So you guys might remember my Tamiya CC-01 Unimog Build from last year. It was a lot of fun, and even though I don’t get to run that truck much.. I decided it was time to give it a little love. Some of the things from the Unimog Review, were pretty glaring performance issues. My minor annoyances were with mostly the steering, the speed, and the lack of drag brake in the ESC. My mission with this is to improve all 3.

I hooked up with one of the biggest sellers of GPM Aluminum parts out there, AsiaTees. They sell so many hopup parts on their site it’s crazy. They are all super cheap too. I remember having a 6x6x6 Wild Dagger back in the day that had all GPM aluminum suspension arms and stuff. That thing was wild. Anyways, here’s my list of upgrades I’m installing:

Castle Creations Sidewinder SV2 ESC
Aluminum Motor Gear Set
Aluminum Motor Plate
Aluminum Servo Mount
Aluminum Steering Assembly

Here is how the package showed up to me, nicely packed, and I received it in a timely manner despite it coming from overseas.

Here are the GPM parts all laid out.

I got a little ahead of myself and didn’t take any before pictures from before I started wrenching. But you should know what it looks like from the Build Up already, right?

The first thing I did was remove all the tires to make it easier to get to things.

Here is the stock servo mount/linkage/configuration. This is one of the shortcomings of the CC-01’s steering design. There is a lot of slop in that bellcrank system, and the plastic servo mount doesn’t help matters. It can flex under extreme pressure. The mount I’m referring to is the L shaped bracket on the right side of the servo. It rests in that groove on the chassis.

This is the GPM aluminum replacement.

All we do is unbolt the servo, unscrew the mount, and replace it. Probably the simplest upgrade I’ve ever done on an r/c.

Here is a comparison shot of the old and new parts.

That was hard! I almost broke a sweat! Seriously though, this should provide a little more rigidity to the mount and hopefully take SOME of the slop out of the steering equation.