- What is going on guys?
Welcome back (upbeat music)
to the Fitment Industries YouTube channel.
Today, we have J.T.'s Porsche, - Cayman S, that's what
it says, yeah. - Cayman S 2006.
We're here to address this issue we got right here.
He doesn't like the wheel gap.
- This is not cool.
You can almost fist it.
Like, I mean sideways, you can, but.
- And so what we're gonna do to fix that is we've got
these D2 Air Struts and some airlift management.
- It's gonna be kind of a pain in the ass
to pull all this apart, but hopefully we can do it
in a day or two and get this thing on the ground.
- Then we're gonna take you along our journey with that,
and we're gonna show you (upbeat music)
how to install air suspension in your car.
This one's gonna be installing air suspension for dummies.
All right, let's jack this thing up
and get these wheels off.
(machine whirls)
Now that the car's up in the air, we got the wheels off,
it's time to take a look at what we have to put in
and kind of what you should expect
in your air suspension package.
First of all, obviously, you're gonna have your air struts,
which consists of kind of a regular shock
or a strut with an air spring.
Those are gonna have fittings in it.
Sometimes they're installed already for you,
sometimes they are not.
From there, you're gonna want to find the tank.
Sometimes these have the air compressor inside of them.
Most of the time they do not.
So they're gonna be some fittings for that.
They're gonna go right here.
We'll show you some of that a little later.
Then here is your actual
air pump. (plastic crinkles)
This is gonna make all kinds of noise
and fill that tank with air,
which will then fill your struts.
From there, you've got some of your hardware
and some of those extra pieces for that.
And then maybe one of the most important parts,
you got a wiring harness,
and this is gonna be for your electronics
that are gonna control, you know,
how much air stays in those struts to make them longer
and shorter, stiffer or softer.
You got your little controller here.
You're gonna have kind of an ECU box
and a couple other wires in here.
Your air line.
You can get your air line in two different diameters.
Usually you have quarter inch and three-eighths.
If you want your car to air out really, really fast
and then also air up really, really fast,
get the three-eighths.
If you want it to be a little more smooth,
make it a little more cool,
it makes a little more noise for longer,
get the quarter inch line.
I think this is kind of the way to go.
How do I segue from here?
Now that we've made a smooth transition over to the car,
we're gonna go over the air strut,
kind of take a peek at what we might need to do.
So three bolts on top that's gonna mimic the stock,
and then on the bottom, this is just smooth.
There's no hardware or anything in here,
and that's actually because the control arm
on this has like a clamp, and it clamps this bad boy in,
so there's gonna be one bolt holding that in,
some hardware for the ABS and stuff like that,
and then these three bolts on top.
It should be pretty simple in the front.
So, I guess let's just get this,
let's get the stock stuff out.
We're just gonna.
(upbeat music)
So in order to pull the strut out of that pocket,
we gotta be able to pull and push down the control arm.
So we're gonna have to undo the sway bar
to allow us to get some travel.
Get rid of that sway bar bolt,
we're gonna have that bottom bolt to open that bracket,
and we're gonna lower the car down
and get to those three bolts on top.
(drill whirls)
So we got a little hardware.
This thing's really easy to push down.
You can see (strut squeaks)
it moves around the strut, moves out of that socket,
so now we just got to take the three bolts off the top,
and we'll be able to drop this thing out. (drill whirls)
(metal clanks)
- Oh yeah.
All right, if anybody wants to buy this bolt, let me know.
- So before we put these bad boys in,
we want to go ahead and measure off
while the adjustable portion of the threaded body itself
and make sure they're even side to side.
We're gonna leave them kind of
about where they came in the box.
We're just gonna make sure that they're even.
That way, the thing's not sitting all lopsided,
and then we can get this thing level with the management.
First thing we're gonna do is we're gonna set one
kind of where we want it.
Then we're gonna measure it
and then copy and paste over here.
Tighten this bad boy down,
make that a little bit permanent.
We'll be able (tool clangs)
to get that tighter once it's in the car,
but as long as we can just get it to stay the way it is now,
we should be golden. (tool clangs)
We're gonna measure this from the top
of this perch to the bottom of that perch.
And it's exactly one and three quarters inches.
So I'm just gonna literally reapply that over here.
It just means a little bit of adjustment, not that much.
Triple check.
That should be about perfect,
so we're gonna get these tight.
Reverse order, and then once it's in the car,
we can adjust where anything else needs to go in there.
