Yellow shocks made to work

Every Tamiya modeler knows these yellow shocks, which featured in a lot of older Tamiya offroaders. I never liked them too much because they were never as smooth as they could be. It was until a couple of weeks ago, when I wanted to restore one of my Lunch-boxed which was fitted with these shocks. I wanted to see if their performance could not be improved. So I took them apart and cleaned all the parts.

The chunky yellow pistons were replaced with those thin black pistons from Tamiya's CVA touring car shocks. (3 hole in front, 2 hole in the back in my case.)
This needed one or two 3mm shims between the piston and the lower E-clip.
This mod alone will make your shocks a LOT smoother.

The second part of this project was the exchange of those hard black o-rings. In came a set of those very smooth white RDRP shock.O-rings, wich I find even better than the TRF O-rings. I also fitted them in a different order from stock, because this makes the shock-piston movement even smoother. (see pic)

Be sure to use a suitable tool to grip those piston-rods without damaging them.

After putting it all back together again and filling all shocks with 35wt oil I was very happy with the new performance. Never have those yellow shocks been so smooooooth.

Maybe you'd like to try this out, next time when you want to revise those big yellow things :-)