The Cross set comes with three spring rates, soft, medium, and hard, with the medium set being as hard as the hard set from Kyosho. After taking the front arms apart and then bolting the front end back together, I went to have a look at the friction damper. Sorry, I forgot to take a picture of the assembled front end...
The friction damper consists of a spring loaded lower plate, a middle plate that attaches to the rear pod, and a spring loaded top plate. I put some teflon tape on all of the mating surfaces to protect the plastic from wear.
First, a look at the top plate and the original 'damper', which is no more than a spring on a screw:
As I will be using an oil shock, I need to remove the spring damper's mounting point from the top plate:
This required quite a bit of force to snip off.
The parts required for assembly:
Putting the central plate in place was a pain in the behind because the axle that goes through the front of the pod was hard to correctly insert into the holes, and then it was also hard to fully slide it through the pod. If there had been a motor installed I wouldn't have succeeded...
Mounting the top plate failed initially because the plastic collar onto which the ball for the shock mounts broke when I tried to tighten down the ball. So I swapped it with a TF-2 alloy collar:
After assembly:
I used some medium Tamiya friction damper grease on all of the plates. The friction damper is non-adjustable.
The simple spring damper will be replaced by Kyosho's FJW-7 Formula oil shock option:
However, I won't be using this new shock, as one of the parts cars came with this shock. I still have to figure out which grade of oil I should use, since Kyosho gives no indication on what to use.