These pages are basically a write up of a mammoth upgrade session I just did on my Savage 3.5. I'm going to break it down into stages and upgrades and what happened and so on. As at the time of writing this I'm pretty much a beginner with all this malarkey and I still don't even know the proper names for a lot of the parts and so on so this might prove helpful for real newbies and might be interesting to the seasoned basher alike.
The upgrades I've installed this 'session' are:
As you can imagine this is quite a lot of the truck being replaced or changed and I woefully underestimated how long this would take to complete, I started on the Friday night and finished on Saturday night! Given that I'm a newbie to all this I had to do a lot of 'looking up' of things and fired an inordinate number of questions at the lovely folks over at the HPI Savage Forum who were very helpful indeed. Thanks All ... on to the upgrades ...
The moment I saw a Savage with IRC Shocks fitted I knew I had to get some, they just look awesome and are renowned for being of a good high quality. I had a few issues getting these all good and working, some of those issues I created through lack of knowledge and one or two are possibly problems with the specific shocks I have here, namely two of them are appearing to be a bit leaky but it would be unfair to say that is an IRC problem as I need to look at them again and make sure I haven't done anything stupid or just not tightened things up enough.
As you can see in the image to the left these are big ass shocks. Excuse the pun but as I opened the bag and pulled the kit out and then the 4 shocks I was genuinely shocked at how big they are. Even having seen them in photographs installed on other Savages in the flesh they are something else entirely.
Towards the left of the photograph you can see the kit in its various bags. Everything you need in order to install the kit is included. There are some very, very brief instructions included in the kit (full of grammatical errors, omissions and spelling mistakes) which I found equally helpful and unhelpful. It feels like the instructions were a bit of an after-thought and rushed to get something put together. The blurry photographs included in the instructions are fairly good prompts to what should be done but could do with being clearer and a few more of them in order to illustrate things bit clearer. That said, the real meat is the actual shocks and the mounting kit themselves. Rob (the chap that IS IRC) is an engineer not a writer of technical manuals and long may that continue as the kit and shocks are great. If your going to buy these shocks you need to get shock oil as that is the only thing not included (for obvious reasons) and you'll need to think about shock oil weights. In the lower portion of the photo you can see 4 bottles of Losi Silicone Shock Oil (2oz in each bottle). I opted for going with 35WT oil for the front shocks and 50WT for the rear shocks. This so far seems like a good combination as it allows for more 'springiness' in the front for impacts and stiffer at the back to keep that power going to the road and not being totally absorbed in the shocks. Anyway, I'll leave that up to the more experienced people to advise on.
First thing to do is to actually fill the shocks with the shock oil of your choice (sheesh I sound like an advert...).
Due to the shocks already being built and because of the construction (as far as I can tell) the only way to do this properly is to get the spring off. When filling shocks with shock oil you need to make sure there is no air left in the shock once the oil has been put in. This is best done with the spring off as you need to move the piston up and down whilst putting the oil in in order to get the air bubbles out. To do this you need to:
Once you've done that your left with a shock like you can see in the image to the right. You can see the shock spring retainer at the bottom of the image.
All that needs doing now is pour the oil into the shock until its a few millimetres away from the very top and make sure that its full enough in order to cover the piston when its fully compressed (see image below). What you need to do is move the shaft up and down slowly in order to ease the oil into the shock body and allow all the air bubbles to form, rise to the top & eventually pop. If you go too fast you'll just end up making loads of smaller bubbles which take a stack of time to 'bubble up' through the oil (even longer using higher viscosity oil). Take your time over this bit as its really important and takes a bit of time and patients to do. Also if your using different weight oils like I did (35wt front / 50 wt rear) do both shocks using one oil before doing the shocks using the other weight oil, sounds obvious but its makes it easier to know which shocks you did with 35 or 50 at the other end!!
Once I had the shock full of oil and are happy that all the air has been released its time to put it all back together. Make sure you have all the bits near at hand. Slide the spring back over the shock body. Then screw the adjusting ring back down the thread on the shock body. The next bit is a tad tricky. Half compress the shock and if need be top up with oil until you can see that the oil is just about to leak over the edge of the shock body and then screw the top cap back on tightly and wipe off any excess oil that maybe on the shock.
IRC Shocks also come with a bleed nipple at the top. I haven't gone through the process of using this yet but the idea is to allow you to get every last drop of air out of the shock using this nipple. Loosen it a tad and compress the shock until oil wells up around the nipple, then tighten the nipple back up and your done.
Once you have filled all the shocks it will be much later in the evening that you had anticipated!!! HAHA! And most likely you'll put the rest off until the following day or session! Either way you'll now be looking at a lovely set of brand spanking new Innovative RC shocks waiting for you to install them. ... Lovely!
You'll remember that I was using 35WT oil for the front shocks and 50WT oil for the rear shocks. If you look at the picture on the left you'll notice that I have setup the adjuster rings at two different settings. This was purely to help me recognise which shocks contained 35WT oil and which contained 50WT oil at a glance. In reality the two different weight oils make them feel (as you would expect) remarkably different in the way they compress and decompress so its actually dead easy to tell which are which without doing something like this as a visual prompt.
One thing that I did notice at this time was that one shock in particular was a bit leaky. This was largely due to its being 3/4 and half a turn off being tightened right up. After doing this things were a lot better. That said, my first trip out with the truck after installing these suggests to me that I need to revisit one or two of these shocks as the spring retainer had a fair bit of oil over it after a couple of tanks of fuel. BOO!