It's good to sing in the car.
All right, (upbeat music)
so everything's even.
Just kind of reverse order of how we took it all apart,
so slide this bad boy in, avoid the paint job, you know?
All right, so moving on to the rear,
which is usually honestly easier,
but on this specific, you know, exotic Porsche application,
the engine's in the frigging middle,
so it's gonna be a little bit more complicated.
Most systems aren't gonna be like this,
but here we have to do the sway bar.
There's like three frigging ball joints,
and the axle has to come out
and then like the whole interior has to come apart
to get the bolts.
Let's get to work boy.
- Hello? - Hello, I hear you.
Hi. - Hello.
- Can I (beeps) help you?
- [J.T.] Yeah, tell me what's going on.
You tired Sean? - Yes.
As I. - What time is it?
- I don't know, 9:30, 10:00?
- [J.T.] All right, it's like a three hour day.
- It's not a three hour day,
it's really long day. - It's 8:50 Sean.
- It's 8:50, okay, it's yeah,
it's basically 9:00.
All right, it's getting late. - It's late enough.
- Like I said, the rear's gonna be complicated.
So I want to go on both the sway bar,
and there's like a brake line bracket
that holds a bunch of other stuff.
It's just, we got to remove a bunch of everything
in order to do the thing we need to do,
and I'm getting frustrated.
(drill whirls)
There's just so much stuff.
So the reason we're taking off all these ball joints
and all these control arm pieces
and the sway bar and everything like that
is we want to get as much extension downward
as we can of that lower control arm
in order to be able to get that strut,
you know, out of the hole.
It just makes it a whole lot easier.
It'd be kind of impossible without it.
So it is necessary.
I'm rambling, why are you laughing?
- [J.T.] No, no, you're good,
'cause you said
get it out of the hole. - Get it out of the hole.
- You're not supposed to laugh at.
What? - The best set has two
(beeps) Allen wrenches in it. - Hell yeah.
(J.T. laughs)
That's exactly what we need to take off the caliper.
You may have noticed we didn't take off
the caliper (indistinct). - These are, I don't know,
there are fat ones though.
They might fit.
Try those.
- We didn't take the front one off,
because we didn't have to.
The line was long enough.
We weren't putting a bunch of stress on it.
It was fine.
For the back, it's kind of tight,
and we haven't even undone any of the other stuff yet.
So we're gonna take this off, hang it off to the side,
so we're not stretching those lines
and messing that up in the process.
You don't want to wreck that stuff.
Welcome to Sean's Tech Tips. (torch burns)
Today, we're gonna show you how to add some leverage
without having a big dumb wrench, I guess.
Or you could put a socket on an extension,
and you can stick that on the Allen wrench,
it's trying to check off the caliber,
and get a little bit more leverage,
since they're really, really tight.
Thank you for coming to my classroom.
Bye.
Oh.
Gonna stuff it here.
What's up?
My PT Cruiser T had a (indistinct) transmission.
- Hey, nice.
(tool cranks)
- Oh yeah.
What are you doing?
- What am I doing?
There's no (beeps) 20s dude.
- Well, where could they have gone?
- [J.T.] I don't know, but the only two (beeps) drawers
with wrenches in them have no 20.
- I swear to god, if I walk my ass over there,
and I find a 20. - Yeah, you find the 20,
I'll, (beeps), I don't even know.
- Hey look, I found it. - It's probably
not even his fault.
You found the 20? (Sean laughs)
- Milwaukee.
(machine whirls)
(upbeat music)
- Oh, hey.
So we got a bunch of stuff unbolted on the bottom,
so now we're ready to go to the top
to get the three undone so we can pull it out and stuff.
So we have to tear apart the interior to get to that.
And by we, I mean the guy that owns the car,
I'm gonna make him do
the dirty work. - I got to get
all these plastics out and try not to break any clips.
Probably gonna suck.
I'm expecting to break a few, but.
- I think that's the metal. Good luck.
So when you compress and store air,
you are inevitably gonna get some moisture.
So on the bottom of the tank is a drain.
First, we're gonna start with this 90 degree (indistinct).
That's gonna go right in there to our quarter inch line.
That's gonna run to this T,
and this T is gonna have a pressure relief valve on it
just in case it needs to be relieved of its pressure.
And then another line's gonna run from there,
and we're gonna have this fill check drain,
I don't even know if it's a check valve honestly,
I'll have to double check that,
but either way, you can fill and empty it here
to empty the water out of your tank when you need to,
especially if you're gonna drive this thing
in any sort of cold climate
or where there's a lot of temperature differences.
