Axial Bender Customs SWX Chassis Kit

thats a pretty nice kit. a bit pricey as you can get a tuber type chassis for similar costs.
i hear the SWX chassis are pretty good units.

so what the reason for the open side?

wow thats a pretty nice chassis, delrin skid plate too. might have to save up for one of those.

Dunno if you covered this, but Brad "Bender" Dumont has officially joined Axial as a staffer on their Crawler team. Pretty cool, it shows Axial are interested in keeping their crawler line developing and making more funky hop-ups.

slowngreen said:

wow thats a pretty nice chassis, delrin skid plate too. might have to save up for one of those.

Click to expand...

It's a very well designed piece of kit, if you look at the way it's designed it is narrow, and the bottom half is designed to give absolutely minimal bind. The skid plate even overlaps under the chassis plates to stop the aluminium hanging up. The lower screws are all countersunk too to prevent any heads hanging up on the rocks. The SWX is a well developed, tried and trusted design with some seriously neat ideas integrated into it. I'm almost certainly gonna get one at some stage. It's a real masterpiece.

Lessen said:

so what the reason for the open side?

Click to expand...

The SWX was one of the first shafty chassis designs that narrowed the chassis overall, to allow it to get through tight spaces, by using one open side to allow the motor and transmission to hang over the side. It might at first seem counter productive, but it appears to work really well from what I've seen, and it's a common feature on 2.2 shafty chassis these days.

Timmahh said:

thats a pretty nice kit. a bit pricey as you can get a tuber type chassis for similar costs.
i hear the SWX chassis are pretty good units.

Click to expand...

This is a comp chassis. The tuber chassis has its uses, but competition is not one of them. This type chassis is a much better performer, assuming that it's set up correctly.

gotchya, i figured it has something to do with over all handling. but being new i wasn't sure.

so what about the expensive tubers. some appear to be designed with comp in mind. that DMG unit looks like its a good comp rig. one thing about the TCS/HBZ/and Sinastir unit to a point, is they all seem to be useing a tuber frame, but still utilizing flat stock chassis pieces. would this to be more adpative, comp worthy, easyier setup, all or none of the above? heh.

Well I think the goal of each tuber manufacturer is to increase performance above the other guys. A lot of this comes to personal driving style. If I built a chassis, I'm going to build it to address the issues that I call problems with the other chassis's that are on the market, and to perform better. Since everyone has their own style, then some chassis setups will work better than others.

Tubers are generally designed to look like scale tube frame buggies, and take quite a beating. Because of their design, they are always going to be top heavy compared to a TVP comp chassis. There are usually some other compromises as well because the builder wants to fit the components into the theme of the chassis. The tubers always sit kinda tall compared to most of low profile comp chassis that are designed with a low COG in mind. Take the GC2 chassis for instance. It's one of the best performing chassis on the market. If you look at it (I have a build thread with one, with more to come soon), you will realize that it has quite a unique suspension, and a doesn't have much weight up top. It's made entirely of delrin, so it's almost weightless. Now if you build a tuber, there's just no way that you can use metal tubes and achieve the same level of performance. Now tubers have their advantages. They look good, usually look scale, and they can take one hell of a beating.

Timmah, I had the same questions that you had. So I contacted a friend of mine that I consider to be one of the top competitors and builders in the nation, and had a chat with him about it. He was building a really nice tuber, so I asked him if there was a way to get it to perform like a comp chassis. His reaction was simple: "There's not a way that anyone has figured out to build a tuber using metal tubes and have it perform like a tube chassis. This tuber is just a toy, if I was building another comp rig I definitely wouldn't use a tube chassis. They just can't compete with the comp style TVP chassis that are being used today."