**Aligning a Car: A Step-by-Step Guide**

When it comes to maintaining and repairing your vehicle, one of the most crucial aspects is alignment. Properly aligned wheels can improve fuel efficiency, handling, and overall performance. In this article, we'll take you through the process of aligning a car, from preparing the necessary tools to testing out the results.

**Preparing for Alignment**

To begin, we need to extend the wheel's camber to push the rear of the wheel outward. This is done by moving the wheel in the same direction as the nut, which is upward. To achieve this, we use flat spots on the tire, which are small indentations that can be hard to see on camera but are crucial for alignment. We'll repeat this process on both sides of the car.

**Understanding Flat Spots**

Flat spots refer to these small indentations on the tires that can make or break an alignment job. They're essential to ensure accurate measurements and correct positioning of the wheels. The goal is to achieve about eighth inch toe in on each side, which requires careful measurement and adjustment.

**Testing Out Alignment**

Once we've completed the alignment process, we'll take the car for a test drive. This allows us to check if the center of the steering wheel is straight. If it's not, we can adjust the wheels accordingly. It may seem counterintuitive, but turning the steering wheel in one direction will help correct any misalignment issues.

**Driving with Alignment Issues**

If the steering wheel is turned slightly to one side, it means the wheels are aligned incorrectly. To correct this, we'll add toe to that specific wheel. This process involves understanding the relationship between steering wheel direction and wheel alignment. It's not rocket science, but it does require attention to detail.

**The Importance of Alignment**

Properly aligned wheels can significantly impact your car's performance. Incorrect alignment can lead to reduced fuel efficiency, uneven tire wear, and compromised handling. By taking the time to align your car, you'll not only improve its overall performance but also prolong the life of your tires.

**Additional Tips and Considerations**

Drifters often overlook the importance of alignment due to their driving style. However, this can lead to issues with the rear wheels rubbing against each other or the suspension components. To avoid these problems, we use grippier tires that allow us to maintain better control on the track. Remember, always follow proper maintenance procedures to ensure your car's longevity.

**Betting on Alignment**

In a lighthearted moment, we took bets on whether our car could handle speed bumps. The result was impressive, with only minor rubbing on the tire stickers. This experience highlights the importance of accurate alignment in maintaining tire health and overall vehicle performance.

**The Importance of Maintenance and Content Creation**

As content creators, we need to balance our passion for driving with the need to create engaging content. In this case, I chose to take a day off from work to focus on installing coilovers and testing their effects on my car's performance. By creating high-quality content, I hope to inspire others to learn from my experiences and share tips on how to improve their own vehicles.

