Hey everyone! I'm Bubba. I'm the owner of Exodus Jeeps, where we build badass Jeeps.
Today we've got a Jeep in for coil overs, so we're going to go through and
talk about the pros and cons of coil overs, why you should or shouldn't have
them. So let's get to work!
All right, so one of the biggest questions that we get hit with at the
shop is, "What kind of lift should I put on my Jeep?" There's so many different
factors that play into that: brand, (Zoolander Movie Clip "Did you press the Apple thing?") quality, price... I
mean there's just... I can't even list them all. Right? So, but we
occasionally get hit with a customer that wants a coil over suspension and
today I'm going to talk about what exactly is a coil over suspension. Let me
start with a very definition of what a coil over is. It's exactly what it sounds
like. (Zoolander Clip: "What do they look like?!") so the coil
springs are over the shock. (Zoolander: "They're IN the computer?") So instead of a conventional
suspension setup, or what I would call a conventional setup, is we typically have
a coil spring right here and then a separate shock mounted over here
hat, upper spring, lower spring, slider, timing rings, can you see the timing
rings in there? There's two of them. Timing rings. We have remote reservoirs,
which is what this is with a hose and then we have piggybacks, which is what's
on the rear. Piggy back reservoir right there. Piggy back reservoir.
The benefit of a coilover, one of the pros is that by combining the two the
customer can get all the flexibility out of it without having to worry about
unseating the coil spring. So let's say if you had a shock that had so much
travel that it actually exceeded the travel of the spring itself in here, this
isn't going to allow that to unseat and cause some damage on the trail. We've
seen in the past where customer has too long of a shock, overextends
spring pops out and then we got a big mess we're trying to fix on their trail.
Usually involves a hi-lift jack or something like that.
Number one great thing about a coil over is it's all self-contained and it will
not cause any damage on the trail. All right let's move on let's talk about
some of the other things that make it really great. Adjustability for right
height. So give you an example, this is an EVO bolt-on coil over kit. We have
anywhere between two to five inches of lift that we can adjust to the customer.
So sometimes customer comes in and they're just starting out - this is a great suspension
because they don't really know what they're doing yet. Say you start out on 35s
they may end up a 40s someday, but the great thing about a coil over
suspension is, if that's the case, they never have to change the suspension. We
can just add preload here and raise the Jeep up to accommodate all over your
tire size. If we do that, then we just make some adjustments on the control
arms to correct caster the pinion angle. So it's a really great, flexible in terms
of what you're gonna do with the Jeep down the road, suspension. Then there's
also the tune ability. So say customer adds or reduces weight to the Jeep as
they're progressing through their build, sometimes the system, the springs and the
shocks setup is going to change with it. Well instead of having to buy all new
shocks and springs, we can simply go in and make some spring rate
changes here to accommodate the new setup. This coil over here doesn't have
it, but you can also get them with compression adjusters on the reservoirs
and that's going to allow you to soften or
firm up the ride as well. So if you go off road and you want a little bit softer
ride from that day you can you can back them all the way off and it won't give
you as push back. Coilovers have a lot of flexibility and in terms of tuning them
to the vehicle itself. So that's another great reason why we like it. For guys
that off-road a lot, you're gonna want a softer spring rate.
These springs right here, I believe these are 250 over 250. For a guy that's gonna
be off-roading a lot, we may go with something like a 150 over 200. Something
like that. So it'd be a little bit less burn than, say, a guy that's on highway a
lot. He's gonna want a more firm spring rate in there to offer more stability.
One of the other great pros of the coil over itself is the serviceability. So this is
pretty much a lifetime shock. So if, usually I want to say, about every two
years or 20,000 - 30,000 miles, you're gonna want to take these off,
break them down and have them rebuilt. Just like you would any shock that, over time,
the oil inside of it is gonna break down. You wouldn't believe how much that the
oil inside these break down until you take one apart. Brand-new, the oil, the shock
oil that's in them, is typically like a golden color- very clear, you can see right
through it. By the time these things get about 15,000, 20,000, maybe even 30,000 miles,
depending on how you drive it, when you take these apart to rebuild them, you
pour it out, it looks just like burnt motor oil.
I mean, imagine the shaft going in and out of there. There's so much,
I mean, heat and friction break down oil in these, just like it does anything else.
