We know not all control arms are made the same so today we're going to be
talking about five considerations when you're choosing control arms for your pro-touring car.
Hey I'm Steve here at QA1 and today we're talking about our pro-touring control arms made actually
right under this roof in Lakeville, Minnesota. A lot of control arms on the market. A lot of them
look the same from afar but there are differences and that's what we're here to talk about today.
One of the features of the QA1 control arms the pro-touring arms is the low friction aluminum
cross shaft. The aluminum cross shaft reduces the weight of the arm. Also the composite bushings is
what makes that move extra free keeping that arm doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing and
reacting with the road quickly. The other thing is the low friction ball joint. A standard OEM
ball joint is not going to move this freely and so there's another free moving portion of the arm
that allows us to just feel the road. We want to keep as much of the contact patch of our tires on
the road obviously or at the track and these are some of the ways that we do that. The other way
that we enhance the drivability of these control arms is the geometry that we that we adjust if you
will. So we add three to four degrees of caster and with the longer ball joint stud in the upper
control arm that's going to give you more cambered gain keeping that contact patch on the ground on
the track getting leading to faster track times or just overall better drivability. The added three
to four degrees of caster are going to give you a more modern feel at the steering wheel now this
is a feature that as you turn around a corner if you let go of the wheel when you're done it comes
back to straight that's all caster at work there. That also helps us on the streets as well as the
track. The next feature we're going to talk about on these pro-touring control arms is going to be
the ball joint. Now on a lot of pro-touring arms a lot of aftermarket arms in general you're going
to see an OEM style parts store ball joint. On my pro-touring car I don't know that an OEM ball
joint is really going to be the one I want. But if I'm going to the QA1 low friction ball joint
which is what's featured in our pro-touring arms you're going to see very free moving ball joint.
It's fully serviceable you can pop in different studs for different applications if you'd like.
Serviceable by the back here backing plate and if you notice a design feature of this control
arm that you're not going to see anywhere else the ball joint housing is actually the arm. So
we've saved a lot of weight by not having a big housing then a housed ball joint screwed into
there or pressed into there. The housing is part of the arm so it saves us space saves us weight
and it's a better ball joint than your OEM parts store type for your pro-touring car. Now when
coming up with a control arm that is strong but also very lightweight you can see the challenge
there. So our design engineers have come up with a couple unique features that I don't think you're
going to see on any other control arms and one of those is going to be the stamped steel lower
portion of of this lower control arm. It adds a lot of strength because of the contours and the
the stamped nature of it but it doesn't add a lot of weight. So that's one of the design features
that will increase our strength but decrease our weight. Now looking at our upper control arm you
can see the aluminum cross shaft is going to be very strong but being aluminum is going to be very
lightweight. So these are some of the features that we've integrated into the QA1 control arms to
give you the the most strength but the lightest arm. One of the last design considerations I
wanted to show you was on our lower control arm. Now on pro-touring cars you don't typically see a
factory style coil spring and shock you're going to see a coil-over. So on our lower
control arm we did away with the extra weight of a spring locator or a way to do a coil spring and
a coil-over. Our lower control arms are simply coil-over ready and so you bolt the coil-over in
here you probably already have coil-overs or are anticipating going to coil-over covers so that's
a design feature that saves weight rather than trying to do a coil spring on your pro-touring
car. So that is five things to consider when looking for control arms for your pro-touring
car. Now we know there are a ton of aftermarket control arms on the market some of them have a
very low enticing price and very red bump stops. But our contention is if you're looking for a the
strongest arm the lightest arm the arm made in America welded right here in Lakeville,
Minnesota by our AWS certified welders then you'll consider QA1 pro-touring control arms. If you want
more information check us out at QA1.net. You can give us a call in the tech line. Check us out on
all the social medias the Facebook's insta-famous all that stuff and we appreciate you watching.
thank you