It doesn't take long of owning a four-wheel drive before
you'll want to modify the suspension.
Now maybe not quite as much as the race car here, but there are
legitimate reasons why you'll be looking at doing that.
That could be you've added a bull bar, a winch.
It could be you just want more under vehicle clearance.
Whatever the reason is adding a suspension lift is a really common
modification and a really effective modification that you
can do to your vehicle. Now if you've got an independent
suspension vehicle like this Hilux here.
You can run into a number of other challenges.
It's not as simple as just putting a lift in by adding bigger springs.
When you do that you can start to affect the steering
geometry and the geometry of the suspension system in a way
that negatively affects the way the vehicle operates and we
don't want that to happen. So there's a number of very cool
things we can do to rectify that situation and not only solve
those problems. We also strengthen the
components so that we have a stronger suspension system in our vehicle.
So in this video I'm going to talk to you about Upper Control Arms or UCA's
as they're commonly known. There's two key dimensions that
relate to the way a wheel sits on a vehicle.
They're called caster and camber, now when we add a suspension
lift to our vehicle the camber will change, now camber relates
to the way the wheel lays in or out of the vehicle.
When you're travelling down the road the wheel is not sitting straight
up and down as you might think.
In an ideal world, we want the top of the wheel to lean outward
just a little bit and that's going to give us good steering,
good handling and good tyre life, but when we raise the suspension,
we're going to find that the top of the tyre is going start
to lean outwards like this, a little bit further than they
normally would. That's going to give us a very unstable vehicle,
it can give us bad steering, heavy steering, poor tyre wear.
So we need to correct that.
The other dimension is castor, and that's like
the shopping trolley wheel that follows along behind the
pivot point.
Well there's a certain amount of caster designed into these systems
and we want to correct that back to the factory specifications.
Now all of these independent suspensions
have a number of ways that the factory designs it so that
it can be adjusted when you get a wheel alignment and we
want to get all of these parameters back into specification.
So when it goes for a wheel alignment, it's all correct.
Now that we're the Upper Control Arm or the UCA comes into play.
It's going to bring all of those critical components back into play.
A quality UCA needs to be able to allow the suspension
to operate to its full extent, so it needs to be able to allow
the wheel to go all the way down and all the way back up,
but what happens when you hit a big washout or a big bump
at speed off-road? Having a properly design UCA that allows for
that hyper-extension, that extreme off-road environment is
a really key part of the design of these UCAs.
So this is the factory UCA that came out of this vehicle.
Now you can see that this is been made out of a sheet of steel
that's been pressed, folded and bent to create the upper arm.
Now for a general light-duty Hilux
that's not going to be used in an extreme environment
this serves the purpose. You can change out the ball
joint, it's got bonded rubber bushes in there and all is good,
but when you start using a four-wheel drive with a heavy
load on the front end like a bull bar and a winch and
then you high speed off-road. These arms are not going to cope with it.
Now because we've added our suspension lift.
We've changed the position that the UCA is going to sit at
at normal ride height, so incorporated into the Upper Arm
here is a new zero position, and
what that's going to mean is that
the ball joint in the UCA is in zero position at
ride height, that allows the ball joint to move freely within
its range of travel whether the arm is going up or going
down, and that's going to give us a nice long life out of
this ball joint.
Now these ball joints are all made with chromoly, which is
a very high performance steel, and the ball joints got the
grease nipple up the top here so you
can put a shot of grease in there when you're servicing
the vehicle, and it'll keep everything in working order.
The ball joint housing, which is this section here is made of
a high quality forged steel, and then that's welded into the
tube section that creates the main chassis of the UCA.
As the UCA is travelling through it's
suspension travel from full droop to full compression.
It's got to be able to clear all of the other components
that are inside the suspension system. So our springs,
our lines down here, our sway bar and all these components,
everything needs to clear and cycle
in a nice clean way, and these UCA's have been
designed to do that.
There's mounting point in accordance with your vehicle to
accommodate ABS lines, or any other components that need to run
along the UCA. Now both the bush and the ball joint are serviceable
items, so you can buy them individually from Terrain Tamer
and get them fitted up to your upgraded Terrain Tamer UCA's.
So I hope that's helped you understand how the Terrain Tamer
UCA's can help you with your four-wheel driving.
I'm Mad Matt, stay safe on the trails.
Terrain Tamer have a 50-year-old promised to deliver
quality engineered four-wheel drive parts.