This chassis is made from 3/16" solid square steel rod.  The suspension is basically the same as clodhopper 3.0 with separate coil springs and shocks.  This time I used some aluminum shocks that I got on rccrawler.com.  I stretched the wheelbase to 18 inches.  I originally planned to use the Hummer H1 body, but it is waaay to heavy and big to be practical.  I'll use it for something else later on. 

What I decided on was a Chevy Avalanche body from RadioShack.  The wheelbase was much too short on it to use it as is, so I cut the bed off, and made a custom flat bed out back, and a tube front bumper with a stinger.  All the tube work is made from 3/16 brake line tubing. 

Shortly after running the new setup, I learned the hard way that my shock/link mounts would not work.  I had a 3mm hole drilled and tapped in the center of the link just like I did in clodhopper 2.0. It worked fine with 2.0, since the links were shorter.  But with this new longer setup, the stress was too much and 1 of the links snapped in 2 pieces right at the hole for the shock mount, and the other 3 bent, and were ready to snap. 

I needed to make a new shock mount.  So I decided to weld a small 90 degree tab onto some new links and mount the shock to the tab.  Since I'm not set up to weld aluminum, I had to use steel.  So I remade the links out of 1/4" solid steel and welded the shock mount tabs on.  You can see a picture of them at the bottom.

Check out the T.S.C. comp video featuring the clodhopper.  Press play to watch the video.