Team Driver Build - Destiny RX-10S

Team Driver Build: Destiny RX-10S
By Henry Salmén

One of the newest brands in the RC market, Destiny, started to appear in Finland already last winter and EuroRC has become its official retailer. During the last season, one FTT TSS-10 series championship was won with the Destiny RX-10S. The price of RX-10S is 399€, slightly cheaper than other competitors in the market.

EuroRC let me test the RX-10S (while waiting for the new Xray T4’18) and I thought I’d write a little report on the assembly and the first feels of the car.

The box and the content are much like those by other brands. The car comes in a small and stylish box and it contains a fairly simple black and white manual, a sticker sheet and the parts sorted in different bags that are labeled by the order in which they are needed for the assembly. The bag for the screws has different compartments for the different screw sizes. Cutting open one edge of the bag makes it easy to pick screws of the right size. The car comes with one bag of 3mm shims needed for the fine tuning of the plays.

I started the assembly by rounding off the corners of the chassis plate and the carbon fiber parts. This is totally optional, and there are many people who don’t bother doing it. I find the rounded carbon fiber parts nicer when handling the car. I started off by sanding the edge of the carbon fiber with a 220‒260 grit sandpaper and to finish I used a 600-grit paper. The little holes in the chassis plate I finished with a small round file. These days I don’t use glue on the edges of the carbon fiber parts because that might affect the flex in the chassis plate and the top deck.

It is good to use a thin file to round off the edges of the holes for the battery strap tape in the chassis plate. This will make the plate endure a greater impact without the tape breaking. You should also remember to use a dust mask while working with carbon fiber because the dust is not good for the lungs.

The bulk heads are in accordance with modern standards. They are identical in the front and back and are fixed into the chassis plate with screws. The bulk heads also have pegs into the chassis plate which will keep it from tweaking in the moment of crashing without making the chassis rigid . The motor mount is a bit larger since the motor mount and main shaft bulkheads form one piece. This allows for many different flex adjustments according to the current trends in the back of the car and certainly an equal flex in relation to the center line. The metallic parts are neatly finished and equally good as those of the competing brands.

Next was the drivetrain assembly. Center shaft is very similar to that in Xray. Center pulley pins can be locked through the center shaft with two set screws. The benefit of doing this remains unclear because the pins are stuck under the pulleys either way. The spur gear that comes in the box is a high quality Panaracer 64dp 116t. The rear differential assembly was a little difficult because you need to be really careful when taking the gears off the mold. It’s good to clean all the molding debris carefully to ensure smooth movement.

With this car, I had to sand the cross pin for smaller gears of the differential before the gears would spin smoothly in place. The box contains a basic paper sealing and an O-ring for sealing the rear differential. I tried to get the O-ring in place a few times without success so eventually I threw it away. There seems to be no other real use for it in Xray other than making the assembly more difficult. The steel spool outdrives are good to have at least in modified class use, because the original ones are plastic. However, the original ones lasted the first two days with a 4.5T modified motor so they will certainly be sufficient for Stock/Prostock use.

The molding debris had to be cut off from the differential / spool gear bearing Hubs, so that the differentials could be placed between the bulkheads. I put a little pit of paint on the drive belt tension markers because it makes the quick adjustments at the track a lot easier.

Next, I assembled the steering. According to the manual it should have been already assembled but it wasn’t, which was a little confusing. Fortunately, there’s an easy guide for the assembly in the manual. The steering is the Awesomatix type bearing steering so it differs from the mainstream. The assembly went without any major problems but all the three bearings in the box were faulty. After I got the replacements, the assembly of the steering was easy.

According to some drivers with experience with the car, a common issue with the steering seems to be that a bump can displace the steering rack. This can be fixed by placing a shim under the screws of the back bearings to keep the rack in place. I switched the screws of the back bearings with longer ones and put 9mm shims under which I added a 0.8mm shim plates before the bearing. Here’s what I added under the top of the screw (in order): 9mm shim, 0.5 mm basic shim, and the 0.3 mm shim from the box before the bearing.

Next, I assembled the suspension which is typical touring car suspension with small differences. The benefit of the C-blocks is that the caster insert is selectable to assembly to c-block. It’s good to be careful when pressing the bushings into the C-block, because when I did it, neither of the bushings didn’t settle properly. The mold seam should be upright in relation to the C-block. The bushing is pushed in the front of the C-block and the hole for the pin in the front of the C-block must be in the lower edge of the block. The manual recommends gluing the bushing in place but according to the experiences of Vesa Yli, the bushing does not have to be glued, which will allow later adjustments of the caster.

