Originally Posted by
niznai
How about Serpent or Mugen?
Or Capricorn?
Xray. Well, they "optimise".
Jokes aside, Tamiya has been very slow to adopt innovations that had proved themselves useful and performant.
Sure, the 419XR may look modern, but that is only because it has finally caught up with things others had locked in their designs years before. That doesn't make it modern, it makes it five years too late.
Xray can be made fun of, but they do listen to the customer more than any other company I can think of. Which sells their kits. People literally ask for things and they get them in the next Xray. Not so with Tamiya. Tamiya seems to want us to buy what they want to sell us. Back to marketing 101. One would be excused for thinking Tamiya wants tell the customer they know better. Fine, but you need to have the competitive results to back this up. I'll leave it up to you to decide if that stacks up. Or maybe it does in Japan and they don't care about the rest.
Well, I would challenge you to find any modern chassis out there like the TA07 and the TB EVO 7. Both of those chassis are new and different. The TRF103 is basically the "it" F1 chassis right now. The TRF419XR has stabilizers that you don't see on the TC7.1 or even the TC7.2. It was also the first chassis I am aware of to have multiple types of center stiffeners. I don't know that it's fair to characterize them as behind the times. But it is absolutely fair to say they don't take feedback or listen to their customers very well. It's also fair to say that Tamiya's fit and finish is probably close to last in its class. Infinity, Xray, Serpent (4x), and AE all require virtually no shimming to get things to fit right and have very little play. My 419XR and TA07 all have a lot of play that has to be shimmed out. My 419XR has some play that cannot be shimmed out because the play comes from having Chubs with larger inner diameters (holes for the pins) than the outer diameter of the pins themselves. I also notice the front axles on the outside of the knuckles have an inordinate amount of play that prevent accurate setting of toe out and straight steering. I don't know if this is a problem with their molds or with the plastics they use, but it's definitely one of the things that I have had to learn to live with.