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MR03 steering not centering

TJ's picture
Posted Fri, 12/18/2009 - 10:58am by TJ

And they said it's normal...

Yesterday, after playing with both of my MR03 cars (mod and stock), the stock car felt a bit sluggish infield and had a real sensitive steering on the straight-away. Honestly, it felt weird driving the stock car compare to the mod (speedy07) car. I'm not talking about the speed but more concerned of the steering. It was just weird, sluggish and twitchy!

When I came home, I checked the car side by side and noticed that the stock cars steering was jittery than the mod car. I've seen posts on the forum saying that this is normal so I myself started to tell the other MR03 owners that, "yeah, that's normal" but when you look at my mod car, it's stuck on dead center and when I slowly steer the car, you'll notice that the wheel is not jumpy (MR02 like) so now, I realize that it is not normal.

The car in these videos has identical ICS settings, battery and they both came from 2nd batch shipment.

Car on the left is the stock car (the car that's not centering):
Part 1

First car on the video is the stock car. Notice how the front wheel is bouncing left to right on idle.
Part 2

This is another side by side comparison with the stock car on the left. This is after fixing it.
Part 3

First car on the vid is the stock car, followed by the mod and then the stock car again. This is just to show how much the jittering was minimized after doing the "steering fix".
Part 4

So you say "that" doesn't matter. Well to others it does... Imagine yourself racing against another same skill level and you have the car that does not center and has choppy steering vs the other guy that has his car centering and has a smoother steering. Who do you think will have the advantage?

I dont think I fixed the problem however, I was able to minimize it. I am still trying to figure out the root cause of some MR03 having this steering not centering as both of my cars (I have 3 btw) has this problems. Also, if you take a closer look, even after fixing the car, the steering is still not as smooth as the mod car. This is mainly my concern but Just to show you guys the difference between these two cars before it was fixed; my mod car with PN70 turn motor is doing 10.1-10.2 at the current track while the stock car with same exact motor can only do 10.3 that bounces from 10.3-10.6.

I will try to post what I did under our tuning tips. Thank you for reading!

Update 12.21.2009
Here's the how-to.

-Tj Macabuhay