Bao La front end for YD-2 build and review

Hellooo! I have finally got my hands on this piece of artwork!

When I first seen a photos of this conversion, which has Mr. Bao La shared on The RWD RC Drifting Society Facebook page, I was immediately interested. Not only me, but many people seemed to freak out about it. But I missed my chance, so I had to wait for the next production batch. Now I have it, so what is it like? And how does it perform compared to stock YD-2 front?

Whole package was packed very properly. So after few minutes of cutting, I uncovered this. Parts were partially preassembled and everything organized in a zip bags.

I have to admit, that the production quality had amazed me. I may have never seen such level of precision in every single part of a product ever before.

I quickly removed the standard YD-2S front including the side pieces and begun to assemble.

Although there was no instruction sheet included in the package, I didn't have any issue putting the whole machinery together. The parts including all bolts were put in bags in order for a step-by-step assembly and just a few glances at the photo on Bao's Facebook profile were enough for me.

Overall I enjoyed the build very much. Each and every part is well-thought, machined perfectly and materials are top quality. Everything fell in place exactly as it should.

After an initial setup, I went to our track. There I test fitted the body and noticed few things.

Firstly, that due to the suspension leverage, the dampers are utilized in a longer range of motion than with a standard YD-2 setup and I am curious to test more and see the effect.

What can I say at the moment is, that it is a bit harder to adjust an optimal ride height. I had to play around with the dampers top mount position to bring the front lip down to the position I am used to and at the same time not to limit the droop.

Secondly, I think that the wheels are pushed a tiny bit to the front, because after adjusting the ride height, they started rubbing the wheel arches of my MX-5 body shell. There was a very minimal space before, but with this front, I had to compensate by bringing both lower and upper arms all the way back (which limits my potential caster angle setting options), extending them and using my thinnest 3mm hexes to reduce the scrub radius.

***Also the steering would collide with the optional YD-2 aero side parts, so I will have to cut them before putting them back in place.

I am also tweaking the steering mechanism. I went back to full length of the stock servo horn, which I was not utilizing before. This will do for now, but I still need some work to achieve an even lock on both sides with minimum adjustment on my transmitter.

The steering lock itself is very good with no sign of rubbing issues.

The ackermann progression is a little too aggressive on the last degrees of lock for my taste, but I believe it can be fixed once I try more settings.

Testing on our small track came out really promising. The steering is solid and smooth, allowing the gyro gain on the same rate as the YD-2 stock one. I will wait with the final judgment until I try it on a larger track, but so far I am happy with this product.

So what is the conclusion? Is it better than the stock front end? I don't consider it a performance upgrade. But so far it seems it could be comparable, which is really, really, really impressive if you ask me, since it was designed and produced by a single man.

Would I recommend it? Depends on who you are. If you are only chasing competitions, I would say no, there is no reason. If you are like me, however, and want to step out a little from the endless crowd of identical YD-2s, it is a great choice. You will definitely get a LOT of "Wow, what the hell is that?!", for a reasonable price.