**Sharing Your Experience**

If you've learned something new or had a good laugh while watching this video, please leave a comment below! Sharing your experience with fellow car enthusiasts can help spread awareness about the importance of proper alignment.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso you can fit when i turn this bolt yes uh all right boys today the celsius getting some love it's been a while you might know that i have this car you might not she's a gem and today we're gonna do some work on here i heard a little knocking noise in the rear maybe it's my suspension get it all right boys we're doing a coilover install today i kind of want to take a little bit of a different approach we got a set of bc's off-the-shelf vr series for this car and i wanted to make a video kind of highlighting some of the tips and tricks if it's your first time installing coilovers or maybe if you think you're a pro some tips and tricks if you want to avoid headache or save some time i'm not a celsiur expert by any means this basically uh jdm ls400 mike knows how to do coilovers on it i don't we'll see if there's any tips and tricks relative to the chassis but i'm more focused on the generic stuff like making sure that you can get the right ride height set up what do you do about alignment afterwards what if you don't have the right tools we'll go into all that all right first mistake we may have already made make sure before you get into any of this that you have the right lug nut tool please don't have locks please don't have locks please don't have sick if you have like wheel keys or something make sure you have your wheel key and if you do have wookies and you're using your wheel key don't lose it you'll be miserable it sucks cutting wheel locks off cars sucks obviously we have a nice shop here anything and everything that we're doing could be done on jack stands use jack stands don't be an idiot i feel like every person knows someone that was working on a car and had a car fall off jack stands or fall off the hydraulic jack or a hydraulic jack fail so it's not worth the laziness find something to put in your car cement bricks spare tire frozen vegetables wood i guess wood works yeah good split though careful that against the grain not with the grain that's the key mike to be successful in life you need to go against the grain that's what i'm saying oh you you can't do it with the grain unless it'll split in life don't go with the grain go against the grain words for mike devine himself most cars are metric so you'll probably need some metric tools whether you have a tool kit or you want to like look up a diy for your specific car to make sure you have the tools first if you're working on like a bmw or something or a german car you might have some torx bits that you need i know i've run into that issue before and then you go borrow them from someone so try to make sure you have all the tools first you don't wind up if it's a daily with your car half down for you know a day or two and missing work or something um if you can get a car to borrow while you're working on your car would make a lot less stressful um pretty much every single person i know is always running that situation where you're like trying to do something in your car that you think is going to take an hour and then you're running like a seized bolt or something that ends up making everything take forever and then you're screwed working at 2am at night trying to get a rig stuff just you can drive to school which was my case or work the next day also don't try to be a fan wear gloves girls don't think it's cool if you work on cars without gloves they think it's cool when you come home and you have clean hands not when you have like four inches of grease underneath your fingernails preferably over rubber gloves i used to use like the actual cloth gloves that you can get at like autozone when you're doing coilover stuff you're going to end up punching a bunch of arms and a bunch of underneath your car and it's sick to not split your knuckles it's easy to be lazy but if you're prepared like it is so nice at the end of the day just like and then you can like pick your nose with confidence you need to worry about getting like gross up there you know what i'm saying i'm gonna put this on the lift you know tools you need i have no idea what i need but it doesn't matter because i have a full box right here 10 14 17 19. and hammer okay maybe some wd-40 maybe a torch maybe a flathead this thing's pretty clean but you northeastern boys if you've never jacked up your car before look up where the jacket from because you can actually get up and it sucks when we have to keep buying these s chassis where the pinch welds are because someone jacked it up in the wrong spot just in case we end up buying your car in the future don't it up usually cars will have like a little reinforced area where there'll be two marks on the pinch welds you kind of know where to put your jack stands um it can be kind of a pain if you need to get your jack stands there and you need to like jack up from your subframe or whatever if you have a bmw you're sorry they suck to jack up because you got to put like a thing in the hole and then you can't get anything under it because it's got all this plastic stuff if you got a bmw i wouldn't even waste your time putting coilovers on because chances are you have some maintenance that you need to do and that's more important and it's going to cost you a lot more than lowering your car okay i know there's someone watching this out there that had a broken window regulator on like an e chassis and they still went out and bought coilovers fix your window why am i lowering the cells here you might ask well you know some people do it for looks there's fancy boys they like to go to car shows with dragon frame and then all their friends give them the instagram and tick tock likes and that's cool i respect that some people are for performance you know you want to take corners better put grip your tires change your alignment whatever lower your center of gravity for this elsier a little bit of both your boy doesn't want to show up looking like this if you can fit two fists chief that ain't it so i want to be looking cool this is my my airport grocery getter i drive this thing actually quite a bit i want to look cool i want to have some decent fitment on it but also on the performance side there are many times i find myself with friends with fast cars whether it's someone driving a r34 a turbo s nsx behind me and i'm trying to leave them in the dust i'm trying to show them that i got that driver mod so i want a little bit more performance as you can see by those first clips there's a little bit of body roll some stuff going on i can't feel the crispness of the suspension and honestly these cars have such soft suspension from the factory that i have multiple times gotten motion sick driving it because it feels like you were driving uh like cruise ship you're just like it's very accurate actually yeah it's cool for like the first five minutes but when you don't have music it feels like you are going to go insane whether you're on jack stands or lift rock if this truly is your first time doing like a major thing on your car don't worry like it is not that bad you should be fine one thing that if you plan to work on your car a lot that is extremely convenient to have is a cordless impact i will say it doesn't really matter what brand you have at this point most of them are pretty good obviously milwaukee has a huge lineup of tools and that is why we use them but in the end of the day they're all pretty much the same just beware that's wrong size whatever brand you choose you'll end up getting more of their tools so do your research if you go to buy your first portable impact make sure that that's the brand you want to stick with so you can share all the same batteries because that's the expensive part they make these fancy little sockets that have clear protector on them so if you don't want to scratch up your beautiful rims look at that no chance of scratching these rims oh whoops don't put that in it's definitely going in audrey's aside i legitimately thought about having three pcos convert these into uh three-piece wheels but not a big fan of the