Many automotive enthusiasts are nerds to their core. I’m one of those, and my 4WD-focused nerd-ness spans from my full-size rig to radio controlled vehicles, the “driving” and upgrading of which is just as satisfying and admittedly much less time (and money) consuming than the vehicles which they imitate. I’ve been playing with the RC4WD C2X for a few months now and have covered it on other outlets, but felt Hooniverse would be a good place to share the fun and talk about how upgrading these trucks is, too, just like the full-scale thing as well.

The RC4WD C2X looks like a quad-cab, flat-bed version of a 1980s Toyota pickup, and that’s a welcomed design in our books. It’s a 1/10 scale rock crawler that comes ready-to-run, with a 35T brushed motor, beadlock wheels, Mickey Thompson-branded tires, a waterproof ESC, and an aluminum chassis. The whole thing is 19.6” long, 9.4” wide, 9.3” tall, and weighs 7.6 pounds, and more importantly for rock crawling has a 1.47:1 crawl ratio that hits the ground through a real transfer case and axles that emulate Dana 44s.

Excellent from the get-go

After countless hours and recharged battery packs through the C2X, we’re absolutely smitten with it and its performance out of the box. The scale realism is fantastic to experience whether blasting through the grass or maneuvering at the slowest speed possible over our makeshift backyard rock crawling course. The stock suspension, gearing, tires, and locked differentials all work in unison to create a genuinely impressive performer, which is good given RC4WD’s intention for the truck to be a Class 2 Competition crawler out of the box. But like all off-road rigs, and because we can’t leave anything well enough alone, the C2X needed an armor upgrade.

While the C2X has a great breakover angle, it has the limitations shared with many radio controlled vehicles in that the body sits quite a ways out from the frame itself, leaving the rocker panel or bottom, outer edge of the body exposed. Rock sliders are one of the first modifications that many make to the vehicles they take off-roading, and that goes for the full-size thing and scale RC crawlers alike. RC4WD offers their own “Tough Armor” tube sliders for the C2X, and they sent over a set for us to test.

Installing the sliders was a bit more intricate than we expected. More of the vehicle’s suspension and other mounting points had to be removed and manipulated out of the way to get the sliders on, but this is all relative; it took maybe an hour or two to get things sorted on this front. It did also take some time to get the sliders to fit in a way that allowed the body to clear the sliders while still fitting over the body mounts. We eventually opted to add a few spacers to the sliders to push them a bit further away from the body, and created an easier way of mounting the body itself, but the effort was well worth it.

Rock sliders, the savior and helping hand of off-road upgrades

The benefits of rock sliders go well beyond protecting cosmetic aspects of the vehicle. Sliders help a vehicle pivot over or around obstacles in both vertical and horizontal axes, and also provide additional structural integrity and torsional strength. They also look cool, but they look better when the paint is scraped up or scratched off after you put them to use.

Adding the rock sliders to the C2X helped us enjoy the vehicle even more. It also keeps the vehicle as a Class 2 rig, in that it doesn’t change the vehicle’s resemblance to that which it was originally, and it still falls in line with modifications a streetable vehicle would be able to run. Now, we can traverse rocks, logs, or anything in the truck’s way without worry of damaging the rocker panels, and we’re even able to use the sliders to find new ways to get the most out of the truck’s capability.

All in all, the Tough Armor sliders made for a relatively major performance upgrade to the C2X with minimal effort for installation. They served as a great first modification to our C2X, and we can’t wait to keep playing with (and upgrading) this platform.