Journey to the Baja 1000 - Episode 8 - King Shocks Unboxing and Lower A-Arms

on this episode of the journey to the baja 1000 we're unboxing some king shocks and building the lower suspension arms for the j-10 race truck you're watching the journey to the baja 1000 [Music] hey everybody welcome to this episode of the journey to the baja 1000 obviously we're not in the garage we're taking a little bit of r r with the family we're on the road kind of clearing the mind getting myself reset for the uh this push to the end of the build we have about hundred days left before the race pressure's on to get this thing done but i'm taking a little bit of break first in this episode we're gonna be building the lower suspension arms for the j-10 race truck all right before we get to this build let me relay to you just a little thought and i stole this from dave smith who's the owner of factory five racing where i built one of their cars years ago but material things can actually bring things to people together the truck is just a material thing it's something that isn't as important obviously as your family your health and those kinds of things at the same time it brings you together and in this case it gives me an opportunity to work with my brother mark he's been over a couple times helping me work he also does all the editing for these videos i've had a great time getting to know my buddy ryan he's been over just about every monday to help to build and work on the body and even teaching my son how to do some spray painting material things can bring you together and i hope that this one does in a positive way welcome to what we're calling christmas time i don't know what we're going to call it but but so basically there are some things that that i've got and i've got no idea what's in the box and usually i am totally not about unboxing i kind of think they're a little corny but in this case i think whatever is in these boxes i got a feeling this would be pretty cool but i have no idea what's in the boxes uh as far as like extra hardware and those kinds of things so i figured we'd open them up here on camera so if you're interested in buying stuff like this from king shocks then at least you know what you're going to get inside the box so we'll get to it just start opening up and grab one and grab a tool and we'll cut in and see what we find let's do it all right cheers i like uh they're like like dimensions and part numbers i'm not too concerned check out these bad guns so these are the four inch bump stops it came as a kit from um i bought all this stuff from down south racing and they were the ones that put my order into uh the king shocks king sharks made them shift them down there we went we went over there and picked them up from down south neil great dude hooked us up with all this but uh these came as a deal um you got two bump stops and you also got two they cans and mount those in and it is cool to see these things man they are can't wait to get to work on these i got four of them they're all the same they'll be one of these at each one of the corners that's pretty awesome merry christmas we got there oh man it's a red ryder bb gun [Music] and uh yes so did i mention we're not playing around i think it's pretty awesome there'll be one of these at each corner i have two of them which are 14 inch which will go on the front and two of them which are 18 inches of travel to go in the back but i'll tell you what king shock as far as quality does not let down these things are amazing this thing is freaking beautiful [Music] there we go there's this there's the twin brother with a 14 inch you may recognize ryan from the uh two episodes ago he was the guy who put the uh the haircut on me so uh i think we're coming up another one of those here pretty soon sign up for the haircuts here we go wow these would be the three inch three inch three two five passes with the uh the piggy back i didn't go with a remote reservoir just because i didn't want to mount that remotely so these are these are the 14 inch ones these are the ones that go on the uh the front so there should be two mirror image ones of these here this is a 14 it's a travel also to go with those 14 inch coilovers it's these things are beautiful all right here it is these would be the 18 inch coil over oh goodness it is so big they didn't even put the other spring on this yet so so it's got this here's one spring those springs in there this one is 18 inches this is compressed length for uh for this one don't worry about the anodized parts you know what this part is so money i actually thought it was plastic this is anodized aluminum beautiful piece such a nice looking piece which i just dropped from scratch yeah but uh i've got the two inch extensions here because these are going on the rear and it's got to go inside that trailing arm so i need to give myself a little bit of room to go inside the trailing arm so these are probably i'm guessing 18 inches oh mama look at those things 18 inch bypass shock right now from this christmas unboxing these things are enormous 18 inches of travel which should translate to about uh in the rear suspension about 30 inches of travel in the rear and probably just because i got a hood and those kinds of things in the front i'm really looking at 22 inches of travel in the front i could go you know if i took the hood off i could have more travel but i i still want this thing to look like a j-10 [Music] nice job to everything beautiful [Applause] seriously looks like it has one compression or two compression and one rebound two here yeah out of my league on these we're gonna learn as we go on these things so so cool those are the shocks we're gonna uh go ahead and wrap this video up right here and drink some more beers but uh this will be in the next video for our suspension build merry