I have a Redcat and the Chimera clutch seems to be having an issue. Whenever I give it gas it takes a while for it to start moving. When I say a while, I mean full throttle and it slowly begins to take off. Kind of sad watching this 30cc monster look like a cuddly bunny.
After downloading the manual from the Redcat Racing Chimera web page I started the teardown. I’m not sure if someone worked on this car before or not. It was a little difficult to get some of the bolts off to get under the cover. I’ll be putting some grease on them when I do reassembly.
I’m not sure what type of maintenance if any has been done on this car prior. I think it was only played with but never really any after-run type maintenance was performed. When I got the main gear cover removed there was some mud in there. It makes me assume it was run in some pretty high water at some point.
There were only three of the small screws (50100) holding the case on. I believe there are supposed to be four. This could also be one of the reasons why water was able to seep into the case.
Repairing cars like this takes patience. It’s one of the reasons why I do it. When I was younger I would have gotten frustrated over something like this. More pissed off that I bought a car that was already broken. Now this is truly enjoyable.
The next step is to try and figure out how to get the nuts off the gears. Looking at the manual it’s a little unclear on whether I need to take off all of the gears or just loosen the first one to get the holder to detach.
When messing with gears always look for markings before separating them. Sometimes you will find a dimple or circle on the ends of one of the teeth. The dimples will usually align against another dimple on a different gear. Usually, it’s something to do with timing of some kind. I don’t see any on these gears, but I will double-check again before dismantling them.
Tons of gunk on the gears in the picture below. I used some compressed air and WD-40 to clean them up a little bit. Looking at the gears they don’t seem to be worn. I’m kind of concerned with if these nuts will be seized on possibly when I try to take them off. They have been sitting overnight with the WD-40 on them so hopefully, it will be easy.
These blog pictures will play double duty for me. I’ll use these pictures as a reference if I can’t figure out how to put the gears back to the way they were. Something that truly shocked me was seeing the metal gears before getting to the Chimera clutch. Messing with nitro and electric remote control cars I’m only used to seeing plastic gears. One thing that I’m focusing on is the middle gear because it has two gears. Looking at the picture it appears the front one is connecting to the left gear and the back one is against the right gear.
