Tamiya Crawls at the Big Chute!

Sunday May 16^th was the opening date for this year’s RCCO (Radio Control Crawlers of Ontario) Crawl Series. Held at the Big Chute Marine Railway located on the Trent-Severn Waterway, the location is about 2 hours north of Toronto. This has been a much talked about spot and had received a lot of hype last year so I had to make the journey.

My weapon of choice on the day was Tamiya’s CR-01, heavily modified with the following critical components:

-CR-01 Axles, linkages, driveshafts.

-TNX 5.2(TGM-04) dampers with internal springs.

-LRP Brushless Crawler system

-Adam’s (Fabguy) customized CR-01 competition chassis.

I’d like to extend special thanks for everyone’s help and advice in the continued development of the 2.2 CR-01 Comp Crawler.

There were three courses ranging in difficulty:

Course 1: Plenty of smoother rock with one formidable step-up gap that no one seemed to be able to get up and over cleanly. Re-positions were frequent. There were steep declines and steep inclines but this was definitely the course to get your sea legs on.

Course 2: This one started with a complex decline that usually ended up in rollovers. It then moved into some larger rocks and extremely tight turns mixed with some looser rocks. The North side was walled so widened turns were not an option for compromising a lot of the gates. Water also became an issue with a little frog pool sitting ominously near the final gates.

Course 3: Spectators not permitted. This was a very treacherous course located on the right side of the rock wall creating very precarious situations. Mistakes could and did result in 40-foot rollovers down the side of a rock face. Picking your lines and watching as much as you could see was critical. As there were often a few “choose your own adventure” moments that could lead to victory or epic fail. Having said that there were some incredible runs with few mistakes and even one completed flawlessly.

To view results, next meets and all other things crawling, visit www.rccontario.ca. I recommend the free registration for full website access.

Josh Flett

Borgfeldt Canada / Tamiya Canada