Silok wrote:

EDIT: Brute convertion is not a good idea, not a good idea at all.

1 run and the body shell is completly broken with1 body post who broke in half (i will post some picture soon). 1 Flip over and no more beautiful truck. Well lets back to the buggy look. I must say tough for 20$ for a so fragile body shell, that a bit expensive guy...
All RC shells are somewhat fragile - buggies are something else, the shell usually follow closely the lines of the chassis, which keeps damage to a minimum.  But if you're moving to monster truck type bodies, you don't have to do much for it to break... a bad crash on the shell and it's done for.

I always reinforce all my shell with a layer of cheap ductape on the inside.
There's another method out there involving shoegoo and drywall tape (there's a gazilion youtube videos on this)... but it's too messy and smelly for me.

If you want to have a monster truck look, you could always look at the Stampede 2wd (traxxas) body (you can have a look in my Gobi Thread to see how it looks).

You'll have a millions options from Traxxas and other after-market bodies from companies like Proline or JConcepts... you can pick them up on sale on Amazon.ca for under 20$.  I don't think they'll be thicker than the one from the Brute... but they have less sharp/square corners, which does help in distributing impacts in these kind of crashes. But if you go that route - make sure you reinforce it a bit.

I've also started "body washers" (big plastic washer) and it does help in distributing impacts around the hole where the body post comes through.  You can also look at aluminum body post (look for rustler / stampede ones - very cheap on amazon again) - but without an aluminum body mount system, you're more likely to break the mount or the shock tower than the the actual body post on a crash... which would cost more to replace.