RE: mounting body
Depends I've not made a custom crawler/scaler yet, but from the custom RC's I've done I usually look at other RC's to see if they have body mounts I can use to seamlessly fit in with the looks. On a tracked truck/tankish vehicle I made I used delrin rods as the mount points for the TVP's, and I mounted 2 tamiya body mount posts to the top 2. I've also used HPI RS4 on-road body posts a few customs seeing they are pretty generic.