re_guderian
SILVER Star
I installed a set of Freedom Offroad UCA's on my '11 on Friday. I did a ton of research, and these are strange beasts. The manufacturer never comes out and says what we are all expecting to hear, like "These awesomely beefy and CHEAP arms relax the upper ball joint angle and provide X degrees of caster correction over stock arms!". They are always strangely a little vague on this, only saying that they are "only suitable for 2"-4" of lift". Ack, don't make me bring my lawyer! If I want a vague dialogue, I'll just go talk to my wi.... uh, never mind...
Anyway, I had some SPC's on my 100 series that I loved, and thought, meh, I'll just get those. But I NEVER used the camber adjustability, and once the caster position was set, it never changed either. I have a pretty generic setup, with Ironman Nitro lift, and 32" tires, OEM TRD wheels, etc. so nothing exotic. It's not like you're dorking with your adjustable ball joint every weekend, right? So if I could save enough to buy a CC or MTS unit, along with improving my caster, why not?
So first off, install was pretty straightforward. I just used the FSM instructions. Battery has to come out, and FSM shows you which wiring harness brace to remove by the tray. Passenger side was a little tighter, and I never removed the bolt from the engine bay. It is tight around the AC lines and the bolt head flange, but if you remove the bracket holding the AC lines, there's enough room to get the old arm out and the new arm in. I think everything else was pretty well covered in the FSM. I did have a hard time using my torque wrench at ride height. There just isn't much room between top of tire and bottom of fender. My specific torque wrench has enough play that I couldn't get a single click of the ratcheting mechanism in that space. So I used a regular 3/4 socket to tighten, and would jack up to get more room and check torque, until I hit the 85 lb/ft.
As to the arms themselves, the biggest knock on them in the bazillion online forums I read was that "they're cheap". That's it. No failures, no weirdness, etc. I mean really, it's two bushings, an arm, and a ball joint. When you compare it to an OEM arm, it's cheaper (about $120 per pair cheaper), beefier (each arm weighs about 3 lbs more than the OEM one) AND comes with a greasable ball joint that's replaceable. Can't find many (any?) instances of premature ball joint failure, which is more than you can say for SPC, right? The ball joint is supposedly proprietary, but available from Freedom for a pretty reasonable price. I also heard this as a knock frequently that since you couldn't put 555 joints back in it, then it must be bad? News flash, OEM ball joints leak and fail, too.
As far as alignment goes, these DEFINITELY place the ball joint further back. Looking at the history of the alignment of the truck, and taking into account various influencing factors, my guess is they have about 3 degrees of caster correction built in. Again, a little strange that won't come out and say this. Here's the history on the caster settings from Nov of last year when the lift was installed by the PO.
Caster spec 2.6-4.1 deg.
Post lift, with OEM arms and settings L 1.4 deg. R 1.4 deg.
Post lift, OEM arms, after alignment L 2.3 deg. R 2.5 deg.
Post Freedom, pre alignment L 5.1 deg . R 5.5 deg. (the difference between this line and the one above is where I'm assuming the 3 deg. correction.)
Post Freedom, post alignment L 3.6 deg. R 3.8 deg.
The wheel is moved back quite a bit by the arms, and even more by the way they did the alignment. I did have to go back and zip-tie my fender liner and step stub back to get rid of some slight rubbing. All good now, I think. I could probably get a little more space and a little more caster by moving the lower arm forward a tad.
After hitting some driveway curbs to settle things in, and driving a hundred freeway miles so far, the extra caster is definitely worth it. I know I've said the truck handled "decently" in the past with lift and OEM arms being slightly under spec for caster, and it does - we've done several long road trips with it (over 1500 miles each), it is just SO much more stable, and doesn't require nearly as much monitoring as it did. It just goes where you point it now, the slight wander is much reduced. I put this up there with the pedal commander in terms of bang for the buck, because you feel it every single time you drive the truck, and not just off road.
I paid $390 for these, got them on Amazon. SPC's seem to be running $630 everywhere, unless you want to get the Mevotech ones on RockAuto, but you take your chances on getting a non-greasable joint in those, and some were the older, problematic version of the SPC ones. So I saved $240 bucks. Plus I feel more confident installing the non-adjustable ones. Not sure why. It's only one extra nut to crank down on the SPC's, but if you jack that up, bad things happen...
