Steering, let's keep things on the rails!

i'm Curt with SlikRok productions and I put a video out on portal nation a little while ago about some steering problems and some cures that we have for that and we have a few naysayers on there so we're going to go step by step through this with some of the problems and some of the cures to fix it Oversteer so what we call oversteer is a big problem what happens is when you get a plus two or plus one and a half a arm obviously it moves the a arms forward and it puts your tire rod in on more of an angle most those kids come with a bump stop that goes in your steering they're plastic they break out pretty easy but what happens is if you're especially if you're going downhill you turn into a rock or an obstacle you push on the gas a little bit it'll actually fall backwards because of the angle of the tie rod end once that folds backwards it usually breaks one of these and takes out an axle almost every single time so we've got a couple of tricks to avoid that we'll show you what those are so one of those cures is a miscellaneous misalignment heim, basically you put it in like this you put in the factory location and because the tie rod end is sticking back like it did with the factory geometry of the vehicle it can't over steer so it can't overturn and collapse and go backwards on itself because it's sticking out a little bit further so something that we have done over the years that we've had some good success with is we've actually moved the hole over on the portal bracket so you can weld a piece of steel on there drill a hole in it most the portal brackets come they're coned in we just drill straight holes in them we use misalignments and kind of get away from the killing thing anyway but what this does is because it's back farther it gives you more leverage on the steering and it makes your steering a lot easier so this is a give and take if you're running a regular heim on it if you put a conventional heim on it and you just move it back you're going to lose steering throw it makes it a lot easier to turn just due to leverage the farther your leverage point is away from the ball joint the easier it is to turn but you're going to lose throw the straighter this rod gets the more throw you lose so over the years in moving this back we have sacrificed steering throw for strength you can't oversteer when they're back here so you're not damaging parts but especially on a four-seater where you lose some throw it's a lot harder to make tight corners we've sacrificed that because moving it back here makes it about 20 easier to turn so it's a lot easier on your steering and your components and it's a lot easier to manipulate and drive but you lose throw with a heim joint the reason you're losing throw obviously the straightest point in between two lines is the shortest shortening up you're going to lose throw when it steers because it is designed to be on an angle this way so what we've been doing is using a misalignment line backwards like this and putting it into the outside hole that gets you closer to geometry with the tie rod so it actually lengthens the whole thing and if you do the measurement on it and you put it in a factory location as opposed to an outside location with a misalignment heim you're gaining about a between an eighth and a quarter of an inch more throw now that doesn't sound like a whole lot but what you have to keep in mind is an eighth or a quarter inch here equals a half inch to three quarters of an inch depending on what size tire you're running so obviously the bigger tire you're running you get a quarter inch more steering you get a lot more throw out of it that makes it easier so you don't lose as much steering and your pressure point remains on the outside the point of force so it makes it easier to turn so with this system here with a misaligned behind backwards it's easier to turn you don't lose as much steering throw out of it so that makes it a lot better and it gets the factory geometry closer if it was factory where you're not losing anything now we're running our holes about an inch and an eighth from center point to center point so that's a little bit less or a little bit more this is a three-quarter offset heim so we have a half-inch difference we run that half-inch difference on the alignment so we do that because we don't want to be able to oversteer otherwise you're not fixing that problem so the setup here is really kind of important we've done a whole bunch of these it does work for any naysayers out there um we've done the math 55 times we've done this on a whole bunch of cars this is a good solution if you're running a big tire car to save on some steering components and some problems so what we're after here in moving that hole out was we want our tire on angle to be back a little bit farther than factory so it can't oversteer so as you look here with the misalignment come in here and get a shot of this where that lines up and comes down we are just on the back side being offset of that hole that'll keep it when it's a full turn can't oversteer so we can't pull backwards so that gets us really close to back to factory geometry but it's back just far enough that it won't allow it to oversteer so what we gain out of being able to do this is because of the missile and behind we can keep our tire right in pretty close to the factory geometry but we can move it back we get more leverage out of it it's easier to steer it won't over steer that way so you're not breaking anything and like i said it's about 20 or 30 easier to steer just moving that back an inch and a quarter because like i said the farther you get away from the ball joint the more leverage you have on it the easier it is now a whole bunch of guys have argued with me that using a misalignment here does not change force i agree it does not change the force the mounting point is still the same what it does do is change the angle the tie rod end like i said the shortest distance in between two points is a straight line if you run a regular high moment on an outside hole you're going to lose a bunch of steering through and making this longer and putting the angle back forward you require you reacquire some of that back that's the point of the misalignment heim to get it back i said we're running these backwards from what they're made for if you run out the other way you don't have to weld the tab back here you won't over steer but doing it this way you get a little bit more leverage when you're steering and it makes it a lot easier to turn big tires Stabilizer so we talked about some ways to get some more leverage so your steering's a little easier we talked about um throw we've kind of talked about the outside but that won't protect your steering rack if you hit something hard we all know this is what happens to steering racks they bend they're expensive they're they suck to take in and out we've obviously done a lot of them Sandcraft steering stabilizers will take the blunt of that blow so if you hit something hard Sandcraft steering stabilizer is designed as your rack moves this moves with it your steering wheel your stabilizer moves with it so you get the added strength of all this steel so if you take a hard hit this will keep this from looking like this