I decided to install the battery tray next. This is basically 2 C-shaped pieces of carbon fiber that are offset from the chassis using threaded standoffs. It has two positioning options. I chose the rear location.

Battery tray mounting hardware. It includes 2 sets of screws for height adjustment (to allow the use of 2 or 3 cell Lipos).

This is pretty straight forward. First we install the stand offs and then mount the carbon brackets on top of them. The battery is held in with 2 nylon locking nuts over a carbon fiber battery strap. From a design standpoint, it would have been nice to include a longer battery strap and foam spacers to allow infinite adjustability (like a SC10 2wd where the battery tray is enormous). I’ll wait to see how this works before judging it though. I know this type of setup will end up more securely holding the battery in place with less chance of things shifting.

Back to the rear end. Look at this rear bulkhead/chassis brace. For a basher the additional ground clearance on the slash is probably ideal over any short course truck, but for a racer.. we want things as low as they’ll go. This brace is one of the strangest designs I’ve seen. It looks like a spoon and it kept making me want to scoop me some Lucky Charms every time I looked at it. Can’t wait to remove this thing.

Start by removing the rear bumper and diff case screws on the bottom.

Then the two upper screws holding the bumper on need to come out.

Lastly, to fully remove the bumper we remove the bottom screw going into the hingepin brace.

With the bumper removed you can then slide out the hinge pins and discard the stock bulkhead.

Here we are again with the bulkhead beauty that is the Team RCE conversion. Look at the two and tell me which you’d rather have on your truck??

The logo is also machined into the bottom of the rear bulkhead. Here it is being held up to the chassis for test fitment.

We start by installing the rear 2 screws. The other 3 are for the motor mount (which we can’t install until we put the diff in).