Once the shocks were all filled and ready to mount I started on laying out the nuts and bolts for the kit and getting all set to start on getting the Savage ready for the shocks. In the image below all i've done is laid out the shocks around the Savage to make sure that all the mounts were in the correct places and the correct orientation before moving forward to actually mounting them.
In the picture on the left you can see the two rear shocks (50WT!) with their A-Arm mounts attached and ready for mounting onto the truck.
One thing to note here is that the IRC kit says on the web site that there are many options for positioning of the shocks on the mounts. Now that mine are installed on the A-Arms it seems that using any of the additional mounting positions on these would be near on impossible since they are flush with the A-Arm itself. There is no room for the bolt head on the side of the A-Arm. I'll try to illustrate that clearer later on with a larger image.
Basically this is a dead simple process of just laying out all the bits in the kit and adding the bottom mounts to the shocks. On one of my front shocks it also seems that one of the spring retainers sits lower on the plastic end cap (the bit with the ball joint) and makes it sit closer to the A-Arm ... this is something else I'm going to have to investigate further before commenting on any more.
In the picture on the right you can see a close up of the front right side A-Arm mount. This better illustrates the point I made earlier about the 'alternative' mounting positions.
Its very easy to see that on the tower mounts there are options that are also easy to use. Maybe I'm missing something here.
If you look at the picture on the right you can see one of the alternative mounting holes above the hole that I'm using. The rear side of this is completely flush to the A-Arm and would not allow enough space for a hex bolt head on that side of the mount.
I'm thinking that this could be something that other could either correct me on, or it could be something to do with the fact that I'm using standard Savage 3.5 A-Arms and some alternative A-Arms would actually allow for these alternative mounting positions to be used with these shocks.
Getting these onto the truck is easy but a bit fiddly. You definitely need to get the dog bones out of the way in order to get the nuts onto the rear side and onto the hex bolts. This took a couple of attempts on the first two mounts but after that I wasn't having any problems at all.
In the image below you can see the front tower mount in close up. This is a dead easy part of the kit to install and it feels really solid and well designed. The shock stays are really well machined and the 'Innovative-RC' machined into the front brace is a really nice touch.
Next in line for the IRC kit is to tackle the rear end ... no comments please!
Getting the IRC kit installed on the rear end of the truck is a lot more involved that the front. There is no way to do it without removing the entire rear end as there is a fair amount of juggling of things to do on this end.
If you haven't ever removed the front or the rear end of the truck its worth familiarising yourself with that section of your manual and seeing what needs doing before actually doing anything at all.
The other major difference between the front and the read is that the rear A-Arm mounts fit onto the rear of the rear A-Arms, confused? You will be!! No really I'm joking. Just think of your Savage being book ended by IRC shocks. The front shocks are mounted on the front of the front A-Arms and the rear shocks are mounted on the rear of the rear A-Arms. The reason the whole rear end needs to be removed will be clear if you leafed through the instructions before doing anything as the rear tie rods need to be repositioned using the IRC tie rod relocation bracket supplied in the mounting kit.
The image on the right shows the IRC Rear Relocator Bracket installed on the rear differential casing.
This bit of the kit is really well designed and machined, if there was even slight errors in the design or machining this mount simply wouldn't work at all.
The actual mounting positions for the tie rods are slightly further out from the diff housing than the standard Savage mountings and this is where I (and others) have gone a bit awry.
The supplied instructions don't touch on this part of the install at all. During this part of the install I was donning my dunce hat with pride. I re-attached the tie rods going DOWN into the wheel carriers instead of UP into the wheels carriers meaning that over the distance of the suspension travel the toe in/out was changing drastically. This stopped me dead in my tracks and I start lengthening and shortening the tie roads thinking that the change in position at the diff end of the tie rods had effected other parts of the setup when in fact it was my stupidity that had. Anyway, that stuffs me for giving you any advice on this as I suspect that even due to the different mounting position you probably don't need to alter then length of the rear tie rods at all. Once I moved the tie rods to the correct position at the wheels end the toe in/out problem vanished.
In the image below you can see the complete rear assembly, looking at this may make the front/rear assembly a bit clearer if your still a bit confused by what I mean by book ending the truck. All done! Well nearly ...
All in all I'm really impressed with this kit and the shocks are simply stunning. I need to check on a few things but I really don't think they are anything to do with the kit, more my technical astuteness on my part leading to a couple of small issues that are more than likely VERY easy to remedy. If your thinking of getting this kit don't even hesitate, it does what it says on the tin!
After doing this ... I moved onto installing the Savage X Radio Box and my new HiTec 645MG servo and a set of replacement steering bearings ... Click Here to Read ...
Below you can see a selection of other pictures of the shocks and the completed truck after all the upgrades were installed ... NICE! You'll notice that the A-Arm mounts are actually installed in reverse to how the instructions show, this was an attempt to get the center of gravity lower and increase the handling of the truck. After a little experimentation I'm going to reverse them and install them as the instructions suggest and see how things fayre.
I still can't get over how big these things are!
A view of the read tie rod mount and tie rod
A view of the rear shocks
The completed upgrades and a full view of the truck with the IRC Shocks
The old stock Savage shock - full of air!!!