So they need to be serviced. The great thing about it is, it costs about $150 per
shock for us to break these down, replace all the seals and oil them, reassemble
them and put them back on the Jeep. So it's not like, yes, they do cost a lot of money
upfront, but over the life of the Jeep, you're not gonna have to buy a new coil
over every two or three years, depending on how you drive it,
you can just have it rebuilt. So that's a great plus to owning a coil over. So that
being said, let's talk about some of the cons. In my opinion, there aren't many cons
to the coil over, itself. I think the biggest one I could think of is gonna be
the price that's probably going to drive people away. They are a little bit more expensive, or
a lot, depending on what size you get. These are 2 inch coil overs. You can do
up all the way to 4, if you wanted to, depending on what kind of rig you got, but
most guys are going to be running 2s on the JLs. The new vehicle, the new
platform, probably two and a half. I think that the price is probably gonna be the
biggest con that's going to kind of push people back to a conventional setup. The
other one is going to be: its noisy. We do get a lot of complaints from
customers that have never been around them in their Jeep. They tend to say that
they're noisy. There's a couple things that we can do to mitigate that. We can
put different sliders in right here. This is the section in between the two springs - the
upper and lower springs. So this piece, this section right here, we could get a
two-piece from like All German Motorsports. So it's going to allow to twist. As the
springs compress, they want to twist. Typically that noises that people hear
are the springs themselves kind of popping as the spring compress and
unload again. So with an AGM slider, you never really hear that. So that's one of
the cons, or one of the two cons I can really think of, that people
wouldn't like about a coil over set up. I'm just gonna go real quick some of the
other characteristics of a coil over, other than the springs being over the
coil or the shock itself. You'll see here, there are some rings. A lot of people
don't know what these are. We see a lot of shops that install coil overs that
never touch these. Sometimes we see them and they're way up here and they're... basically if
they're not set somewhere kind of low, towards the bottom of this thread, then
they're not really doing their job. And where they get set is all
dependent on on how much preload or lift that is set on the coil over itself. What
they do is, as a coil over is being compressed and this slider moves up, its
going to hit here. It's going to bottom out. It's going to go from a dual rate to
single rate mode, which means, once this slider hits this timing ring, this
upper spring pretty much cancels out and all the weight of the vehicle is now
riding on this lower spring. So be very careful if you're getting coilovers
installed by a shop, make sure that they understand what this is and how it needs
to be adjusted. So if they're basically, if they don't know what that's about,
they need to get educated real quick on it by someone that does, or you need
to take it to a different shop- somebody that knows how to adjust that and
tune it to the Jeep, itself. Again, you have what I call the "hat," which is how
you adjust preload. I personally don't like to see more than about two inches.
About where this is at right now, of preload. If you got more than that, then I
feel like a spring rate needs to be changed to suit that Jeep. I also don't
like when I see a coil over that has no preload on. I like to see somewhere
between 1" - 2" of preload on a coil over. That just means that it's, in
my opinion, it has some adjustability in it, so if we need to
make some sort of lift height or ride height adjustment, then we have plenty
there to work with. And then there's also the reservoir. So you have remote reservoirs
and you have piggyback. Customers on this set up here, you'll see in the video, the
front has what, we call a "remote reservoir," which has a hose. And EVO set
this up to where the reservoir will mount right here to the bracket that the
coilover's mounted to. In some cases, customers want us to mount them a little
differently, so we'll weld tabs on the frame right here. We'll kind of reload
that reservoir right here. And then the other difference is the piggyback, which
you'll see on the back of the Jeep, is basically built in right to the top of
the shock itself. The head comes off and the reservoir is built in. And that
keeps things kind of tight and compact, but you can't really do a piggyback from
the front due to the wheels, or the tire, possibly coming in at
full turn and rubbing the reservoir. So for that reason, we do remote reservoir on the front.
All right, that's all I got to say about that.
(Forrest Gump: "That's all I have to say about that.")
(2001: A Space Odyssey Theme Plays)
Rick Flair:"I DRESS MYSELF IN CASHMERE,"
"I DRESS MYSELF IN $100 PLEATED SLACKS,..."
"I WEAR A $15,000 ROLEX,..."
"STEALIN', WHEELIN' N' DEALIN'...,"
WOOO
OOOO
oooooooooo
"WOOOOOO"
oooooo
wooooo
(Bubba's wife:) Goodness gracious.
WHEELIN'
"WHEELIN' DEALIN'...
JEEP
RIDIN'
WOOOOOOOO
(music beings to crecendo)
(guys screaming from Jeep with "death wobble")
(Bubba's wife:) Look at that!
(Bubba's wife:) That's pretty...
(music crescendo)
WOOOOOO
(crescendo fades)
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