XRAY - Model racing cars

I think customers are the most important thing, no customers no cars!

The Xray pinion gears are not much more expensive than other good ones and could not be compared to those cheap crappy pinion gears that are available, too. IMO it's the best deal for the runtime you get out of them.

The problem is not if they are cheap or expensive, good or bad quality, its because in my case i have many of other brands.

Nope, no. 6 always does it for me because I like to set the motor position by fitting a pinion with an extra tooth first and then fit my pinion to the (now)screwed down motor.

Interestingly no-one seems to have mentioned the point that the motor often (in my experience) never sets itself with the flat on the shaft point directly downwards; making doing it via the small hole even less possible.

I just bought a T4'2013 and was really excited. This pinion issue however has really annoyed me no end.

I understand for commercial reasons why a brand may choose to create their own specific parts but to me it is ludicrous.
With a huge variety of pinions available from aftermarket brands, I can be sure if I break or lose something I can go to the local hobby shop and pick up something to get me going. Or if I am at the track I can borrow one from someone else.
Now do I carry two of every XRay ones, which are typically not locally stocked where I live (most things are by order only) or do I have a car which supports a "standard" part?

Another reason people may choose to use an aftermarket one is for high power applications where the surface area contact between the gears adds to strength. XRay always talk about 25% less weight, more grip, optimized whatever..... well a simple fact is 4.5mm wide gears vs 3.0mm gears equal 50% more gear mesh area.

Also, can someone explain WHY the offset spurs even exist? To me, they seem to create an uncomfortably close gap between the chassis top plate and front belt.

At the moment, I was hoping to just power this up and see how it goes, but now I have to wait for an order for an XRay pinion, and even then I am wondering if it will work.

Another solution may be to custom make a spacer to move the motor further out to allow the standard off the shelf pinions to fit. This of course will chance the cars balance however.

Overall, it is really, really, really annoying.

Okay, you wrote a lot of words there, but none that explain what your actual issue is.

Why can't you use a normal pinion? I use RW ones on mine which are a standard size pinion. I fit them on backwards (grub-screw towards the battery) and they fit fine. You may need to enlarge (dremel) the hole in the chassis to get to the grub screw, but thats a 5 minute job.

Hi Dale, he did explain at the start - he said the "pinion issue". This is well know and suffered by a lot of people including myself - i.e. it is unnecessarily difficult to fit the pinion -no matter who makes it - from the hole in the chassis.

I have gone over to Skidden's idea now and remove the motor. I have a mark on a driver so that the mark to the driver tip measures the distance from the end of the shaft to where I should locate my XRAY or RW pinion on the motor shaft.

It's no big deal but it just shows = bad design for no good purpose. Equalled by how difficult it is now to modify Ackermann since the new steering system was implemented. If you race at a new track and want to play with Ackermann it use to take seconds.

Maybe Xray can make a tool like these ones, so the pinion depth on the shaft can be set before fitting the motor to the car

Oops sorry, whilst my Ackermann example was a good example of design, I did not qualify the model numbers. It was the T2'009 backwards which the great one screw system. I went from the 009 to the T3 012 where you have to add/remove all those shims. It may well be that the T4 has a better system than the T3.

I have the same issue, using a Tekin Redline Gen 1, with RW spur and pinions (Long term fan of RW, so I have a lot of their stuff).

I do understand though that the car is an XRAY, not an RW, just one of those things....