User Spotlight: Embark With Mark

Hey, welcome back everyone. So on the 5th Gen Forerunners, I've noticed that a lot of people are neglecting this important part of the suspension when they're lifting it. Now, we run a 2.5 inch lift kit. It's by Ironman. It's the Foam Cell Core Pro Edition. Really like the lift. It's fantastic. It rides really well and I wouldn't buy anything else. We really like it. But regardless of a lift kit that you buy, the rear track bar needs to be addressed. The geometry changes when you lift them and most people are just not addressing that. And you can't really address it with a longer track bar that does something else. So I have a kit that's supposed to fix it. Let's look at the kit. We'll go underneath. I'll show you really what the problem is and then we'll install it and see if it corrects it. Before we look at the bracket, let me attempt to show you what happens on paper when you lift a vehicle with a solid rear axle. Toyota, Jeep, trucks, doesn't matter. If you have a solid rear axle and a track bar, it's going to look like this. So up here we have stock. This is stock ride height. This is how it comes from the factory for any vehicle, your track bar is going to be fairly parallel to the ground. Now, all axles operate on an arc, which is what this line here represents, the arc of travel. When your axle comes down, it's going to swing one way. When it gets pushed up, it's going to swing the other way. And that's kind of how suspension cycles going down the highway or when you're crawling. It's just the nature of having everything tied together with circular joints and bars and everything, right? You around. Much like if you were to take a ratchet, right? If I hold this here as if it was the frame and this is the axle in and this is tied to the axle and it goes to swing, it's going to swing in an arc just like this. All right. That's very rudimentary, but that's kind of how it works. So by factory, this is parallel. So it's right in the middle of the arc of the swing. So there's really not a whole lot of directional change the axle has to overcome. When you go down the highway when you hit a bump, it swings up and the actual kind of the axle will push over a little bit, but not much. When you go over a hole and the axle needs to come down, it'll come down. Now, this arc is extremely exaggerated. It's actually a lot less than that. So when you're right in the middle of the arc, the idea is that your axle is moving left to right as little as possible. And it's going straight up and down as much as possible. However, when you lift it, you change where that arc sits. You're now sitting at the bottom of the arc when you lift it because your track bar looks like this. This is the frame side. The frame became further from the axle. So it's going to look like this. Now you're sitting more of at the bottom of the arc. So when you hit a pothole, the reason that vehicles feel a lot different is because now the axle has to overcome part of that arc to get to the flat area, the more vertical part of the and then it can start traveling in a straight line. So it actually travels this way and then straight. That's kind of what happens and also when you drop into a hole the axle is now swinging violently off to one side. This is why it's important to have your track bars as parallel as possible. It's gonna make your vehicle track much better, it's gonna make your vehicle ride much better, you won't get that weird... it's actually like a bump steer feeling but in the rear and it's just it's because the direction of travel is changing rapidly versus up here you're right in the middle of this arc and so you're really going up and down which is what you want this also happens with control arms if you have shorter control arms and a violent lift you're actually changing directions very rapidly because you're going from the bottom of the arc to the middle to the top of the arc versus when your factory and your control arms are relatively flat you're in the middle of the arc and so your direction of change is a lot less. You're more going up and down instead of around. If we took a short ratchet, again like this, right, we're right in the middle and we're doing this, the direction of change in the arc is very minimal, but if we're down here, you can see we have to actually overcome and the position of the of whatever is tied down here is going to change rapidly as this moves. It's kind of how it works. If we had a really long ratchet, this is not going to be in frame, but if we had a really long ratchet like really gone control arm and mounted parallel the direction of change is very little so this is the kit right here this is what you get to relocate your track bar in order to fix set issue we just discussed this is all nice stuff they're painted well they're built out of quarter inch still so they're not thin even these brackets are really well thought out and how they go together and we'll look at that when we install it and then you get really nice hardware to go with fit. It's fairly simple to install and they have a few different options depending on how you've lifted your vehicle. I optioned for the shorty version because we only went up two and a half inches of lift and I wanted to maintain the factory bump stops. If you have more lift, you're going to want to go higher, but this should be all we need. So let's go into the vehicle. I'll show you how the track bar looks. We'll install it and we'll see how it looks afterwards. all right here we are underneath the rig and you can see track bar right here is what we're working on it's got a little bit of an angle here's the bracket and you can see it's going to change that angle quite a bit taking it from this hole up to here that'll make it fairly level which will be nice. So let's get this thing off. Oh wow. I think the next best thing to do is try to get this track bar out of our way for now. I'm just gonna zip tie it up to the crossmember here. So when you get this piece in here now it's not gonna quite fit so we actually You've got to bend this bracket out just a smidge. I'm going to use the big old guy here. チョコレートを作る I think that'll work. We'll be able to tap it in place. So now, we've got to stick this piece in this hole here. We're just going to put it up there like that. At this point, we're going to use the factory bolt. Put a little loctite on it. I'm going to take this big guy and stick it up in here and place the factory bolt in. Next job here, you got to get this bolt underneath here into that plate. And, it's so that we don't have to Loctite it. It looks like it's a locking nut, but I'm going to anyway. go all right last nut should go on the side right here all right there's a lesson leave all this extremely loose like a lot of slop all right let's drop the track bar in you can already see how much more level that is again with loctite Alright, it seems like we got it. Most sealed together. We're gonna start tightening down and torquing. So I do have to make a correction here. Originally I tightened two of the bolts down to 95 foot-pounds and the other two to 125, but there was an update on the website recently that says just simply to put every bolt to 125 foot-pounds. I appreciate the updates. I've gone in there and fixed it already so everything is torqued down correctly and appropriately and tight the last thing is that we have this cable here that is for the abs uh the original hole that this this clips into is covered up now by this bracket so we're gonna zip tie it to this brake line so that it's not wiggling around and getting damaged that was pretty easy and just look look at how much more level that thing is that wasn't too hard of an install actually i am in love with this kit it went on easy it fixes what it's supposed to there were no monkeying around with anything to get things to work it just it went on as designed takes you about an hour i didn't even put my vehicle on jack stands which you don't have to which by the way i do want to say that if you go and tighten down any bushing on any vehicle especially the track bar area you You want the weight of the vehicle on it before you do that. I didn't even put jack stands. I just took out the spare tire, bolted everything up, torqued it down, and then put the track bar and torqued it down. Weight was on the vehicle the entire time. This is not a hard thing, but this is a necessary thing. A lot of people do not correct the geometry of their suspension when they lift it. Listen, guys, shocks and springs don't give you a better ride necessarily. You have to correct everything else in the suspension to get that handling and ride comfort back. And once you do, you'll notice a night and day difference. And all these little things come together to make a really well handling experience for anything that you lift, not just a 4Runner. But for this kit, two thumbs way, way up. It's made by Dr. KDSS. Really like the product. I don't think I could build a thicker, well-designed out product. You are a genius when it comes to this. Definitely get one. Correct your geometry and your 4Runner. Your ride and your geometry will thank you later. And it's awesome. Honestly, with the kit, I don't even think you need an aftermarket track bar. Run the stock. It's thick enough. has more than enough articulation and with this corrected geometry i don't really see a need for an aftermarket it's gonna be the right length to uh center your axle now so with that guys thank you for watching really appreciate it and uh well hopefully we'll see you in the next video