- [Nolan] $500 suspension package. - [James] Versus $3000 suspension package. - Does more expensive mean more better? - Let's find out.
- Yeah. (James growling) (synth music) - We bought two identical Nissan 350 Zs and we've been modifying
them to be fun daily drivers that you can take to the track. - I could take it to the track. One Z, we call it Hi Car, gets expensive parts. And the other one we call Low Car and it gets all the cheap ones. - Then we test them to
see which components are actually worth spending
your hard-earned money on. - We've compared a ton of stuff. Coilovers, brakes,
wheels, tires, turbo kits, injectors, seats, roll cages, body kits. Now we already installed
coilovers on both of our cars. One them more than once. But there are more
components to suspension than just springs and shocks. (groovy beat) - Today we are installing some sway bars and adjustable control
arms on Low Car from Ebay. - And for Hi Car, we're getting sway bars,
front upper control arms, rear camber arms, rear toe arms, and sway bar end links front (cash register chimes) and rear. - Yeah.
(groovy beat) - The more adjustability
we add to the car, the more we can tweak the car's alignment. Big boy sway bars like
these are really stiff and will help keep the
cars more flat in corners. So neither of our Zs have any front camber adjustability
from the factory, zero. So these upper control
arms will give us more sweet, sweet camber than we
could ever hope to handle. We're gonna look like
Ryan Tuerck out there, just like (mimics engine revving). Hopefully our car doesn't blow up. That hasn't happened in
a couple years actually. These rear arms give us way more rear camber
adjustability than stock. These rear toe arms also give us a lot of adjustability in rear toe which Nolan does not have. So, sorry Charlie. - That's literally because there wasn't a cheap option for those. Stock it is! - With all of these things combined we will have complete
control over our alignment. Complete control. (chill beat) - There it is. So this is the rear sway bar. It connects the left and right
rear control arms together. Let's say you're taking a right hand turn. The car's is gonna load
up a lot on the left side, so the control arm is gonna pull upward. But this sway bar is connected
to the other side of the car so it also pulls the right
control arm upward as well which loads the other side of the car which helps distribute
weight and reduce body roll. This is our new one. And I can tell you right now it's a lot heavier than the old one. The old one is probably hollow. This one I think is just
a solid piece of metal. It'll twist a lot less. So it'll better distribute the forces between the two side so of the car. - These are both adjustable control arms, which means that we have options here for where we mount our end links. A sway bar is basically a lever arm. So if you mount your end
link all the way out here your lever's effectively longer
and you get more leverage. It depends on how you want things to act. Like your rear bar, if we
go for the most levers, that'll make our rear end want to come out a little bit in the corners. And I like that. A lot of drifters actually
run no front sway bar and a big old rear sway bar 'cause it helps bring
the rear end back out. (mimics tires screeching) (chill beat) - Excuse me, got to go
access some tools, thanks. (drill revs) Pretty heavy. Get big, stay big.
- Get big stay, big. Get big, stay big.
- Get big stay, big. This is beefier. And High team likes beef. (chill music) So now we've got our sway bar installed. We're installing our adjustable end links which is what actually
couples the sway bar to the control arms here. And they are adjustable so you
can change the height of them which allows you greater
control over things like your ride height when
you corner balance a car. Or if maybe you have something
that's kind of in the way of your new big old sway bar. You can adjust it up or
down to try to clear it. - If you can see right here on the rail, the sway bar is actually
interfering with the metal itself. So what I'm gonna do is
I'm gonna trim that down to make sure that the sway bar can travel all the way up and down
without interference. - We have no idea what time it is because they won't let us leave the shop until we finish the Zs. Send help.
- Please. Send help, it's almost Christmas. I think. I think it's almost Christmas. (drill revving) - Let's do one of these
sexy upper control arms. Let's do it. I've been waiting for this day. Old one, new one. Basic overall shape is the same but we've got these big
adjustment areas on the SPL ones so that we can adjust
the overall length of it, which in turn adjusts the camber. - So if we spend these boys out, the control arm gets longer, the wheel goes like that. That's called positive camber. We spin them in, these boys get shorter. That's negative camber AKA steez AKA Ryan Tuerck style.
