I had one of these neat Tandy Beetles when I was a kid. The combination of Baja Bug-esque styling and fun big tires is a winner. Recently, I found a much sadder one on eBay, bereft of its transmitter, tires, battery door, and suspension. Let’s figure out how to cobble this thing back together into a running car.

Plastic repair

A bunch of parts on the frame of the Beetle were already broken, but it was mostly on the fake rear six-banger boxer engine. Unfortunately, you practically have to strip the car down completely in order to access these parts, and I ended up with a bin full of loose bits for almost a year while I thought about my next steps.

The flat-six engine installed in its repaired cradle. You can see evidence of repair.

Some super glue and model cement put the engine back together, and the rear plastic rollcage frame back into one piece. I had to clamp up the top rollbar, which only had one of its driving lights left and a giant crack in the middle. Although I don’t have replacement driving lights for it, I could probably 3D-print something or even take a mould. It’s a very low priority.

Tires

Now that I had most of the parts again, it was time to reassemble the car and see if I had misplaced any of the screws. Putting the trailing-arm mount back together was somewhat precarious, as it depends on several different-length screws and some flimsy plastic pieces. Hopefully this doesn’t break in the future.

To get tires, I went to my local hobby store. Unfortunately, they didn’t have much that fit. There were some RC4WD “Goodyear” branded 1.55” tires, which went on the rear, but they wouldn’t clear the bumper in front. They fit a little bit loosely, so I may have to use glue.

Some knobby rear tires are mounted onto the Beetle.

After asking my friend Albert, who does a lot more RC stuff, he pointed out that the front tires in the promotional shots for the Tandy Beetle look exactly the same as the ones on a Tamiya Sand Scorcher. Then he gave me the part number. I took that part number to the other hobby store in town, and after some rummaging through the bins, they turned up a bag of new-production Sand Scorcher front tires.

Those tires fit perfectly (although it was a finger-pinching activity, involving lots of dish soap, to get them on.) Thanks, Albert!

The loose frame of the Beetle now has front and rear tires, making it look like an actual car.

The part number of these front tires is Tamiya 9805033, marked as “for 58016,” which is the Tamiya part number for the original and reissued Sand Scorcher. I suspect the rears are supposed to be Tamiya 9805081, the original rears for a Sand Scorcher, but I’ve already got these rears, so I’ll run them until something horrible happens. It seems like Hornet tires would also work; it would be fun to try some of those oh-so-80s spiky rear tires, which are also back in production (the adjacent part number, Tamiya 9805034.)

Springs

I couldn’t figure out why the rear springs were missing, until I tried to put new ones on. Turns out that the rear “suspension,” which consists of a plastic sleeve and pin that slide into each other, droops significantly once you remove the trailing arms. It took a little bit of finagling and swearing until I got them in, but the springs fit surprisingly well.

Some springs are sitting on the rear suspension, spacing the trailing arm away from the body of the car.

Which springs, you ask? Hardware store ones. I took a quick measurement with a digital caliper to figure out the minimum inner diameter of the spring seat, and then went to Canadian Tire. On the shelves was this Hillman 851618 compression spring, which was about a buck seventy-five a spring.

A package reading Hillman 851618 2" x 3/8" (50.8 x 9.5mm) compression spring by Hardware Essentials.

These springs may not exactly be the right stiffness or length, but they definitely seem to work. And that’s good enough for now.

I did a quick dry fit of the body, and even with the rear fake engine not installed, the thing looks pretty good.

The body has been dry-fitted onto the frame. It sits loosely, and no fake engine is attached to the back yet.

Next steps

My next task is to remove all the original Tandy/Atcomi electronics from this machine. If everything goes well, I’ll also be able to reverse-engineer the original board and post a schematic – it looks very simple and appears to all be based on an off-the-shelf (and still available!) “RC car” LSI chip from the period.

The end goal is to try and run the original motor off of a newer Quicrun 1060 brushed ESC. I was hoping to use a Traxxas “hump pack” from the Stampede 2WD, but it looks like I don’t quite have enough wheelbase to make that happen, so I’ll have to find another smaller pack. My fear is that the increased beef of the new electronics will shred the two-speed rear end instantly, but there’s only one way to find out.

Whether or not this project ever made financial sense is sort of irrelevant. Everyone who tells you not to spend money on toy-grade R/C is one hundred percent correct, but at the same time, it’s hard to deny that this bootleg Beetle is pretty damn cool.