Building a Lightweight Indoor Crawler Course from garbage

welcome to another episode of burn peak express i'm seth and today we're going to be doing something a little different but kind of the same this morning i glued up this 4x6 enclosure which is going to enclose our micro crawler course i just had surgery on my foot last friday it's gonna be a little bit before i can get back on the mountain bike and so this is gonna be a great winter activity now before we get started building this new micro crawler course let's go outside for a second so right here is our outdoor micro crawler course and i built it one night in september out of pile of rocks every time i come out here i change something just pick up a rock and move it someplace different and that's one of the great things about building with things in your natural environment is that it can be changed easily but on an indoor course we want to be able to pick up the whole course and move it because i'm not always going to want it in the middle of the garage i'm not always going to want it in the basement and so we need to really take into account weight i've seen a lot of indoor courses where people fill it up with dirt put rocks that's great but we're not going to be doing that today we're going to be building with garbage so i have beside me some supplies like spray paint and fake 3d printed rocks and little desert plants and things that we're going to use to create this crawler course i also have amazon boxes foam from flat pack furniture and this stuff is great because not only is it lightweight but you probably end up in a landfill anyway so we can build something with it instead and so with that let's get started building trash mesa off-road park the campground [Music] so first things first we're going to use these cardboard boxes to create the structure and i'm just going to hot glue them down to the table and just roughly frame out what our course is going to be so with these boxes laid down this doesn't look much like terrain but we're going to lay these plaster strips over it so these sheets are plaster you can just dip it in water and lay it over the top of these boxes and as they lay down and fold over they're going to look a little bit more like terrain they're going to look like mountains i don't i don't really know what i'm talking about i'm just trying to pretend i have a plan here and all you have to do is wait for them to dry and they should be hard enough for us to drive a crawler over this thing dried way faster than i thought it would see it doesn't have the greatest traction we gotta add like sand and stuff like that to it next we put this sort of glue solution onto it and then throw this particulate at it so we'll see how well that sticks yeah i think we really have to goop this stuff on real good i'm a little skeptical i feel like using spray adhesive or something would be better but this is what the guy at the hobby place told us to do [Music] all right it's time to lay down some paint and start getting some color on this terrain i cannot stress enough how this is not a tutorial so the way i see it the stuff that's facing up should be kind of dirt and the stuff on the side should be kind of rock because in real life that's this is not gonna look anything like real life oh this is pretty light we might have to go over this with like a sandstone kind of color because i misjudged the color of this flaky rock stuff [Music] yeah this doesn't look like terrain at all i think there's too much contrast the lights are too light and the darks are too dark so we went back to the store and got some different colored paints and mixing it up a little definitely makes it look more realistic now it's definitely not show quality or anything but we've been putting sort of the mossy stuff straight down and then on the sides where grass normally wouldn't grow we're mixing in grays and browns and stuff and it's starting to look like terrain and once we start putting rocks and things in this is going to look like a nice little crawler course for sure now the way we're going to delineate the trail the place where you're really supposed to drive the course is we're going to put the plants where you're not really supposed to drive so the most difficult sections are not going to have plants so next up we're going to build a suspension bridge [Music] oh sweet all right i literally can't contain myself this area over here seems pretty pretty dry i guess so i'm gonna just climb up it just just a little bit right here and see how it affects the crawler course see what type of damage it does and then we can always fix it okay so we did a little test drive on the crawler course and granted it's not totally dry yet but we took on some damage a little more than we would have wanted to so kevin suggested we take an automotive grade clear coat and put like two coats on it really really soak it in so that everything gets held together and so we're gonna do that and see how it works out [Music] so it's monday and kevin's clear code idea actually worked we put a matte clear coat on here it just seems way more durable the sand isn't moving around the ton everything's really hard i think we can ride vehicles on this so that's what we're gonna try right now we're gonna test out the crawler course for the first time the anticipation is killing me i think the most challenging part is going to be the bridge so the first vehicle that i'm going to try and do this with is my kyosho rubicon because it sucks at climbing it's super scale it's got these little wheels with no tread on them see does it have to approach angle to get to this yes it does oh yeah look at it beg for traction all right i'm gonna have to give it some juice there she goes all right i think i'm gonna have to use this rock to get up this ledge i put this ledge here purposely because it's a very harrowing looking feature isn't it oh yeah there we go wow all right we gotta back up a little bit to make this turn i'm gonna try and go over this rock not quite lined up oh [Music] [Applause] yes so a lot of scrapage on the chassis and on the pumpkins and that's good it means it's a challenging course and we have plenty of space to build additional terrain and so with that let's give it a try with a few more of these cars [Music] [Applause] oh really challenging [Music] oh so what we have done differently well first of all we would let each step dry before moving on to the next one if we let the plaster dry in the first place we would have been able to dust off all the powdery stuff and then the paint would stick much better second of all after the plaster dries we would definitely put down a base coat of let's say brown do a few coats of that that way when a car scrapes it away it scrapes away down to the brown it looks like dirt so letting each step dry sufficiently before moving on to the next one i think is the main mistake we made here but i'd say for a first shot we didn't do too bad now something that we will definitely do the same again is use these colors i think these colors worked out great another great thing was the clear coat that kevin recommended and it made a huge difference in terms of how cohesive all this was and how well it held together i'm also glad that we left about half of this table open because now that we learned all that we can do even better the next time so let me know what you want to see in our next crawler course i think this is a great idea for anybody it's only four feet by six feet that's smaller than a pool table that's smaller than table tennis and in many cases it's actually cheaper even if you include the crawlers so really cool thing you get to build it yourself so let me know what you want to see in the next iteration of jank mesa and thanks for riding with me today i'll see you next time i'm going to be honest i don't think we can do this with a deadbolt i changed the gearing in it and yeah it's just it's hard to modulate at low speed let's i'll try going up that [Music] oh that actually did we'd actually took on some damage over here [Music] wow okay oh

Channel: Berm Peak Express

Views: 928,365

Keywords: do it yourself, diy, tools, home, backyard, mountain biking, cycling, outdoors

Id: P1XMJwiAENE

Length: 10min 6sec (606 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 14 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/mycoolguyusername]

I'm anavid MTN biker and a SCX24 owner. I'm super stoked that seth recently got into the RC realm