- What's going on guys, I'm Fuller from Custom Offsets,
Custom Offsets TV on the YouTube,
and today I want to talk to you guys
a little bit about traction bars.
Now traction bars have a few different names.
You might hear some people call them ladder bars,
but in general, traction bars is like,
the industry term for it.
It's that bar that connects somewhere in the middle
of your truck and goes back to your axle, okay?
So what we wanna talk about is what they're for,
what their intended purpose is, why people run them,
and then the pros and the cons, the benefits of having them.
So I guess primarily the main reason why
people want traction bars is for one of two things.
First one just being aesthetics, that means looks,
it's however they want their truck to look,
but they do actually serve a real life purpose.
So under heavy acceleration or whenever
you're applying torque to that rear axle,
you'll see that without trac bars if you really hammer on it
you're gonna watch that differential twist upwards.
Now while that's happening you're also moving
that entire axle forward a little bit.
And what this does is it changes the angle
from your drive shaft to that differential,
and basically you're putting that joint
at a place where it isn't typically,
which can cause different vibrations,
it can cause premature wear,
and then the big thing is that that axle wrap,
or the wheel hop, where you're kind of bouncing all around,
because you're putting so much stress and pressure
on your rear leaf springs,
they're actually going from the U shape
that they typically are, to kind of like an S,
because you're shifting everything up and forward,
and it just twists things up in there,
and you get a little bit of binding going on.
The trac bars, or traction bars,
are designed to help that and prevent that from happening.
So what the traction bar does then is like I said,
it mounts to your frame,
now there's both weld on style and bolt on style,
so you wanna pay attention to that if you're ordering them.
If you don't have a welder,
you're probably gonna want the bolt on ones.
But there are a lot of people too
that will get the bolt on kits
and still choose to weld them on if they've got,
you know, a 900 horsepower Duramax or something like that,
or they do a lot of towing, in like a hilly area,
or they take their truck off road a lot
where it's really, really bumpy,
you wanna make sure you have a good,
solid connection to your frame,
'cause that's basically your brace point.
Then you've got a heim joint, and then that trac bar runs
all the way back to the rear axle.
There's different ways to attach them back there,
usually you've got U bolts that go around
that rear axle that your torque down,
and then there's a bushing on the backside too.
So it is still free floating,
so it does allow some movement, left, right, up, down.
So now what these bars are doing
are under that heavy acceleration or under that time period
where you're applying torque to that rear axle,
they're preventing that axle from moving forward.
They still allow it to travel up and down,
which is the way the suspension is intended to move,
but they don't let it move forward,
and it also prevents that rotation
so that your differential,
or the pumpkin in the back of your truck,
isn't twisting upwards and creating
binding issues at the U joint.
Now the good news is if you've already lifted your truck,
you can actually install these things in your driveway
with some fairly simple tools,
especially if you get the bolt on ones,
but we also do offer these as upgrades to lift kits.
So if you're shopping on the website,
like BDS is a great example,
you might find a lift kit that you like,
and then it'll say traction bar options.
You can click on that and you can add
the traction bars to that.
Now BDS offers what they call a Recoil traction bar,
so they actually have a spring that's inside
that trac bar, and now their traction bars are also
fully adjustable that way,
and they do have grease zerks on them too
so when it comes to maintenance, it's fairly simple process.
So that's why I really like the BDS Recoil traction bars.
Now companies like Rough Country
offer traction bars as well,
and those are significantly cheaper for you too,
they're only about 400 dollars,
kinda depends on your truck and what kit you're getting.
But if you've got a lot of axle wrap or wheel hop going on,
or you just want the appearance of the traction bars,
Rough Country makes a really good kit
that is both strong and looks nice.
They've got a cool kind of laser cut design on theirs
that's, you know, it looks better to the eye than just
your standard, tubular traction bar.
There's a few other companies out there
that primarily all they make is traction bars,
but you're gonna wanna pay attention to how long those are.
So I see a lot of kits, you know,
like the Ebay or Amazon brands that are quite short,
and that's really not gonna help you at all,
because you're not bracing that far enough up your truck
to really have an impact on how much that axle can rotate.
If you've got a really, really short arm,
or really short tube, there's still,
there's enough room in there and enough play
that you can still twist and bind things up,
so you wanna extend that out,
making this huge triangle which gives you the strength,
and that's why people add the traction bars
like from Rough Country, from BDS,
and all the other guys that make the really
nice quality, really long ones.
So if you wanna check those out
or learn anything else about them
you can check out our website at customoffsets.com,
we've got all the lift kits you could ever want on there,
and the trac bar options to add to them if you want.
Peace.
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