My local shop quoted my $1100 OTD for SPC's installed and aligned. So compared to that, I saved $600 by going with Freedom, and doing the install myself. Time to order CC and MTS, I guess?
A few pics
Anyway, I had some SPC's on my 100 series that I loved, and thought, meh, I'll just get those. But I NEVER used the camber adjustability, and once the caster position was set, it never changed either. I have a pretty generic setup, with Ironman Nitro lift, and 32" tires, OEM TRD wheels, etc. so nothing exotic. It's not like you're dorking with your adjustable ball joint every weekend, right? So if I could save enough to buy a CC or MTS unit, along with improving my caster, why not?
So first off, install was pretty straightforward. I just used the FSM instructions. Battery has to come out, and FSM shows you which wiring harness brace to remove by the tray. Passenger side was a little tighter, and I never removed the bolt from the engine bay. It is tight around the AC lines and the bolt head flange, but if you remove the bracket holding the AC lines, there's enough room to get the old arm out and the new arm in. I think everything else was pretty well covered in the FSM. I did have a hard time using my torque wrench at ride height. There just isn't much room between top of tire and bottom of fender. My specific torque wrench has enough play that I couldn't get a single click of the ratcheting mechanism in that space. So I used a regular 3/4 socket to tighten, and would jack up to get more room and check torque, until I hit the 85 lb/ft.
As to the arms themselves, the biggest knock on them in the bazillion online forums I read was that "they're cheap". That's it. No failures, no weirdness, etc. I mean really, it's two bushings, an arm, and a ball joint. When you compare it to an OEM arm, it's cheaper (about $120 per pair cheaper), beefier (each arm weighs about 3 lbs more than the OEM one) AND comes with a greasable ball joint that's replaceable. Can't find many (any?) instances of premature ball joint failure, which is more than you can say for SPC, right? The ball joint is supposedly proprietary, but available from Freedom for a pretty reasonable price. I also heard this as a knock frequently that since you couldn't put 555 joints back in it, then it must be bad? News flash, OEM ball joints leak and fail, too.
As far as alignment goes, these DEFINITELY place the ball joint further back. Looking at the history of the alignment of the truck, and taking into account various influencing factors, my guess is they have about 3 degrees of caster correction built in. Again, a little strange that won't come out and say this. Here's the history on the caster settings from Nov of last year when the lift was installed by the PO.
Caster spec 2.6-4.1 deg.
Post lift, with OEM arms and settings L 1.4 deg. R 1.4 deg.
Post lift, OEM arms, after alignment L 2.3 deg. R 2.5 deg.
Post Freedom, pre alignment L 5.1 deg . R 5.5 deg. (the difference between this line and the one above is where I'm assuming the 3 deg. correction.)
Post Freedom, post alignment L 3.6 deg. R 3.8 deg.
The wheel is moved back quite a bit by the arms, and even more by the way they did the alignment. I did have to go back and zip-tie my fender liner and step stub back to get rid of some slight rubbing. All good now, I think. I could probably get a little more space and a little more caster by moving the lower arm forward a tad.
After hitting some driveway curbs to settle things in, and driving a hundred freeway miles so far, the extra caster is definitely worth it. I know I've said the truck handled "decently" in the past with lift and OEM arms being slightly under spec for caster, and it does - we've done several long road trips with it (over 1500 miles each), it is just SO much more stable, and doesn't require nearly as much monitoring as it did. It just goes where you point it now, the slight wander is much reduced. I put this up there with the pedal commander in terms of bang for the buck, because you feel it every single time you drive the truck, and not just off road.
I paid $390 for these, got them on Amazon. SPC's seem to be running $630 everywhere, unless you want to get the Mevotech ones on RockAuto, but you take your chances on getting a non-greasable joint in those, and some were the older, problematic version of the SPC ones. So I saved $240 bucks. Plus I feel more confident installing the non-adjustable ones. Not sure why. It's only one extra nut to crank down on the SPC's, but if you jack that up, bad things happen...
My local shop quoted my $1100 OTD for SPC's installed and aligned. So compared to that, I saved $600 by going with Freedom, and doing the install myself. Time to order CC and MTS, I guess?A few pics
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