As far as your drivetrain goes, you cannot go by how many shims someone has on their car and expect it to be right. For instance, when I went from the kit plastic diff cases to the carbon ones, I had to lose almost all the shims on the diff because the tolerances were different. So even though the amount of shims someone tells you they have on their car may get you close, it also may be way off for your cars tolerances.

The easiest way I can explain without pictures is to set your pinion gear shaft play first. I would follow what the manual says as far as shims for this as a starting point. Then with it installed in the lower diff housing half, put the top diff housing on and push and pull on the drive cup and see how much front to back play you have. There should be a very small amount. If so then do the other diff housing the same way. When you are done shimming, with both diff housing halves together, spin the pinion shaft to make sure that it is spinning freely and not binding. If you shim this area of the drivetrain too tight, it will bind up here and cause a lot of drag and burn up bearings. If you shim it too loose, the main drive shaft will get in a bind under throttle and braking because it will have side to side play along with forward and rearward. Then you risk damage to the crown and pinion gear, along with vibration of the driveshaft at high drive line rpm.

After those are shimmed correctly, install the built diffs into the the bottom diff housing with the bearing installed but with no shims. With the pinion gear shaft installed push the diff away from the pinion gear until the bearing is against the side of the lower diff housing. Then push the pinion shaft down by its bearings and with a finger do not let the pinion gear move. Now take your other hand and rock the diff back and forth and check how much slack there is with the gear mesh. Think of it as being similar to the method on how you would check the gear mesh of your motor pinion and spur gear mesh. You want the mesh to have just a little bit of play, with both parts shimmed and checking it like I described above it I usually try to get about .50mm/.60mm of movement on the crown gear....(make a small mark on the crown gear if you like and observe the movement of the mark if it helps) So if it has too much slop, just add some shims to the flat side of the crown gear * the side with no teeth* until you get the desired about of clearance. While checking this, it is important to check the free play at a few different positions of the the crown gear to make sure there is indeed the desired play in 360 degrees of rotation of the crown gear. After that, add shims to the the side of the diff facing the crown gear teeth to take out the side to side play of the diff when it is installed in the diff housing. When you feel its pretty good, install the top diff housing and go ahead and bolt it together. Then spin the parts by hand and verify that they spin freely. Then with your pointer finger and thumb, grab both sides of the diff outdrives and check the side to side play with the diff housings bolted together. Also double check the pinion shafts forward and rearward play. You should be good to go then, install the main drive shaft and spin it and it should spin nice and free.

You can run your tolerances a little tighter or looser as both have there pluses and minuses. I'm not going to get into that because this post is long enough But I hope I explained it simple enough on how I do my cars basically. There are some more things you can do to be more precise like plastiguage and removing a little material here and there, but this is the basics and will get your car ready to hit the track.

Question 2: The manual indicates that lube/grease be applied between the bevel and differential/one-way. What type of grease should be used? I received a ball diff grease and a ceramic grease with the kit. I also purchased a Anti-Wear grease from Tamiya.

Question 3: I applied Anti-Wear grease on the arm installation (to the suspension blocks) and fr/rr universal shaft. Is this the appropriate grease for this? The reason I ask is that this grease is very 'sticky'. I actually had to wipe off a great deal of it from the arm / suspension block installation as it was causing the arms to bind.

Also...

Timmie - I ordered and received a set of 81T/47T and 90T/52T spur/pinion combos. I'm happy to report that the 81/47 configuration also works. It will require the 1.5-2mm spacer to clear the uppder brace which you have mentioned.