The car in this presentation was a normal Stallion with a Shin conversion kit. The first Stallion was lacking specs for the price, as a lot of the parts were made out of plastic where aluminium was expected. The shin upgrade kit doesn't correct this and if you are in my case, you will still have to buy the optional aluminium parts. However for those of you who will buy the Shin edition kit, the aluminium parts are included.

The build

Building the car was admittedly quite messy. Having a kit and a conversion kit makes a lot of parts redundant and you have to make sure to put the new parts where needed. The car comes together very nicely, with as little slop as possible. The machining of the aluminium parts and molding of the plastic parts is second to none. Being used to Tamiya kits, it's nice to see hinge pins go in the wishbones freely without the need of a reamer, yet not being sloppy at all. The bulkheads are beautifully machined and to much tighter tolerance than many kits.

One good point for the conversion kit is that it includes a proper Shin Edition manual, and not a few pages notifying of the changes like some manufacturers have the bad habit of doing.

Chassis

The car features a standard dual deck chassis layout, but has singularities compared to the main stream of the actual chassis. First, it is rather wide, although not quite as wide as on the original stallion kit, but wider than that of the MSXX for example. Compared to the Stallion, the Shin also features cells moved much further forward, to a position comparable to that of the other TCs.

Suspension

The Shin features its own new wishbones, with rear wishbones 2mm shorter than on the Stallion. They are in the industry standards in terms of length, although strangely the rear wishbones are shorter than the front ones. Interestingly though, cars at the DHI featured re-drilled wishbones, where the inner hinge pins were around 4/5 mm closer. There are plenty of positions for the shocks to be attached to the wishbones, and the same goes for the turnbuckles, with easy way to set the roll centre using shims as introduced with the TRF 414M 7 years ago.

Differential

For my car, I have preferred to get the aluminium diff outdrives straight away, as I only race modified. I am sure however that the plastic outdrives will handle anything up to 19T without problem. I also chose to put Acer racing ceramic diff balls in my diff. I have been using those for countless years (since 2001) and they have provided me with the smoothest diffs always. I highly recommend them. I also use AE black grease and Stealth diff lube in all my diffs as I feel they provide the best diff action for the longest period of time.

Anyway, the Kyosho diff is at least up to par with the TRF diff, which means it's probably one of the smoothest diffs out there. Once again the quality of the machining is unbelievable and provides a diff that without slipping is smooth as butter. We will see how it fares once on the track. A good point is that it can be adjusted by putting an allen key through the outdrive, good for setting up on the go.

Drivetrain

The usual double belt drivetrain, with one belt on each side of the spur gear (although opposite sides compared to the Stallion) features a rather strange concept of one way / spool. It's a one way with the one way bearings in hex housings. Those housings take place on each side of a plastic body on which the pulley attaches. Those one way bearings can be replaced by plastic outdrives, to make a spool. I ditched the whole thing, and got a JP Products spool instead, which I will talk about later.

The driveshafts are inverted compared to the mainstream of driveshafts, ala MIP but with a square-ish profile on the dogbone. These are made out of red aluminium and are thicker near the diff for added strength. They look the job, but I have always preferred steel dogbones at the front for durability, especially with spools and one ways. Time will tell if the aluminium will handle the power of the 3.5 brushless.