Suspension & Wheels for AAV R7A1
Conversion Kit
Hobby Fan 1:35th
Kit HF-063
Review by Terry Ashley

The set includes replacement lower hull side panels with the revised suspension mounting brackets plus the Bradley style drive sprockets, Road Wheels and Idlers and again the quality of the resin casting is excellent although you have to be careful when removing the casting blocks from the drive sprocket halves as this is between two teeth and damage can result easily if care is not taken.

Detail on the parts is excellent with the lightning holes and inner hub detail of the drive sprockets matching closely to photos with the road wheel rim detail again excellent and also includes the undercut around the outer rim and well defined hub bolts for a good representation of the wheels. The idlers are also nicely detailed and there is very little cleanup needed other than to remove the casting blocks and some very fine resin film inside some of the cut-outs in the drive sprockets and idlers that a quick pass of the X-Acto #11 will fix.

The small return rollers have the two styles, with single and double wheels with again very good hub details and minimal cleanup required.

One thing to note which is not mentioned in the instructions is the drive sprockets, road wheels and idlers are designed to take the Tamiya poly caps for fitting to the axles and if you don’t include these the wheels will not fit very well as they flop about with nothing to hold them in place. But adding the poly caps also gives the benefit of easy fitting just as Tamiya intended with the kit wheels.

One small issue with the road wheels is a few of the inner wheels were slightly larger in diameter than the outer wheels but after gluing the two together (trapping the kit poly cap between them) it’s very easy to reduce the diameter of the inner wheel using the outer wheels as a guide, there were only about five wheels in total needing this alteration.

The two long hull side suspension mounting panels have the mounting brackets included on a very thin backing sheet which should remain so don’t be tempted to remove this. As the backing is very thin there is quite a bit of distortion in this panel but only in the thin backing and not on the axle mountings themselves.

After careful removal of the casting block I used a small steel ruler to make sure the upper edge was perfectly straight but don’t worry about the warping at this stage.

You now have to remove all the old axle mountings from the kit hull sides except for the final drives which is quite simple with a sharp X-Acto #11 but as the new axle locations are different I also plugged the old axle locating holes with short lengths of 3mm plastic rod to make drilling the new holes easier.

To attach the new resin suspension panel it’s best to glue the rear section in place first as this has the small underside bracket making it easy to line up and using cyanoacrylate glue this firmly in place which eliminates the warping on the thin panel backing in the process.

I then glued the first axle mounting in place ensuring it lines up correctly with the lower hull and then progressively in small sections glued the lower and upper edges of the panel in place using cyanoacrylate which again eliminated the warping in the process ending with the perfectly flat panel on the hull sides. Working in small sections of about 12mm (1/2inch) at a time ensures you can firmly hold the thin panel hard against the kit hull as the cyanoacrylate cures.

You will need to drill small 3mm holes to take the new resin axles using the holes in the axles mounting brackets as guides and the only thing to watch is to get the axles to sit at the correct height as no locating pins or other guides are included but you can use the four shock absorbers per side as indicators for the correct ride height.

After the wheel and idler axles are firmly glued in place the wheels can simply be slipped on at any time using the pole caps you included while assembling the wheels, didn’t you?

Refer to the review of the AFV Club Big Foot track (set #AF 35133) for assembling these which fit perfectly to the resin drive sprockets after assembly.

Thanks to Hobby Fan for the review kit.

Page created 7 August 2005