christmas geez this is incredible stuff now that i have the shocks i can get some really good dimensions on how they're going to mount and how far apart they need to be spaced and then i just use a piece of cardboard to map out where i'm going to put all the elements of that lower suspension arm and then i started translating those into fusion 360. so today i'm just going to show you what i built in fusion 360. on the next episode where i'm building the upper suspension arms i'm going to show you how i use the fusion 360 to build each individual piece inside the suspension arm i just don't have time for that in this uh this video but here i put all the parts in as i kind of zoom forward and how i build this thing i start cutting other parts elements out to make it fit i put the bottom on and the top on and then i have a full suspension on and then like i said what i'm going to show you in the next one is how i now take all these parts back apart and nest them such that they will work in my plasma table but this time let's just take a look at the plasma table doing its work once again the plasma cable proves its worth and just how well it just cuts out parts if you want to know how i got all the pieces of metal this clean check out episode 7 when i'm building the spindles and i show you exactly how to get all the mill scale off and prepare these things for our welding also if you go to ntdracing.com or just look in my description below and you can see links for where i have all things like magnets and those kinds of things and you can get them on amazon if you're looking to add them to your toolbox so if you follow any of elon musk's builds whether it's spacex or tesla one of the things he always says is the best part is no part and in this case i think the best weld is no weld so any chance i have the opportunity to remove a junction that i put together based on a weld and make it a part that i'm gonna bend i'm going to do that in this case i'm going to keep these arms to go down the sides of the lower suspension arms one continuous piece so there's a lot of cool tools here that i'm using an angle finder to get the exact angle of the the piece of melt i'm trying to bend obviously a speed square to mark the uh the 90 degree angle i'm using a press that i got from harbor freight and then a press brake that i got from swag offroad this is an angle cube that's going to tell me exactly how many degrees the part is that i'm bending uh in there i start to bend so i just bend it to half of whatever the degrees is that i needed to uh for that part to be and then both sides bend obviously so i need 20 46 degrees i bend it to 23 degrees on one side and it's pretty much a perfect bend you might be wondering what that piece of square aluminum tube is for i use that because it elevates my my speed square a little bit and that allows me to make sure that this bend is at a 90 degree angle from the face of the press brake so i want to talk about some lessons learned while i built this thing first off i wanted to make just have the part in where it's gonna be mounted as the jig so i'm basically welding it in the place where it's gonna be it's nice to have it on my table do that i'm using rubber bushings at the frame side and then a uniball on these the spindle side and you can see that brass slug in the uniball side on the other side i had to pull those rubber bushings out and put them back in and always worry about melting them while i was welding and it was just a real pain in the future next ones i will put uniballs on both sides because i really like to use those brass slugs they do a great job of absorbing the heat and maintaining the the shape of whatever you're welding it doesn't distort very much the rubber bushings were just a pain to uh to deal with as i'm welding this i i do most on the outside do all tig welding but i did mig weld all the parts on the inside just because you just couldn't get a jig welder in to a lot of those places efficiently and a mig weld if you do it right is is just about as strong just doesn't look as pretty but this is going to be covered up anyway so i didn't really care how pretty it looked on the inside behold the beauty of computer aided design it's not so much that they just all kind of fit together just perfectly but here's the beauty of it when you get down to the side here and you look they all line up so when i put that top plate on i'm going to put one bend in it and it's all going to line up perfectly all the way across i'll be able to weld all the way down this seam here and then a couple uh you know rosette wells if you will across here to hold these plates in across the top and there won't be any gap when i put it on there it's gonna look awesome all right back over to the uh the press brake and just for the price you just really can't beat the capability of this thing about 20 inches wide is the widest piece you can put in there and you can bend quarter inch plate still in this case i'm just bending one eighth inch plate still but does a a perfect job once i get this part off i drop it right on boom and nice and it'll be really easy to weld that the the holes on the very top of this i plan on doing is a rosette well right over the uh the uniball and i finally like to use you know small rosette welds i'd like to use the tig torch in this case i'm using a tig button to uh to light that tick torch off within the other places where i got longer runs or maybe bigger voids to fill in i'll just go ahead and use my mig welder to fill in those spaces it does a pretty good job the reason i'm mig welding these pieces is because i really want to have good fusion between those stringers inside the lower suspension arm and the skin uh especially in these areas where we'll be trans limiting a lot of load uh through this lower suspension arm and i just think