Gadgetory

today is the day we're gonna lift my truck I'm super excited about this normally I don't tear down things this size or this you know expensive but this should be really fun I have an icon stage 9 lift kit and we're gonna remove a huge chunk of the factory suspension and replace it with these aftermarket components let's get started so the reason people add lists to their truck I guess my reason why I'm lifting my truck is just to get a little bit more performance than the stock vehicle so most vehicles are designed so they can be used on the freeway because that's where it's gonna spend you know 99% of its life I like things that are practical and useful in a more broad spectrum so having a lift on my truck allows me to go off-road and have more performance if I ever do need to go off of like you know a paved road so we have the truck lifted up off the ground a little bit so we can get those tires off and start working on the suspension if you're when I first started my youtube channel I was doing more automotive and car repairs and the reason my whole channel exists is because of this guy Bryan's mobile one we're in his shop today and he's gonna be helping me out a little bit all right step one get rid of the wheel so a sitting that I've had this truck for about 6,000 miles and there's already some rust on some of the bolts inside and rust is not a good thing when it comes to cars it makes things seize up inside so we're gonna wire brush that off really quick and that'll give us easier access to remove some of the components so we're replacing the suspension on the truck and we're gonna show the majority of the passenger side right now the passenger and the driver's side are pretty similar I'll kind of explain a little bit what each component does as we're going through the lift so that sway bar that we just disconnected it wraps up and goes all the way through the front of the truck and attaches to the other tire basically what that does is it connects the wheels and the frame and everything in such a way that you don't get body roll this is what body roll looks like if you go around the corner it would lay to the side and that's fine for an off-road vehicle but on the highway you don't want to be doing this on the freeway on-ramp so the sway bar keeps the body of the truck from swaying side to side keeps everything stable ER so this is a tapered bolt and it goes through this in such a way that it really gets stuck to get them undone what I like to do is just put some shock through it so you know they're not so obviously with a project like this there are a lot of dangers so the truck is supported in multiple locations and we're taking special precautions not to damage the brake lines because if the brake lines break during this process it adds another level of complexity that we don't want to deal with right now so to keep stress off of this brake line right here this brake hose we have a jack stand supported up underneath here on this knuckle and that's keeping the weight from breaking that hose up there my truck is brand new only had it for three months and there's already rust on some of the bolts inside the last time I did this was on like a 95 Jeep Wrangler and that was that was a nightmare some of the bolts had seized up so much that I had to just sawzall through them and remove the part you know what the bolts still intact with the metal joined together if we were to just hit this with a hammer it might damage the threads and so we put the castle nut over the top like this and then it gave us a flat surface to hit the hammer on without damaging the actual threads themselves little trick of the trade and like always it's a really good idea to keep your screws organized during the whole process so up at the top of the shock there are three bolts with a 14 millimeter with a 14 millimeter nut attached to it so we're gonna pop those out and that allows the whole shock assembly to drop out from the housing that it's in so at the tie rod off we can manipulate it to turn right or left with ease so if you turn it like this I can lift it up and out and turn it back the other way slide it out alright so this is the shock we just took out you can kind of see this housing inside that has like you know a bunch of gas and oil inside of it and that's kind of what makes a smooth ride when you're driving your car or your truck whatever vehicle you have it also it has this huge spring on it now icon was nice enough to send me out one of their lift kits this is a stage 9 from my truck and you can see that the inside reservoir first of all is super beefy and it has an external reservoir as well so when you're going off-road and there's bumps and stuff in the road and your shock is fully extended it still has enough dampening oil and fluid inside of this to give you a smooth ride now the vast majority of people will never ever need that because their most cars spend 99% of their lives on paved roads but since my truck is useful and has features I wanted to be able to go off-road and that extra fluid and stuff in the shocks gives a smoother ride off road when you're crawling or just you know going on roads that aren't paved so that reserve reservoir is going to mount to this bracket so with this out of the way we can get this into place just like that alright so this is the upper control arm it's kind of like this u-shaped thing right here and we're replacing that to give you know more travel to the shock so that what we were working on inside with the upper control arm that needs to come out through like underneath the hood so we've got an air conditioning line that's in the way and a little wire harness so we got to unmount this so that it can flex out of the way with the bolt out of the way now we can get a little bit of movement on it you don't want to crease it but you can certainly move it to clear the path through the bolt now this ball right here we're making progress perfect got it but to make enough room for that bolt to come out we had to bend on that little side wall right there this flex it on the body mounts a little bit of aggressive persuasion in order to get the reservoir bracket in there you have to take out this plastic tab if you push on it you can see that it's not steel it