RCBasher.com - HPI Savage Mods - Engine Protector Reinforcement

Savage (sav-ij) -adjective: fierce, ferocious, cruel, untamed, barbarous, wild, rugged, bloodthirsty

HPI Savage X Engine Protector Reinforcement

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The Savage X's plastic roll bar has some advantages over the "old school" Savage's aluminum roll bar, such as the fact that it can deform and return to its original shape, it weighs very little, and you can add the engine protector segment if you wish. However, when you use your Savage as the R/C gods have intended mishaps do occur, such as landing hard upside-down after big air. It's okay, it happens to the best of us! Under such a heavy load, however, the plastic bar and protector can bend quite a bit, exposing the engine's head to whatever the truck landed on, which is usually something rather hard, potentially leading to this:

I'm sure you'd like to try to prevent that from happening, correct? Fortunately, it's not too difficult. Below is a tutorial on how to reinforce your Savage X's roll bar/engine protector set in order to significantly reduce the possible deflection in the system. The pictures and text are used with permission from a friend of mine in Norway, so please bear with the slight idiosyncracies in language usage. He knows English WAY better than I know Norwegian!!

Materials Required

Procedure

Finished Product

Savage X Engine Protector Mod for Extended TVPs

Regardless of whether you reinforce your bar and protector, if you're running extended TVPs on your Savage and want to us the engine protector set, you'll need to do some mods to install it. Shown below is what my Norwegian friend did to "extend" his engine protector in order to use it with his FLM extended TVPs. Essentially he made an extension for the lower mounting point. See the pics for further information.

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