Type-1 Chassis

The **Type-1 Chassis** (Japanese: タイプ１シャーシ, *Taipu Wan Shāshi*) is the first (unofficially) race-orientated Mini 4WD chassis to be released by Tamiya in May 1986, with the release of Hornet Jr..

## General info

The chassis's overall design is based on that of Hotshot R/C buggy's, except it has no wires or steering system, only the driveshafts, a propeller shaft, two crown gears, one spur gear, one counter gear, one pinion gear, one motor and the copper-based terminals, were presented, which are the basics for the shaft-driven Mini 4WD chassis for the years to come.

Since Type-1 was designed with off-road racing in mind, it has high ground-clearance which is suitable for off-road tracks. However, such high ground-clearance made the Type-1 to do wheelies and having the risk of being flip over on the track while using the high-torque gears setup and/or the high-power motors. Notable to this chassis is that there's no attachement holes for rollers other than the front bumper, making it unsuitable for on-road track racing.

The chassis doesn't comes with the 620 plastic/brass bearings attachment for the driveshafts, meaning the ball bearings cannot be install on this chassis.

Depends on the gear setup, the change of pinion from 8T to 12T and vice-versa is necessary. It has the light blue G1 crown gear on the front and the orange G2 crown gear on the rear.

As Type-1 is the very first chassis in the Mini 4WD series, it has many problems on its own; propeller shaft cannot be held properly and brass tubes are constantly touching the crown gears and spur gear, which results in power losses. There's no holes around the motor and battery area to dissipates heats, as well as it doesn't have the battery clip. Those problems become more apparent after the newer chassis become available.

The Type-1 was later re-designed into the Type-3 Chassis.

## Colors

### Chassis frame

* Black - Common color for most machine. First equipped with Hotshot Jr.
* Smoke - Common color for Clear Special variant of Type-1 Chassis car. First equipped with Hotshot Jr. Clear Special.
* Red - First equipped with Thunder Shot Jr. Black Special.

### A parts

* Black - Common color for most machine. First equipped with Hotshot Jr.
* Smoke - Common color for Clear Special variant of Type-1 Chassis car. First equipped with Hotshot Jr. Clear Special.
* Red - First equipped with Thunder Shot Jr. Black Special.

## Gallery

Chassis construction view (Dash-1 Emperor)
## Trivia

* Earlier mold revision of the Type-1 Chassis prior to October 1987 doesn't have the screw holes for roller attachments on the front bumper.
	+ Earlier batches of Type-1 Chassis cars has the gears molded in milk white instead of various colors.
* Along with the Type-3 Chassis, the Type-1 Chassis is one of the only chassis to have two pinion gear sets.
* Although both Type-1 and Type-3 shares the similar design, the official Mini 4WD race regulation prohibits installation of the Competition Gear Set on Type-1 chassis as it was not designed for the Type-1 Chassis.

## References

1. ↑ Mini 4WD feature: Hotshot Jr, at CoroCoro official site (Japanese)
2. ↑ Mini 4WD Grade-Up Parts Matching List (Gear sets) (Japanese)