Welcome to Supreme Suspensions! In this video we feature our visit to the Motor Head Garage along with our brand new Supreme Suspensions mid-travel UCA kit (Upper Control Arm) for the midsize Toyota truck & SUV line up! Follow us on other social media:

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Transcript:

Hey folks and welcome to the supreme Suspensions channel. Now a few months ago, we got a great opportunity to fly out to Tennessee and film a segment for a show called Motorhead garage. Now it aired on the Velocity Channel several times over the summer but if you didn’t get to see it, stay tuned because we’re about to give you a recap.

This week on Motorhead Garage, John gets hands-on installing a new suspension.

Welcome back to Motorhead Garage, presented by Dustless Blasting. You know, Toyota Tacoma Pickup is hugely popular with off-road enthusiasts; they take the two-wheel-drive versions and build pre runners and they take the four-wheel-drive versions and beef them up and take them off-road through the mud and the woods. Chances are that if you’re going to take one of these off-road, you’re going to put a lift into the suspension.

We have the guys from Supreme Suspensions here in the shop this weekend and these guys have developed a system, a three-and-a-half inch system, to raise the tacoma up and to do it the right way.

Traditionally, in the front of the truck, you have a spacer, which they have, thee spacer is going to use some of the factory hardware as well as some of the hardware that’s provided in the kit. But the secret sauce is these control arms, that they’ve developed and designed.

Whenever you lift a truck, you change the geometry of the front suspension and if you fail to change the control arms to fix that geometry change and correct it, the truck’s not going to drive well, it’s not going to wear tires correctly and chances are, you’re not going to enjoy taking it down the road, on-road or off-road.

Built into these control arms, you have a relocation bracket for the brake line and they’re designed, obviously, to bolt right onto the factory frame. We have John Gardner, across the shop, working on the truck right now to show you exactly how this front-end kit goes on.

Well, you mention lift kits and sometimes I get nervous. These things can be a beast but, you know, not this one. Tim, from Supreme Suspensions. Tim, this thing’s pretty easy, I mean we got this far, let’s show our audience what we’ve done so far. We actually got the strut assembly in but the key to that whole strut assembly was this actual block and that was preet simple. Tell me a little about it.

Well, it’s basically just a billet aluminum spacer that bolts right to the top of the strut here. And we get this question a lot from our consumers but, believe it or not, we’re going to get three and a half inches out of that spacer. On an independent front suspension, you’re going to get about a two to one ratio from the thickness of that spacer to how high that truck’s going to lift.

And the nice part is that we didn’t even have to compress our spring because the actual hardware stayed intact.

Absolutely.

Went ahead and put our spacer in, used the factory bolts to bolt it to it.

Right.

Then we took our spacer with the little bolts that came in the kit to attach it to the top. Piece of cake, all there.

Piece of cake.

Alright, then we’ve gone to our control arm. You can see our control arms up there.

Absolutely.

Just as easy. The really cool part about the control arm is the actual heim joint. Why a heim joint instead of a ball joint?

When you lift a truck, it really beats up those upper ball joints so we went with this really beefy heim joint, it gives you a lot more articulation, it’s a lot stronger than that factory ball joint. And the best part is that it’s serviceable so, over time, you don’t have to throw that control arm away if you need to work on the thing.

And it was as easy as just sliding that in there, it’s machined out.

It just goes right together.

After we got that in, I also noticed the actual TIG welds on the bar. Tell me about that.

Well, uh, we decided with chromoly tubing. The strength-to-weight ratio is just awesome, especially compared to the stamped steel that comes with the factory control arms. And they use this material in everything from gun barrels to mountain bike frames and we’re really happy with it. We really put it through the stress tests and it really just holds right up.

And that’s the ticket right there. It was super easy too. Tell me about this angle set. Why don’t we finish putting this system together and while we’re doing that, I’m really curious about the angle. Why the angle and why the actual upper control arm?

Well, the big reason that you want to go with a control arm like this is when you’re lifting three plus inches on the lift, you’re really going to mess with your camber and caster angles and you get to the point where your factory adjustments can’t compensate for that. So by going with a custom control arm like this, it sets the spindle kind of out and back a little bit and it allows you to get that alignment back into spec.

And that’s key because we actually had the alignment angles down here. You’re talking about caster and camber.

Right. Not only is it going to affect the handling of the car, it’s really going to eat up those tires if you don’t have that right in spec.

That’s true, and the cool part is now we use our factory adjustments because this one’s going to be long enough, we will be able to get it in spec.

Absolutely. It’s gonna drive just like it was form the showroom.

Now we got it married up here with the actual spindle assembly. Just a matter of pulling it down, it’s ready to go. Now what about this three and a half inch. This is really nice, i mean a lot of people like to take them way up there. You know, not me. That’s going to affect a lot of the driveability and the things going on with the vehicle. And maybe just bump it up with some little blocks, it doesn’t look beefy tell me about this mid range kit.

Well, our midrange line is a real nice happy medium. You know, a lot of folks want to go more than, you know, your standard two inch leveling kit or whatever and we really like to cater our products to folks that like to do the work themselves and can handle a little project on the weekends in a few hours. And this is a really simple set that allows you to hold onto your OEM parts. Because when you go with a six inch long-travel, there’s a lot of cutting and fabrication involved and you’ve got a lot of custom parts in there. It’s not as livable as your OEM parts.

Well Tim, we made short work of this. But you know, we still have the rear to do so we’ll be right back with more Motorhead Garage, presented by Dustless Blasting.