all looks like it's part of the stamping of the frame but it's no there we go the irony is there's already tape right there so we just complete it those plastic slips gone the reserve reservoir brackets gonna fit nice and flush against the frame all right so this one is for the passenger side which is the side of the vehicle we are working on get it up in the top as far as you can and then just use a pry bar to get the rest of the I would recommend leaving this undone and bolting the top first it makes it a lot easier to get those three bolts in the top blue holds things in place through vibration without being too aggressive and it also coats this this is steel and it has some kind of anodized coating on it but anytime you put steel into aluminum it's good to have something on it so once you get the first one in you can let it hang by that and it will help to line the other ones up so I don't tighten it all the way until I've got all three bolts in place if you get a bunch on one side as you twist it in it'll get around the other sides too and the beauty of doing it this way is you can fit a pry bar underneath it here and get your up and down and forward and back pretty easy but these are tough otherwise then go back through by hand and snug them up good alright so the bolt goes from the back side towards the front you support the shock it goes in really easy I like to have this side straight and then have this one angled up just a little bit and you put this straight side on first where the bolts gonna go so the best way to get this in from underneath the hood was we had to put the washer and then this metal bit right here on top of the bolt first and then that allowed the angle to get through this other hole and then feed through the entire control arm out the other side we had to get a little creative with tapping the end of the bolt from underneath the hood after that washer and metal bit we're on and then it's sink all the way through the rest of control arm alright so the upper control arm is here we're gonna attach this bottom part with this massive nut do you remember the sway bar right below that is something called the tie rod and this is what it's that's your steering wheel and it moves the steering knuckle it what's makes your wheels go back and forth as you're driving your car so we're gonna take that pop it up back into this hole it came from put the castle nut over top so the reason they call it a castle notice because it has these little pillars you know like a castle looks like so we're gonna stick this pin all the way through this hole once that pin is in and make sure that the nut is not ever gonna spin because when you're moving your steering wheel back and forth everything is constantly moving and that will keep things secure so this bracket right there the sway arm needs to be offset a little bit from where it was before so included it with the icon stage 9 kit is one of these offset brackets so we're gonna go ahead plop this into place basically this uses the original bolt holes inside of the frame and then gives us new bolt holes to mount the sway bar to and that reservoir bracket is between the spacer and the frame you'll notice we've got the rubber splash guard between the bracket and this that helps to reduce any potential for noise so in order to mount the reserve reservoir we had to cut a few slits inside a splash guard for the clamps and then we can slide the reserved reservoir through the clamps and then tighten them down this part right here is attached to the sway bar it's called a sway bar link we're gonna toss it through here and then we're pretty much done once I get this tightened in we have the reservoir we have the top control arm we have the shock in place not too bad take a look at the hardware I think that looks sick one thing about these lift kits is that they're adjustable so I can go all the way down and have it basically build like the stock height or I can raise it up along all of these threads and giving more clearance as the spring gets more and more compressed down the shaft the higher we go lift wise like the more you can press that spring the stiffer the ride is gonna be but the more clearance you'll have from the ground which depending on what you're doing if you're doing a lot of freeway riding you don't need a whole lot of clearance but if you're off-road most of the time I need to clear like boulders or Hills or whatever give yourself a higher point of gravity higher center of gravity then it's nice to have a higher truck alright everything is mounted and in place all of the bolts are snug and tight we have the skid plate stuck back on along with the sway bar underneath that so we'll get the tire put back in and we'll be good to go all right so the front tires are done but believe it or not there are four tires on a truck and so now we're doing view rear which are actually leaf springs instead of like the coil shocks we saw earlier so they should go a little quicker there is less parts to replace the leaf springs are actually super heavy I'll show them to over here these things probably weigh over a hundred pounds and there's quite a few more Springs and the ones we have underneath so this is called an impact gun and it's probably been my favorite tool of the entire day all right so these are drum brakes the emergency brake line comes up through here sort of remove these lines this is the emergency brake cable we're gonna move that which will give us more room to mess around with like the axle and the shocks and the leaf springs and stuff like that so this is the shock itself which we're gonna be replacing should come out perfect now let's get the better ones in all right so we're dropping the rear tire down got just want to point out that we have the truck support on a lift and a secondary support underneath the axle so I'm safe in more than one regard along with eye protection and right now we are taking off the bolts these u-bolts right here that hold the axle to the leaf springs front bolts out of the leaf springs these aren't the hardest part but they're the heaviest we have the two old leaf springs here working with late springs it's kind of tricky because they're under pressure when they're all pinched together with this Center