Axial Scorpion AX10

combined price

On its own the Novak Goat system (motor and ESC) has a recommended retail price of £199 but CML do offer the Scorpion with the Goat as a package with an RRP of £369, which will save you £30 or possibly more if you hunt around and talk to your local hobby shop very nicely! If you’re a bit of a novice to all this crawling stuff or even just electric motors and ESC’s, I would strongly recommend getting this set-up as it just takes all the stress and worry out of it. If £170 for a motor and ESC seems a bit much, you can also get the Scorpion with the Novak Rooster ESC and their brushed 55 turn motor for around £265 (so it’s just £65 for the ESC and motor).

power up

With the nice people at Novak supplying The Goat ready to go, all you need to do is fit it into the truck. Axial provide you with a 14 tooth pinion to go on the motor (make sure this is secured with thread lock) and the whole motor slips straight into the truck. The ESC and Spektrum receiver are then secured with double sided tape to the underside of the battery plate but making this all fit proved to be quite a challenge.

The two straps that hold the battery in place reduce your mounting options but you need to ensure the ESC sits in front of the gearbox as the cooling fins on this will hit the top. You then need to make sure the receiver doesn’t hit the spur gear. I found that by mounting the ESC so it half covered the rear battery strap and putting the receiver right next to it, it will all fit in (it did take me three attempts and a lot of double sided take to discover this though!).

final fittings

With the motor, ESC, receiver and servo fitted, there are just a last couple of things left to do, namely fitting the supplied bead lock wheels and spraying the shell! The wheels are mounted on machined aluminium green wheel hexes which will help prevent stripped wheel hexes in the future.

The wheels themselves are of the beadlock design so there’s no gluing involved. This might well be music to some people’s ears but I’d suggest waiting till you’ve tried fitting the beadlocks before thinking that’s a positive point because they are quite hard work. The tyres sit in a rim, then the green aluminium beadlock plate is screwed down to hold them in position but until then, the foams push the tyres out making it hard to line up. My advice here is just to take it slowly, winding the screws in a bit at a time. Remember not to over-tighten the screws as well because the threads will go.

Finally it was time to paint the shell, of course it would have been rude not to use green but I tried to spice this up with some chrome bumpers and picked the fuel cans out on each side with a different colour. Overall not a bad effort for a couple of rattle cans, even if I do say so myself.

testing times

So we’re all ready to get out and do some crawling but would you believe it, it never stopped raining. Really that’s not what you expect from a British winter. In the end we embraced the elements, armed ourselves with some anoraks and went out to do some crawling! The first thing I did was hit full throttle and burst out laughing, do not buy a crawler and crawling motor if you want to go fast, you’ll get about 8mph out of this and end up being hugely disappointed. Yes I know I’ve just completely missed the point about rock crawling but I’m a slow learner!

Still once we appreciated what this kit was designed to do, the fun really started. And I do mean fun, because while the concept of going slowly over obstacles never really jumped out at me, once I was doing it, the challenge soon became a real buzz. We began walking round looking for new obstacles, be it felled tree stumps, piles of dirt of just a load of rocks piled up - and then unleashed our crawlers on them!

Getting used to the very sensitive throttle control took a moment and initially I was just gunning into everything, but with some adjustments made to the ESC and a bit of patience on my part, I was soon creeping up to the obstacles and looking for the best ways over them!

As I’ve not driven a rock crawler before, it’s a little hard to compare the Scorpion to anything. However it did feel very nimble with good steering response. The Rock Lizard tyres hooked up very well on a variety of surfaces from dirt to rocks and wood. After having a go on Nobby’s Wheely King Crawler I have to unfortunately admit that this felt a lot more stable over the tougher terrain and I did find the Scorpion toppling over a few times due to the fact that the battery was mounted so high up. With the cells over the front axle though it will be a different story and as the Scorpion is a lot more nimble, it has the ability to out-manoeuvre the Wheely King Crawler!

While the rain continued to hammer down and most sensible people were wrapped up inside, we were out having a wail of a time with our rock crawlers. Now that’s not a sentence I ever thought I’d be saying but I really enjoyed running this kit and am already trying to work out how I can build a rock crawling area in my back garden!

in conclusion

Rock Crawlers are some of the most dedicated people in this hobby and probably show more passion for their kits than anyone else. However the Scorpion opens the way for hordes of new people to get involved and if they are embraced, this market has the potential to really grow. It’s not often we test kits outside of our comfort zone - and are impressed with them - but the Scorpion makes me want to stand up and shout “I love rock crawling!”. Well perhaps I’d mutter it loudly but it doesn’t change the fact that I really enjoyed running this kit and can see me having hours of fun with it. So my advice is to go out on a limb and give rock crawling a try. The Axial Scorpion and Novak Goat couldn’t make it any easier and will provide you with a whole new perspective to this hobby.

Distributed in the UK by CML Distribution