First run: Sloppy steering

I had heard much about the sloppiness of the stock steering setup of the Mad Force, and got to experience more than my share of it first-hand on the first day of running the Mad Jedi on the track. No matter how strong your steering servo and how strong the steering rods, there's enough room for motion in the steering column to move the wheels easily 45-60 degrees independent of eachother. How so? Recall this picture from the Mad Jedi buildup:

Front axle

Imagine the steering knuckle & wheel hub to your upper right is held steady. Now imagine rotating the lower left knuckle counter-clockwise. What happens? The entire cranks bend, about themselves and about their swivel points. The one closer to you in the picture twists clockwise, and angles its pivot to the right by bending about the bolt through the soft plastic of the suspension arm. One wheel can actually bend far enough to bind the drive axle in the wheel shaft hub, locking the steering completely.

Alright, what good did that experiment do? Knowing how something goes wrong is paramount to figuring out how to fix it. Some MF owners have taken to installing a second linkage across the two cranks, run between the mounts where the outer rods attach, with the help of longer bolts. Do note that this will change your steering Ackerman. You can get Kyosho's aluminum steering crank set #MAW009, which will eliminate the bending of the cranks themselves, but you'll still have some twisting about the centers since the bolts are threaded into plastic. For a complete solution, we need stiff cranks and reinforced swivels. I'll tackle this a little later.