(engine revving) - All right so with the camber arms, for track purposes you want a
little bit of negative camber so when your car goes around a turn, say, doing a right hand, the the weight will go over
the left tire and be flat and that will give you the most
grip you can through a turn. But you don't want too much
negative camber because you'll burn our your rear tires just by driving around town. And that's what we did. We drove 3,000 miles with
some nasty camber on there and we had to replace
the tires pretty much as soon as we got back. Because they were useless. (synth music) Come on you... (synth music) When in doubt, swear at your car more. Whoa. (synth music) - [James] How's everything fitting? - Pretty well. So as you might have noticed we are no longer running the
green Maxpeedingrods coilovers that we had from last season. - Tada. - Rest in piece Maxpeedingrod. - That's 'cause we didn't trust them. So we replaced them with
some Megan Racing coilovers. They're about $600 so $400
more than the ones we had. A little more expensive
than the lowest of the low but they're still pretty
cheap for what you get. They are adjustable for
harshness which I really enjoy and they match the car
better which is very cool. (rock music) - All right I'm gonna
Google up some torque specs. - We never forget to tighten bolts. - -, yeah.
(clanking) We tighten everything? (rattling)
Nope. - Nope, surely did not. - One thing I need to remember is I don't want to put the
aftermarket arm straight in and just let it go. I want to make sure
that it's close to OEM. That way when our alignment guy comes, he knows if the car is pretty
much where it was stock. Obviously he's gonna
take some measurements, but we just want to give him
a solid platform to start with rather than just messing
with a bunch of stuff that's all over the place. (chill beat) - Pretty cool, huh? (James chuckling) (chill beat) - All right, so everything is buttoned up, everything is cinched down. We've made the upgrades. Now it's time to get our car aligned. (chill beat) - So we spent a bunch of time and money installing adjustable suspension stuff, but that's all worthless if you don't get a proper alignment. So that's what we're doing today. There are a few different kind
of alignments you can get. Like if you go to just some
normal old alignment shop they're gonna give you
just a basic alignment that follows the factory specs. What we got going on today is our boy Tanner who came to us and he'll do whatever we want. We can spec out a drift spec or, we're going for grip so
we're gonna set the car up to get the most grip possible
so we can crush the track. - Hey guys, I'm Tanner. OC Mobile Alignment. Usually do drift cars and stuff. I've gotten to work with
Rad Dan and Odi Drifts and stuff like that. So we're setting this one
up a little bit different. Gonna set it up for grip
and see how it goes. - And this is a "HiLow" almost first. We're actually getting the same exact alignment
treatment as Hi Car. So we can actually
compare apples to apples. - So there are three basic adjustments when you're talking about alignment. You've got camber which is the
tilt of the wheel this way, toe which is the tilt
of the wheel this way, and caster which is relation to where the upper mount for the shock is. So we can't really adjust
caster but that's okay. We'll get a good adjustment on toe upfront and camber all around which should be the biggest impact for
us that we can have. - So you've got three degrees
in the front for camber. Do we want to lower that or, this one is three. Let's push this side in a
little bit to three and a half. - So right now we're adjusting
the upper control arm. Again, this is exactly
what I was talking about. If you can see the upper
control arm right here, you adjust it from the top. It looks kind of cool. Maybe when you see that
picture on Ebay or whatever you're like, aw, it looks really cool. But this is gonna be a nightmare for our alignment guy tomorrow. Because the whole car is
gonna be up in the air. If you can see right here, you can't really get to those bolts when the car's gonna be settled. How easy is it to adjust these arms? - [Tanner] Not so easy. - [Joe] You get what you pay for. - So the clamp on the front
wheel has a laser on it which shoots back here and shows us where it lands on the rear wheel which is, we're doing that on both sides and that's how we can
figure out where our toe is or how to center up our toe. Once you get the laser equal on both sides that's the center of your toe range and you can start adjusting from there. (banging) - How come you don't zero it out. - Zero?
- Yeah. - 'Cause your arm doesn't go that far. (chuckling) Yeah, you'd have to
either pull the lower end or push the upper out. - But for a grip set up
what would be the optimal? - You usually want a little bit of camber. Three might be a little bit high. You'd have to be turning
pretty hard to do that. But two-ish is probably pretty good. Two to three. - But because of the
range of our cheap arm-- - Yeah, as little camber as
we're gonna get. (chuckles) - So we're limited?