the best way for just to basically lock all that stuff together like i said these rubber bushings were just kind of a pain i think it'd just be easier to go with uniballs i really can't change the design now just there's just be too much design change for not a lot of benefit but i had to do this every time to put them together and then take them apart was a bear you're kind of tearing up the rubber and all that so it's probably going to be good for for one or two races or something like that on this uh this thing then i'll go with another design the next time i make lower suspension arms like i said the balls i think work a little bit better they're a lot more durable than those uh rubber bushings that being said they're not perfect and as you put a lot of heat into this thing it distorts a little bit despite having that brass slug in there so it's a little bit of a trick to it i had to sand out a little bit just to get that thing to slide back in there and then i'm just using some parts from around the garage to help you know smoothly slide that uniball into place in this case i just got a bolt i'm going to pull that thing in into position and then once i'm done i'll test it really quick just to make sure i don't have any binding if you need the ball and it did pretty good if there was a lot of force to put that thing in there i would use some i would take it back out and continually sand or grind down that uh the surface just to make sure i'm not just distorting the the casing of the uniball and ruining the bearing inside there so here's a quick walk around of the finished a arm i'm pretty much done welding the next thing i will be doing is just cleaning this thing up so i can paint it besides that i'll leave it the way it is for a little while while i continue the mock-up because there are still some mounts for the uh coil over the bypass shock and i think i'm going to land the bump stop right about here but we'll see how that goes the first thing i need to do next though however is make that upper a arm which will connect to here and i'll get all that together and that'll be part of the next video just to kind of look at what i did here it is tig welded all the way around the outside you can kind of see where i started some tig welds and stop and start and stop because i was basically welding in sections about this big just so i wouldn't build up too much heat in the park while i was uh doing this thing there are some places where it's tip mig welded i just it was so difficult to get us uh the tig welder in there with the stick and everything i just figured i would do a much better job with just the mig weld in that spot i'm actually i feel like i'm getting a little bit better with a mig welder i still don't like it as much as i like take and then the whole the entire inside of this thing was uh mig welded and you can see the uh some of the burn through uh on that so uh besides that i like the suspension travel one of the benefits of orienting the uniballs the way i did while i limit my steering a little bit you know to 34 degrees in each direction i don't limit the movement of the suspension by uh or into the unit balls this way right here the way it's set up uh where it reaches the limit because it runs in right here that's at about 18 inches of vertical however that let's put the tire well through the hood of the vehicle so it'll never go this high uh and then there's unlimited lower suspension travel i'm looking for about maybe 20 inches of suspension travel once this thing is all done so i so far i like the way that it's been designed so this is really cool finally get a spindle put on and start to put some parts together what i'm testing here is i'm just seeing if the geometry of that lower arm is going to limit the steering of the um of the spindle now remember that uniball has 34 degrees left or right and what i found is as i put it on here and i swivel it or turn the wheel back and forth i really don't lose any turning capability based on the geometry of the part i made so i'm really happy with the lower suspension arm the way that goes together [Music] all right it is time to update all the costs if you didn't see episode two and three this is where we came up with fifteen hundred dollars for the gj10 and 450.58 for all the parts for the silverado recommends you go back and look at those pretty cool videos if you're looking at trying to get low-cost ls parts but we're adding in today the shocks don't tell my wife we spent 7 dollars on four bump stops four coilovers and four bypass shocks that's our most expensive thing we're probably gonna have on this product project and then finally about two hundred dollars on fasteners i had fasteners already from other projects i bought some more plus or minus probably around 200 for the grade 8 fasteners i'm using on this truck it comes to uh right now our total is 11 056 dollars so we still have about 9 000 to try to finish this truck and have it ready to race i think those suspension arms are really awesome and they're going to be really put to the test as the greatest stresses are going to happen on that lower suspension arm next up is going to be the upper suspension arms and once those are done we're going to get a chance to test the whole system the upper suspension arms lower suspension arms with the steering and we'll get an opportunity to see if all that geometry and planning actually works well i hope you enjoyed this episode of the journey of the bot 1000 hopefully you'll choose to join us in future episodes maybe even hitting the like and subscribe button below we'll see on the next episode take care of yourself [Music] you

Channel: NTD Racing

Views: 2,310

Keywords: King Shocks, Unboxing, a-arms

Id: RmcU55NUsLo

Length: 21min 16sec (1276 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 24 2020