then comes my most favorite activity of all, building shocks. Make 4.

Day 3

Well, what do we have here? Something that looks like... something.



It's even enough to give that first obligatory articulation shot!



A few words of warning during the link assembly process. For the link ends, the instructions say "make 16." That means, try to have a power driver available for use, with a 1.5mm hex bit. Doing them all by hand could be maddening.

Also, on step 16, the instructions say to use D6 (medium) spacers for the lower (longer) link mounts. Frankly, this doesn't work well. So little spacing at the mounting point they specify causes binding of the links against the side plates at the extremes of articulation, causing your chassis structure itself to have to flex like it was a spring. To avoid this, use D7 (thick) spacers instead.

Unless I get off work quite early tomorrow, it'll be a few days before my next update. The upcoming two pages in the manual cover building & mounting the shocks & springs.

Day 4

Alright, got the suspension done. Building the shocks started out easier & less frustrating than expected since all 4 shocks are identical on this truck, allowing me to do a bit of simple assembly line work.



However, the honeymoon ended when the time came to top off each shock's oil level. Sadly the CR-01 mounts its shocks upside-down, and as a result, any air in the shock collects at what would be the bottom of the cylinder, just past where the piston tends to rest under normal conditions. In other words, if you have air in a shock, it's gonna hurt dampening performance a lot, unlike with a conventional orientation where only under the relatively rare full compression does it become a problem. Getting shocks perfect is something that takes great patience and a lot of trial and error. One drop too little oil, and you get an air bubble. A few drops too much and the oil will compress too much and the shock will develop a spring effect.

The spring mounts are a bit funky, forcing strange twists & angles and needing quite a bit of stuffing & shoving to get them to stay in place long enough to tighten down the outer clamps. The 2.6mm x 8mm screws that hold the clamps in, however, don't get a lot of bite in the mounting holes, so it feels like it could be extremely easy to strip them.



Regardless, I got it all put together and now have working suspension. The unique independent cantilever and coil spring setup with stealthy torsion swaybar is interesting, but not as effective as I would expect after going through all the assembly trouble. In fact, I'm quite confident that a traditional coilover setup could work significantly better.



There is a lot of slack in the cantilever setup, and I don't want to be told that I should look for alloy upgrades to fix the problem. Changing one spring requires undoing 4 screws unstead of the usual 1. And again, the upside-down shocks really call for painstakingly perfect filling (which I wasn't able to achieve).

Well, next up, I'll be putting together the transmission. I hope to be ready to drive by the end of the week!

I don't remember where I read it, but there is an aftermarket coilover conversion available being sold at a crawler site... I realize that you may not be planning to mod this ride, just throwing that out there!

Thanks Unfortunately this point if I want to do a solid axle project vehicle, I'm becoming increasingly confident that I won't use a CR-01 as the basis.

Day 5

Here's all I have to show this time around. It's a planetary gear unit, pretty compact and beefy at the same time, with a nice low center of gravity. However, it's intrinsically inefficient due to the friction of the extra gears. Indeed, all assembled I can feel quite a lot of drag. Also, if you bust the spur gear, you have to remove the entire transmission and partially disassemble it to make a swap. Nonetheless, it's exciting to have the center of all power in the whole vehicle sitting on my table. Next time I'll be mounting it up!