- Yeah. - She's limited. - Our upper control arms are adjustable. You can adjust two different points which basically means we can adjust camber and caster a little bit. The primary adjustment is camber but we'll be able to cheat
the caster a little bit too. - [James] You like our stuff? - It's just got some good
control arms, yeah, I like it. - They better be good, they were $1000. (giggling) I just bought an engine for my other car. It was $700. - See what the other side's at. (chill beat) Okay. - So Tanner finished up
the front end alignment. We were only able to adjust
it to a certain degree because the aftermarket arm
isn't adjustable all the way. Caster is what makes the car easy to drive and it gives you that self steering when you're turning in
and out of a corner. Because ours is fixed the car might pull to
the left a little bit. We've got nine and a
half degrees on that side and 10 on this. - Well we were just going over what we wanted to set
up the rear end like, whether or not we wanted to try to emulate what he did on Low Car where he was limited by the
adjustment of the cheap stuff. But here we've got so much more adjustment that we can really nail the best alignment we can possibly have. So that's what we're gonna do. That's what you get when
you buy better parts. You can really dial it
in and hit what you want. So that's what we're gonna do. - [Tanner] Ah, man down. All right, all right, all right. (hip hop beat) Cool, cool. So we got our camber about where we wanted but the toe arm, since it's stock, we only have the stock adjuster. We can't shorten it enough
to straighten the toe. So it's toed in real obnoxious. We're gonna have to add camber
to straighten the toe out. - So basically, the driver's side of the car
toe is gonna be like this which is gonna rear steer the car-- - They're both toed in, it's
just a lot of toe in, yeah. - Not where we want it. - No, we're gonna have to
sacrifice camber to get toe. - Both cars just have the
factory toe adjustment because the toe arm is
actually also the spring perch. So you basically have to switch to a true coilover in the rear where the coil's actually over the shock so that you can run an actual toe arm. Which we actually bought. I bought toe arms for that car 'cause I was just on a shopping spree and I was like "Ooh, toe arms, buy them." - [Tanner] Those toe arms
are expensive too, dude. - So then we got here and I was like oh, we can't use those the
springs go in the stock toe arms. So we're kind of limited by that. But how do you think
it'll affect handling? How do you think it'll feel with this, it's toed in a bit, yeah? - If it was a drift car, man, you'd be pretty smooth and
transition left to right but-- - Just going straight it's probably just gonna drag the tires a bunch. Resistance. - Again, there's pros and
cons to stuff like this. For what we're trying
to get out of this car, I'm gonna say that it probably
would've been better off if we just stuck with the stock stuff. Having changed out just the one arm and not having that full
range of adjustment, probably not the best. There's companies out
there that kind of make a full one off kit that will
allow you to take advantage of all the range of motion in whole. But we don't have that ability. So we're kind of stuck
with what we've got. - We've only got the factory
adjustability for rear toe because the toe arm is
also the spring perch. And we need our spring. So we've just got the
factory eccentric bolt which should give us about
a degree of adjustment. So we'll just make that work. (hip hop beat) - Now that we've got the car aligned we're gonna set scales
underneath each corner of the car to make sure that each corner
is as close as possible to evenly distributing the car's weight. That way we can get a
very well-balanced car. The whole process of dialing in a car, especially with a specialized
alignment setup like this, can be very tedious. What we're gonna do today is pretty much align the
car as close as possible, corner balance it, that way the car is very even and sometimes that can
throw off the alignment. So we're gonna be bouncing back and forth until we really dial this setup in. - So we usually just go for crosses. The cross percentage, this plus this and this plus this. So these are what we're
looking at right now, are 48. This cross is lighter than this cross so what I do is lift
one of the light corners and try and get this to 50%. Once this is 50 then we
have 50% here and 50% here. But we should be able to just
jack up one of these corners. I think maybe that one. (chill beat) That's what we're shooting for. (chill beat) Sick. (clanking) - Never been shot. - Since the upper arm is so adjustable we can do caster and camber together. So it kind of took me a
couple more tries. (chuckles) - Ooh, that a fast-load hopper? - It's a nice exhaust. That's pretty. - We're at a 50.3 right now. Just a little further than we were? - [Tanner] Tiny bit. - All right, we'll get
another couple spins. We're gonna hit this thing dead on. - [James] This is how you got to do it. (gun firing)
(clanking) - [Guy] That's a bright paint. - Invoice me for the paint. - We just got done aligning both cars. I've got our specs right here so let's go over them real quick. On Hi Car with our sick as
front upper control arms we're also able to tweak
caster a little bit where Low Car would not do that. So at the front of Hi Car we've got one and a half degrees negative camber which should be very
good for grip driving. And two and a 10th degrees
negative camber in the rear. Then for toe we've got a
total toe of zero degrees. So that's probably gonna go
straight as hell down the road. And on Low Car they don't have
as much camber adjustability so they're stick with three and a half degrees
negative camber up front, negative two and a half
degrees in the rear. And they've got differing caster because they can't adjust caster. So the front left on Low Car is a positive nine degrees caster and the front right is
positive 10 degrees. Might push them in one direction, it might be imperceptible too but ours is the same. So Low Car is stuck with a
little bit of toe in on the rear because they don't have the
same amount of adjustability that we have, which is what you get when
you buy baller ass parts. Tanner fell in low with our adjustability. That stuff, it worked,
but wasn't the best. So the question is whether or not it'll be noticeable when we're driving. So it's time to go find out. (rock music) - Whoo! - Wow. [James] That's so good! What a car! - This has got to be one of
the best cars I've ever driven. The grip is so good, the handling, the steering. It goes where you point it. - (bleep), it's on rails, bro. - Toot, toot, freight train
coming through on rails! On rails! (engine revving) - Whoa, that was sick. - Was that the drone?