The car comes with traditional rear/front drive shafts and it’s recommendable to get  Double joints in the front. Destiny’s double joints are delivered ready assembled so I did not disassemble them but applied Teflon chain oil spray on them. I assembled the drive shafts in the rear with Hudy’s graphite grease.

The hexes are, contrary to normal, bushings that go on top of the drive shafts. The diameter of the hex’ bushing part is slightly bigger than a regular drive shaft, so it felt that the shaft/hex/hub combination was quite playless.

The traditional tip is to put set screws in the outer ball holes of the rear hubs. If you don’t assemble the original front driving shafts, you’re left with the right set screws to use for the rear hubs.

Like the Yokomo/Tamiya suspension arms, the inner pins of the arms in this car are “equipped with bearings”, as there are balls attached to the ends of the pins so the suspension arms don’t need to move smoothly in the pins. I used Hudy’s graphite grease on these parts as well to make sure the movement is smoother and to prevent them from wearing out. The wheelbase spacers in the front/back side of the arms were mentioned quite vaguely in the manual. I put 1 mm + 0.3 mm shims in the front and 0.5 mm to the back side. As the manual says, I put 2 mm in the front side of the rear arms and 2mm + 0.3mm shims on the back side of the arm. The quality of the plastic parts is good since the hubs and the suspension arms didn’t need any polishing with sandpaper or a file. The ball cups feel a little flimsy but they are smooth in the balls and in the first track tests they stayed put.

The shock absorbers are typical touring shock absorbers and quite short which is in accordance with modern standards. The box contains 4-holed pistons, probably widely used 1.1 mm holes, although that wasn’t mentioned in the manual. The shock absorbers were easy to assemble and the pistons were tightly in their place in the shaft and don’t require extra shims.

What required special attention in the assembly of the shock absorber was the fine tuning of the lower and top parts of the ball cups. The balls didn’t move smoothly, but the old method of squeezing the cups helped. What you do is squeeze the sides of the ball cup with pliers when the ball is in place. Don’t use too much force so the cups won’t become too loose. The box contains 2.6 springs for the front and 2.5 springs for the back. After the first day at the track, the shock absorbers seem to leak a little bit so it would probably be worth a try to test the Xray’s O-ringsto seal the shock shafts.

The last stage of the assembly was mainly finishing like installing the body posts and front bumper. The screws in the box were not really the most suitable for this stage so I had to use screws that were a little longer than in the manual. Though these days, specially at carpet tracks with tight grip, some people add weights in the bumper so a few grams don’t really matter. The box also contains high quality serrated wheel nuts, so those don’t require upgrading. Battery stops would have been a nice addition but I managed to build a piece in front of the battery using the Xray servo mount and on the back side a 10g support weight was enough. As with other brands, there is a hole for a screw on the side of the servo mount, in which you can put a long screw with a suitable amount of shim plates to support the battery sideways. In the back, the motor mount is at a suitable distance from the battery to serve as a stop.

The location of the body posts was slightly different to that in Xray, so I painted a new Protoform LTC-R LW body for the car. With regards to electricity, I used my trusted Highest DLP 650 servo, Hobbywing’s XR10 Pro speed controller and a certainly sufficiently powerful Hobbywing’s V10 G2 4.5t motor.

I did track tests at the Lahti club on ETS-carpets for a few days. I assembled the car pretty much according to Vesa Yli’s this fall’s basic setup. The car felt nice already since the first heat. As the grip improved, the springs became a little slack so switching to Xray’s 2.5-2.8 front spring and 2.6 back spring improved the speed and the car was easier to control. With regards to shock oil, I switched to a stiffer 550cst oil, which helped especially in quick turns. In the two days and about 20 heats I didn’t break anything in the car, even though we had one pretty bad head on crash with another car. In terms of lap times, the car is capable of high speeds and people along the track commented on the car’s movement on the track. I’d recommend Destiny’s RX-10S as an alternative worthy of consideration for a serious driver who doesn’t want to pay almost 200€ more for the newest models by other brands. As far as I know, there are several drivers that are going to participate in the FTT series with Destiny, so there will be people able to help you with the car at the tracks.

Henry's Setup