TB-02 Porsche Carrera GT

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Visit the full Tamiya Porsche Carrera GT TB-02 gallery >

Video

JANG's Impressions

With active production for a full half-decade, the TB-02 was a long-lived platform, as touring cars go. It was a well-respected hero of many a humble-budgeted onroad racer, as the cost of most of these kits was not too far above the truly entry-level TT-01, yet it offered all of the tunability of the race-spec TB Evolution III on which it was based. This was a powerful combination that actually made it popular amongst not only competitive club racers, but casual parking-lot racers and bashers, customizers, and drifters looking for something a cut above the omnipresent TT-01.

Looking at first the earlier TB-01 and then this chassis, one sees vividly the rapid evolution of Tamiya's sport-level racers moving from performance-upgraded versions of platforms that were really designed just to hold scale-looking bodies, towards highly efficient mechanical wonders designed to get from point A to point B as quickly as physically possible. The next chassis in the line, the TB-03, would extend this theme even farther.

Building the standard TB-02 is a straightforward affair, and when it's complete, you have a decent starting point from which to experiment with and learn about tuning settings. There's nothing absent in the options that any amateur could ask for, save easy re-gearing. Tamiya used a motor mount with just four set positions, so to make a large change in overal gear ratio, you have to remove the motor completely & re-install it. A convenient table in the back of the manual shows that you can use pinions in a continuous gradient of sizes from 16T to 25T, allowing an overall gear ratio ranging from 9.91:1 all the way to 5.72:1, with four pinion options available for each of the three different-sized spur gears included. Of course, having to change your both your pinion and your spur to make a small gear ratio is far from ideal, but at least you never have to worry about getting your gear mesh just right, so long as you pay close attention to the chart.

In all, the TB-02 was a gift to the 1/10th scale onroad world that served its purpose well.

Building tips

See the whole buildup, with photos, in the Tamiya TB-02 Porsche Carrera GT build thread on the forum.

• Beware that when you drive the droop screws through your suspension arms, even by hand, they'll come out the other end a bit warm from the friction. Just a little warning.
• When assembling the diffs, it's helpful to set the tiny locknut into its nook before inserting the adjuster screw. Otherwise it can very easily go in upside-down, or try to go on crooked.

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