That's gonna make a lot of moisture in this thing.
So Justin finished the drain install on this tank
so that you can evacuate the water out of it.
But, and there is the inevitable water in the tank.
How you keep it out of the manifold and out of your bags.
We're gonna be able to do that with this right here.
This is a water and air separator.
This is gonna take water in the air
and not let it into that manifold and into the airbags.
Now this is only one way flowing.
On these, you are gonna see an arrow with an N,
and then it points, and then this is the out.
So it is only gonna go on one way,
and you're gonna want that obviously in line.
So yeah.
All right, so all the fittings are on the tank,
and you're kind of ready to start putting things in, but.
- What? - But,
I don't remember.
First, we still got to run these lines,
and the way I like to do it
is I like to put my lines in first
and then kind of stack things on
as we get closer to completion.
So the first thing (upbeat music)
you gotta do to get your lines in
is you gotta find some grommets.
You gotta find a way to get the lines from the struts
for outside of the car to the inside of the car.
And the best way to do that is to find your factory holes
that are covered with rubber grommets.
I don't know where I'm going with this.
So you're probably gonna have to pull some carpet out.
You're gonna find a little, they look like this
if you don't know what you're looking for.
Start from the inside.
Kind of see where a good way to go would be,
and then you're gonna have to get under your car
and either locate the grommets you took out
or find a new one and then try to find those on the bottom.
Then I learned by doing it wrong the first time
is start kind of from the top and feed in.
I struggled a lot from the bottom trying
to like get it up in the hole and do one of these
when I realized, if you just put it this way,
you can just grab it.
So yeah, let's run these lines,
and then we'll start putting hardware in.
So now that we found our grommet to stick our hoses through,
I want to show you another trick that I learned.
I like to take two of these lines
and stick it through and pull them down.
That way I can run both driver and passenger side
kind of at the same time.
And then all I really have to do is pull extra through,
and then I can cut the line, have a little extra,
and then this becomes my new line
that I can then run to the back as well,
and then it all comes back to this trunk area,
and there's no really going back and forth.
It saves a ton of time.
(upbeat music)
So we didn't want to bore you with the monotonous stuff
of installing the airlines,
because it is kind of different for every vehicle.
So we'll just run through that really quick of what we did.
Essentially, we just ran the airlines
through that grommet that we were just looking at,
and then we want to follow the brake lines of the car.
You know, that's a safe place.
It's out of the way.
It's engineered to be a safe place for everything.
So if you follow that stuff, you should be good.
Just make sure to keep it away from any exhaust.
Up in the wheel well,
we did want to give it a little slack,
because that's gonna be moving around, doing some turning
and stuff like that.
And then in the back, we ran it along the firewall
to make that square that you probably only have to do
in a mid- or rear-engine vehicle.
Yeah, you wanna check out the trunk?
That's not totally,
but it's good, like it's function,
look, it functions.
- Yeah, so coming around in the back of the car,
we got kind of a mock-up set up.
It's a little bit rough.
Obviously nothing's hard mounted yet.
But essentially we're gonna want the tank
to be sitting far enough for me
to be able to open my oil fill right here.
The compressors hidden away,
down and tucked in this corner, nice and neat.
All the lines I ran through, like we said,
up through the underbody,
through a grommet in the firewall by the motor.
The wiring harness starts back here,
running power to everything,
comes up over this strut perch here,
down the carpet, tucked nice and neat
through the interior up here past the fuse box,
up under the dash and then through a grommet
into the front with the battery.
We got the controller coming through right here.
That's tucked up nice and neat with the harness
over the fuse box, up over the pedals,
and then out to me through the center council.
I'll eventually have that mounted probably
on the vent or something.
- So the setup actually turned out really, really nice,
especially with having that compressor off in the corner.
It keeps things nice and quiet and tolerable,
which is really important.
So that's about gonna wrap it up
for installing air suspension for dummies.
It's actually really simple.
It just coil overs with airlines and a compressor
and a manifold. That's kind of all there is to it.
So if you guys are looking to take your ride
to the next level with air suspension,
you guys know where to go.
Come see the experts at fitmentindustries.com.
I'm Sean or seanb.fi on Instagram.
- And if you want to follow along with the build at all,
it's @jts.fi on Instagram,
and we'll catch you guys in the next one.
Peace. - Peace.
(upbeat music)