bolt on keeping them all lined up at the same time while they're pinched together under pressure it's kind of tricky all right so I have a seat clamp on this and we've released all of the bolts holding this sandwich together this big metal sandwich and as I slowly loosen up this C clamp it's gonna expand all the way out and allow us to switch out some of the leaves inside the leaf spring so with this big metal sandwich of a leaf spring there's this one Center guiding pin and so that's what we are see clamping together as we lined up all the way and there's little metal plates in between which minimized the sound and the squeak egde between the layers as they flex together so you got these little barrels that spaced out in the middle part that's it yeah yeah be careful of your threads but if you're lined up you can just knock it through like that in this case according to instructions this goes to the rear with the one and then to go to the front all right well tighten everything down and then get it back on the truck so as brian is setting this back into the axle there's this little pin at the bottom which sits inside of the axle and what does that do it keys it up set your axles axle stays a fixed distance now that we have a slack in the brake hoses we can put the brackets back on so this little guy right here is called a bump stop which is a little bit different than another video I made recently it sits right on top of this and that's so when the truck bottoms out it doesn't hit the leaf springs it hits this rubber on top of the the bump stop okay so the u-bolts are what hold the axle to the leaf spring and essentially the rest of the truck so there's a great big cup that goes on the bottom side it's like a giant washer that helps to Center it on the axle so the thing with these is that they all have to be even like they have to be evenly spaced and have an even number of threads sticking out through the bottom so right now I'm not gonna go up all the way I'm just gonna snuggle up till they're about even all right so this shock right here we're gonna put it up through this hole in the top section and then the bottom section it goes into that little slot there we are almost done and my truck is almost put back together pretty heavy-duty stuff so even though this truck is the off-road TRD Tacoma so it's built for off-roading this shock right here you know it's still you know mainly gonna be driven on the freeway so these shocks are quite a bit smaller than the icon stage 9 shocks or putting on so you can see the off-road freeway shocks versus the off-road off-road shocks pretty big difference for this next step we have the bottom of the shocks secured and then for the top it's hard because you got to squish these bushings so to accomplish this part you can either Jack the axle up with it or you can let the lift down once you crush it down a little bit on the bushing then you can get your nut started just stack it with a bushing like this washer on top and then you should have just enough thread now to where you can get this started these nuts hold the top of the shock on it to do it right you want to tighten it down to where when you put the second one on it's flush so put the first one on till you wind it up like this and spin on the second one lock it down if you look at it it's got some texture on one side this mechanic trick put the texture down all right it's better put this in the middle and doing it now that'll help locate the drill bit so it doesn't creep one of the things I really like to use when I'm drill and stuff like this is a bow Lube boeing company came up with this for drilling it comes out like margarine when it gets hot it gets more runny and you get your bit hot you just dip it again all right so this is the bracket that holds the reservoir so we're gonna stick that in place now to work so the rear shocks and reservoir are in everything is tightened down remember we have the bottom of the u-bolts we have these bolts right here on top of the leaf springs and these leaf springs have to be loaded meaning that the weight has to be down on the axle and all the way to the truck is on the leaf springs before you can tighten these bolts down in at the end because of the bushings that's sweet I'm super excited about this the truck is back on the ground and look at all that space for extra tires I am super excited about that that's like real suspension you've done the suspensions on trucks and stuff works so what would you change what did you like about this one and what would you change if you had to change anything really like the reservoirs on this one as far as changing things I do something with the mounting of the reservoirs in the rear I'd well bolts on it's way easier and it keeps it up off the frame I like it where the lift comes from the steering knuckle having a little bit of change but they're a lot harder and more expensive to make so with this with the icon stage nine we started about 10 o'clock in the morning it's nine o'clock now so it took us I would say about 10 10 hours or so if we had to do it again we could probably do it a little bit quicker but you know it's not too bad there's some learning curve we cheated we looked at the instructions a few times yeah so right now with the truck that does have the stock tires on it still which are pretty like you know hidden inside of the truck and leave plenty of space around the outside so inside of the wheel will so I will be getting new tires and rims but I will save that for a new video this is just how to install the lift on the truck and huge thanks to Bryan for helping me out with this process I don't have all the tools to do it myself you can do it with hand tools but with the right tools it's a lot easier if you have not seen Bryan's channel definitely go check it out I'll leave a link right here somewhere on Bryan for his channel check me out I've got all kinds of stuff that show how carves work how to diagnose things I got some hard-hit and heavy duty stuff and I got some easy stuff too huge thanks to icon for hooking us up with this stage 9 lift if you have any questions leave them down in the comments and Bryan will be here to answer them all thanks its own thanks a ton for watching and I will see you around