Taigen Leopard 2A6 Upgraded

Putting this out to show what I have done with Taigen Leopard 2A6. In the first picture you can see the inside of the chassis where most of the upgrades are, except for the Henglong gun barrel/mantlet/Airsoft unit (you can see the white of the HL Airsoft unit though, as opposed to the black Taigen/Torro Airsoft unit).
I put in the Elmod MFU, speaker, and motors a while ago. Yesterday and part of today I did the rest. I love Taigen/Torro tanks construction and paint jobs, but their electronics leave a lot to be desired, especially for the one modern tank they produce. The speed of the drive motor and traverse motor are fine if it’s a WWII tank, but woefully slow if you have a modern tank. Also the Airsoft barrel doesn’t recoil, so I had to fix that.
I really like Elmod, so I got that in there as soon as I could with a radiomaster ER8 RX. Got a beefy speaker as well.
The 550 gearbox is actually made for a Leopard 2A6 with a metal hull, so it fit just fine. You do have to drill the stand-off holes all the way through the bottom of the hull and attach the machine screws from the outside in to attach the gearboxes. Also some of the attachment point holes on the gearbox are poorly drilled and tapped, so you will want to be able to re-drill and re-tap them if you are going to do this mod. The use the same diameter screws as every other 1/16 rc tank gearbox, which I believe is M2.
The metal turret gear and high speed metal gearbox are simple drop ins with a few caveats. On the Torro upper hull the metal turret gear is a really really tight fit. I think maybe because there was some paint on the rim of the hole. The turret traverse motor doesn’t have a lot of torque, so for a while it kept acting like it was caught on something. I just ran it a lot and eventually the function got smooth.
There is a high speed and low speed metal turret traverse motor. The high speed one will have the motor perpendicular to the gear box. The wires on it are really crappy, and the connector is not JST XH male, so you’ll have to be gentle with the wires and change the connector head. I ended up soldering on better wires because the included ones fell off. You’ll need to make sure the area unde the turret is as clear as possible, because if it bumps into something it doesn’t seem to have a lot of torque to push things out of the way. On the other hand, it’s not going to be eating up your wires either, so that’s good. Also, when installed properly you can freely rotate the turret with your hand, which is nice.
To install the barrel combo unit, all I did was remove the old one and plug the new wires in where they go. You’ll need to have to splice together the positive for Airsoft motor and the positive for the Taigen gun elevation motor. I was able to do this by just crimping the two ends of those wires together with a JST XH connector. Also, there wasn’t an easy way splice in the warning laser light, so I just left it unplugged. I’m going to come back later and try to put a camera there anyways. Also replace the elevation motor with a servo and fix the recoil. Projects for another day.
If you have any questions put them in the comments and I’ll try to answer them
Parts List:
Elmod FusionX MFU (www.rctank.de/...)
Radiomaster ER8 RX (www.radiomaste...)
10w Low Profile Speaker (www.rctanklegi...)
Henglong recoiling gun barrel/mantlet/Airsoft combo (heng-long-panz...)
550 motors with gearbox (a.aliexpress.c...)
Metal turret ring (a.aliexpress.c...)
High speed traverse motor (a.aliexpress.c...)