revo with picco .26 red dot questions.

[gibsonguitars1838]

Hey guys, as we all know tax time is here and I'm wanting to upgrade my revo with a picco .26 engine. As far as doing a motor swap, I'm pretty clueless as to what ill need. Ive been researching for a little while and I know ill need a new motor mount. Ive been trying to find a link to a mount everyone has recommended which is the "new era" mount? Anyone know of a good seller that has a good price? also, i know i will need a new exhaust as well. I do not like the side exhaust so is there by chance another exhaust that any one prefers? what else will i need for this swap? im trying to keep everything as stock as possible. If theres no way to keep it that way i would at least like to hear some of your suggestions as long as they dont include drilling or grinding. Thanks.

[NvDesertRat96]

Im sure more experienced guys will chime in but i believe alot needs to be upgraded. Like steel drive lines, steel trans gears, steel spur gear, heavier diff oil ive even seen some that put the e revo diffs in. I would think anything that has to do with rotation or being turned buy the engine would need to be up graded. Plastic on plastic under high torque and rpms sounds like catastrophic failure waiting to happen. My next engine will be a big block too. Good luck.

[Zepher]

Use the ofna picco mount for the revo, about $20 at most Lhs.
New era mount is way over priced and is not needed for the picco.
It will run fine with the stock exhaust, I ran both my picco .26 powered Revos with the stock manifold and traxxas 2 chamber muffler.
You'll get more performance with an aftermarket exhaust ( not sure how much as mine felt the same with both), but those will be spring mounted and the ez start does get in the way of the spring.

Other than the mount, it just bolts right in.

These were my 2 picco .26 powered Revos,





Picco powered on the left and right and 3.3 powered in the middle

[Zepher]

I sold a picco to my sisters boyfriend for his stock revo and it has held up fine. He even has reverse still

[gibsonguitars1838]

Im sure more experienced guys will chime in but i believe alot needs to be upgraded. Like steel drive lines, steel trans gears, steel spur gear, heavier diff oil ive even seen some that put the e revo diffs in. I would think anything that has to do with rotation or being turned buy the engine would need to be up graded. Plastic on plastic under high torque and rpms sounds like catastrophic failure waiting to happen. My next engine will be a big block too. Good luck.

i havent read anyones post about having plastic gear problems. I have thought about that though. I guess if i go through with the swap ill find out first hand lol.

[gibsonguitars1838]

Appreciate your info Zepher. Im not 100% on the swap yet. I have no reason to but the tax money is burning a hole in my pocket plus i guess its in every guys DNA to have a more powerful engine lol. I wish i could say i have friends that have nitro's that way i could be more competitive and have reasons to dump money into upgrades so i could be faster than them. But where i live a gas powered r/c is the most amazing thing people have ever seen around here lol. Have you had any gearing problems? like as far as stripping tranny gears and diff gears due to the extra power the picco has? and what cb and spur gears do you use? Ive also read that the stock 3.3 clutch cant handle the extra power for too long.

[Zepher]

We had a total of 6 picco powered trucks, 5 Revos and 1 T-Maxx.
4 Revos and the Maxx had the Forward only conversion done to them, all run hardened steel clutchbell and spur gears, 16/40, since that is all the gears we had in the big lot of revo parts we bought (we bought 4 fully upgraded picco powered revos and about $5000 worth of new parts for $1500 in late October). None of the cars had trans or diff issues, and we drove them hard. We went through 16 gallons of fuel in 2 months between 3 drivers and 10 nitro cars.

Oh, the copper colored revo in the above pic was buillt using stock parts, had a chassis sitting there and decided to build another revo since I enjoy assembling them.

I decided to sell all of my nitro cars and went 100% electric. Had I known about lipo batteries and brushless motors when I got back into the hobby in October, I would have skipped nitro completely.
I got out of the hobby in the late 80's when all we had were ni-cad batteries and electronic speed controllers were $130+ and failed all the time (kits usually came with mechanical speed controllers), and you were lucky to get 10 minutes of run time per charge.

Here is a pic from a month ago, right before we started getting rid of the nitro trucks,

all of these vehicles were bought between october and december of last year.

[Klimpen717]

I will try to help you with this since I have done the exact same thing.

1. The OFNA mount will work but it will be hard to adjust the engine with different gears ratio's. Use Traxxas Big Block conversion or New Era
2. I started off by using the stock exhaust and I then drilled the stinger (end pipe) to 6 mm using a regular drill. Then I got a side pipe with a big block exhaust and that gave me some serious power upgrade. If the change from "stock engine" to "Picco with stock exhaust" gave you 10 units of power the side pipe will give you an extra 8 units of power above that)
3. With the stock exhaust you can keep the EZ-Start. With a side pipe you can not.
4. With the stock exhaust you don't need to upgrade the gears inside the gearbox.
5. With a side pipe you will wear out the gearbox pretty quick and I have gone steel for the gears that stripped over and over again.
6. You will need to gear up the clutch / spur gear ratio to about 16/40 or 16/38 (with side pipe you can go to 16/36, that's what I'm using)
7. You will enjoy it!

[Klimpen717]

Here are some pictures if that might help.

[Zepher]

We've never had issues with the transmission gears and 5 of the piccos had performance rear exhaust.
Ya, the ofna mount limits gear ratio choices due to the limited amount of movement.
Using the stock traxxas 2 chamber muffler and header, I was able to run an 18/34 setup with wide ratio with no issue.
Truck was very very fast.
I've got a brand new new era mount I'd sell for a good price, it's been opened but not mounted with anything. I've also got a brand new traxxas big block as well.