- The drone, yeah. - [Radio] We are going to back to camp. - You guys might notice
that we're working from home doing our part to level the curve. Without further ado, does more expensive mean more better? - Kind of. - Kind of.
- kind of. - I mean obviously you, there's no question. Hi Car has more adjustability, arguably a smoother ride overall. - Arguably? It's like night and day. - The difference in Low Car
was night and day as well. Even our baseline cheap
as can be components. I was very impressed with
how much better the car feels in the same way that the car changed when we finally got the fuel injectors and got the car tuned
correctly with the turbo. It feels that same way
with the suspension. Before we put the new parts in Low Car felt like you were driving a Radio Flyer wagon. It was pretty rigid, pretty rattley. And now it's still rattley
but it feels a lot better. - Yeah, and the difference
in Hi Car was huge as well. I think what it comes down for me is the confidence driving in Hi Car. I know that none of that
stuff is gonna break. I think we did have more
adjustability though. - Oh yeah, for sure. We were limited where
you guys were able to go a lot deeper with your tuning. And I think the results kind
of speak for themselves. - Yeah, we haven't even begun to tap the potential of the
suspension setup on Hi Car. Moving forwards as we go to
the track and drive it more we can really dial it in in
the way that we really like it. We just got to figure out
how it is that we do like it. - You got to experiment a little bit. Find out what you like. It's a important part of life. - So, Nolan, you're completely
biased opinion aside, let's go to something that doesn't lie, our super scientific numbers. - [james] Nice launch, Joe. I actually really like this thing. Time for Hi Car, huh? Night and day. - Oh my god, this thing's amazing. - I saw that smile.
- Best car I've ever driven. (tires screeching) - [Joe] Oh my gosh, this car is awesome. 10 out of 10 awesome. - I just want to point out that we are testing with
science and numerics. I mean we don't have GPS. We have a 20 year old
intern with a stopwatch. So we're doing out best.
- Jimmy. Take it all with a grain of salt. (tires screeching)
- Dang. - Everybody went faster in Hi Car. Even you, Nolan.
- Even me. The average time in Low
Car for the slalom course was 8.84 seconds. Hi Car was 8.49. Nolan, a half a second on
a full lap of a race track is a lot. That slalom course was
four feet long, man. That's a huge, huge difference. - It's an astronomical difference, James, and I think we really nailed Hi Car. I think you guys did a great job. As Zach said it earlier, it might be the best car he's ever driven and I have to agree with him, man. Best car I've ever driven. Bar none, bar none. - So the numbers don't lie. In this case expensive
does mean more better. And as we're getting deeper
and deeper into these cars, we're dealing with a lot of parts stacked
on top of each other. As both these cars stand, Nolan, which ones would you buy? - You know, if I had a stock Z, definitely shell out the money for those Hi Car suspension parts, man. With good tires, good brakes, and then those components underneath, it'd be such a great car.
- Absolutely. - I want to remind you, we are talking about $500 versus $3000. That's a 600% increase.
- Yeah, that's-- With that knowledge, Nolan, which one would you buy? - Ah, man. The machining nerd inside me wants to say the more expensive ones because they look so great and the adjustability is amazing. But that's a huge difference. For $500 we absolutely changed
the character of Low Car. So I think I'm gonna have
to go with the low parts. - Honestly I might agree with you. - Really? Really? - Yeah, dude. I can't afford $3000 suspension stuff! - That's amazing. This is only the second time I think that we've agreed on this. - Thank you so much much
for watching "HiLow". I hope you guys are not too bored and you're all staying safe out there. Make sure that you tune in next week. During this episode we ran into an unknown issue. - We have a small crack in our radiator. I think it's just because
Low Car was so low. Going up and down those driveways must have caught up with us. - Make sure you tune in
so you don't miss that. As far as we know, Donut programming is gonna
keep going as scheduled. We got about three weeks in the can and we're currently figuring
out stuff to film at home if we have to do that. So we know everyone's bored. If you're still working-- - You're a hero.
- You're a hero. - Take care of yourself, wash your hands. We'll get through this together. I love you. - Be kind. See you next time. - See you next time. - That weird, that's hard to do.
