LCA replacement. Upgrade cam tabs?

[eclipsegst97]

Replacing my LCA with OEM. But wanted to upgrade the cam tabs to minimize any alignments needed after going off pavement. I do off-road, more overland but I do hit some nice trails.

Goliath
Is this a good upgrade ? I would like to avoid welding as I do have a welder and have never have. The gx is my weeklend rode and I don't want to have a lot of downtime with it

With this kit and new.lcas I should not need any additional hardware even if I have to cut off the cam bolts after 196k. Correct?

 

[HomersCanyonero]

I personally went with the original Taco Tabs. I just felt this design grabbed the tabs better to prevent movement in a hard event. No real evidence other than my own intuition.

Also, I had a muffler shop spot solder behind the oem cam tabs (aka wings) to prevent them from bending.

2 years and over a dozen outings to medium hard trails like Poison Spider, Golden Spike, etc, plus Gold Mountain, little John Bull, and miller Jeep trail in SoCal and no issues with my setup. No more alignments since doing this upgrade to taco tabs and spot welding the wings.

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[Rednexus]

I have wheeled my rig extensively and have never bent a cam tab or had the alignment slip. That being said, I can see how it's possible, but checking LCA bolt torque relatively often is also a good idea to make sure the cams don't get loose.

For my rig, I bought the Marlin Crawler LCA brace kit as extra insurance, but have not installed it. Instead, I'm going to - at some point in the future - go with the much more versatile but more expensive Coastal Off-Road LCA relocation kit, which completely replaces the OEM LCA mounts and allows the whole wheel to be moved forward.

(For anyone who reads this - I'll sell the Marlin Crawler kit at a loss since it's well past the return date - just PM me).

 

[eclipsegst97]

Thanks.... I have had the alignment be off after trips. Granted my LCAs are shot so that can contribute
Would love to find a muffler shop to tack weld but it's MA. And any frame "mods" are illegal. I did ask a well known muffler shop about it and they turned it down. Not a chain, a local well known.

 

[Rednexus]

Thanks.... I have had the alignment be off after trips. Granted my LCAs are shot so that can contribute
Would love to find a muffler shop to tack weld but it's MA. And any frame "mods" are illegal. I did ask a well known muffler shop about it and they turned it down. Not a chain, a local well known.

New LCAs and probably UCAs too will helped a lot. I took my rig on a nearly 3,000 mile trip on 2024....from MO to CO for several hundred miles of wheeling in the San Juan Mountains. i had it aligned before I left and again about 6 months later by the same local shop. The only thing that was off a tiny bit was the toe-in, caster and camber were still perfect.

IMO new suspension parts and properly-torqued LCAs is all you need for most rigs. Though, I'm problaby going to weld my existing LCA cam tabs for the time being until I can get the Coastal kit installed.

 

[iwashmycar]

Unless you beef up the tabs in some fashion, no beefier cam or bolt is going to do the trick.

Unless you add beefier frame tabs, those stop sign shaped ones are actually going to be WORSE I bet, because the OEM bolt/cams have dimples that hold to the frame, and the OEM cams are part of the bolts....those aftermarket ones will just slide and take out the whimpy frame tabs at the same time. They will depend on super solid tabs to keep place.

 

[Rednexus]

Unless you beef up the tabs in some fashion, no beefier cam or bolt is going to do the trick.

Unless you add beefier frame tabs, those stop sign shaped ones are actually going to be WORSE I bet, because the OEM bolt/cams have dimples that hold to the frame, and the OEM cams are part of the bolts....those aftermarket ones will just slide and take out the whimpy frame tabs at the same time. They will depend on super solid tabs to keep place.

IMO most of the time the tabs get flattened, it's probably because the LCA bolts are loose. A loose LCA bolt will make it easier for the cam to "jump" the tab and flatten it, as well as the rig to come out of alignment. I've had some big hits on mine and they are fine.

However a simple bead of weld down the side of the OEM tabs (like @HomersCanyonero posted) with the OEM eccentric cams should make the tab drastically stronger - in the event it takes a huge hit or the LCA bolt is loose - by substantially increasing the force required to fold the OEM cam tab over. I had actually not thought of doing that to mine until I saw that photo, but it clearly falls into the "why not" category of mods.

 

[HomersCanyonero]

IMO most of the time the tabs get flattened, it's probably because the LCA bolts are loose. A loose LCA bolt will make it easier for the cam to "jump" the tab and flatten it, as well as the rig to come out of alignment. I've had some big hits on mine and they are fine.

However a simple bead of weld down the side of the OEM tabs (like @HomersCanyonero posted) with the OEM eccentric cams should make the tab drastically stronger - in the event it takes a huge hit or the LCA bolt is loose - by substantially increasing the force required to fold the OEM cam tab over. I had actually not thought of doing that to mine until I saw that photo, but it clearly falls into the "why not" category of mods.

I can see how properly torqued cam bolts will hold up offroad. I didn’t know this before and I didn’t check the torque done by my alignment shop prior to the taco tab installation. I just know that I got misaligned way too quickly when hitting the trails.

These taco tabs cam bolts have not moved since installed. Maybe they were torqued properly and I have hit ruts hard and fast as well rock crawling downhill. At least twice I hit a rut so hard in Death Valley and Moab that I thought for sure I messed up alignment.

I checked a nothing had moved and drove home at 75 mph straight with no issues.

Anyways, adding the taco tabs and welding the winged tabs gets a silver medal for value and ease of install.

The gold medal goes to the beefier wings and support structures that can really beef up those wings with your favorite fixed cam bolt setup.

But for me, the silver medal is just enough for my level of off-roading and rock crawling.