faces no i could pick a better wheel to do that with which i may or may not have done it may or may not be coming soon if you have a bad back this is a good time to have a friend that can lift things for you thanks mike yes sir damn look at those brakes mike was telling me a lot of people actually steal the brakes off this for other stuff i think some chaser people use them they make brackets for mark fours they make brackets for like isf's and gs300s and sc300 mark iv like a supra you're saying that super people want the brakes from my daily traditionally you'll have two different styles of front suspension at least in most of the cars that i've ever lowered you have one that has an upper arm or you'll have one that's mcpherson where there's none of this and it just goes directly to the shock i feel like the upper arm stuff can be a little bit more of a pain to like kind of wiggle the shock out we'll see in this case if there's enough clearance or evolved to unbolt stuff and i'll kind of give you tips and tricks for how to break stuff loose i've done coils on everything from like an s13 to an e-chassis to even doing lowering springs on a brand new turbo s and nine times out of ten it's the same oh look at that beauty the sharks are supposed to hold the hood up right yep they're supposed to do that i got ripped off i thought this thing was mint that's a big engine huh four liters four cams yeah you only got one broke the pitch after my drop yeah i like that yeah hopefully you don't have a strut brace if you have a nice car it probably has a strut brace going from here to here our end is way too big for that if you have a strobe racer and there's probably probably also tiny so that sucks i see why you need to overcompensate with coilovers we're cheating again using power tools but i get a haircut in like an hour so i got to get a on quick i don't know the order if you should take these out or not take these out first i pretty much always do i like to just take chances also if you're putting coilovers on your car you've never changed your oil you're an idiot change your oil now you can do this this is the fun part all right it looks like there might be a little bit of hope that we can actually finagle this thing out some cars won't have a lot of droop a lot of times you can fix that by unbolting one of the sway bar end links and then a little give you a little bit more droop we'll see if we need all that droop in this i don't know if we need oh man i was supposed to do suspension bushings and that's i don't know if i'm enough time to do that in this video we might have to continue that tomorrow if all you have your suspension off you have a sudden urge like every other male the first time they work on their car don't worry we've all done it do you paint your brake calipers don't paint your rotors we've all seen the memes don't be that guy please your biggest enemy with this is going to be damaging bolts threads stripping things so if for whatever reason you need to tap a bolt or something put the nut on a little bit and tap the nut because if you tap the threads and screw them up you're gonna have bad time a lot of times you run into an issue like this where you can't get your shock out uh i always try the last thing possible to pop things at a ball joints just because they can be a pain if we were going to take this spindle out of the ball joint i would pull the cotter pin out i would take the nut off and then rather than hitting the threads you can usually just smack a hammer on the side of this and that'll kind of like break the threads free and then it drops i should actually just do that instead i was going to be lazy and just take like the lower bracket off maybe we'll do that just for illustrative purposes you northeastern boys it ain't gonna be that easy i love how because i'm from the northeast i only talk about northeast like anywhere else that gets snow irrelevant don't put your eyes under there because it's gonna be messy you also don't want to hit this boot because if you do you're going to end up like splitting it i'm kind of putting pressure on this with my arm as i pull i might be able to do it going down but i think it works better if i do this there is a special tool that you could use to like separate ball joints on cars but i've heard that they split boots so i've never used them ah it worked not bad boy dude yeah my dust boot was blown it's a good thing i'm replacing it uh you guys can find this on my ebay store if you're interested these are great for ass chassis if you want more grip one thing i forgot to mention be mindful of your brake lines i know some cars people actually have to modify or extend or relocate brake lines when they do coil overs or move things because like if i want to go drop this out and i just tore the brake line you had a really bad time there'd be no taking cool pictures at your 7-eleven if you got broken brakes just in case you accidentally hit the threads it might be a good idea to leave your nut on so on this car we are going to be using bc's off-the-shelf br series a lot of people always ask us because we do sell coilovers at lg mfg and drift hq for recommendations for a street light track car you know a little bit of spirited inspired driving i will say 99 of the time the off-the-shelf spring rates are targeted around that however i do highly recommend if you have a car that you want the best ride possible and plan to do track and street driving going up to the ds series what that does is it gives you a digressive damper and that'll let you get a better ride while also having the best performance possible however the br spec is still a fantastic coilover one of the best you can get for the money and i think i have zero intention of going over speed bumps so i'm gonna start with this thing as low as i possibly can and we can always go up from there usually if you're a super low boy bc sells extreme low if you've got an engine swap we can help you figure out what spring rates to go with just send us a message and we'll take care of you if you don't have a vice you can probably get away with doing something like this we do have a vice but i'm lazy and devices on the other side of the shop so very very very important if you're using a set of bc's i don't know if other coilovers are adjusted differently you need to adjust from the actual body of the shock don't mess with your preload if you do mess with your preload i'll show you in a second how to set it back where it's intended to be but don't mess with that right now just worry about getting this boy wherever you want it uh some like a little tip i have if you kind of know roughly where you want it you can use little marks on the shock rather than counting lines say you wanted to go max high you can always use these little holes in the coilover as a rule of thumb for the minimum amount you want before it starts getting sketchy and then you know all four shocks are the same however as we'll get into our ride height and fitment stuff you will find that on your car even if you have all the shocks the same length you'll likely be lower in certain areas cars aren't perfectly weight distributed on all four corners sometimes you'll have a little bit of jacking due to suspension geometry and weird stuff going on maybe your car was in a crash before so it's good to have a starting point but understand that you might end up adjusting them slightly different and that's perfectly okay in our case though we're going to start all the way down because i'm trying to look cool if you are going all the way down try to go all the way down and then like do a half turn back otherwise if god forbid it seizes there it's going to be a mega nightmare to break it loose so mike has that happened to you before yeah he's like he's like nodding behind the captain yeah so like i said if you are dumb and you messed up and you adjusted from the wrong place you've now affected your preload so the rule of thumb with bcs basically go until you get a spring snug like you just kind of tighten the top upper ring by hand okay tighten the lower one into it hold the shock with one hand take it turn turn turn turn turn until you can fit one wrench between it that's about how much preload they're intended to come with and then you're not messing them up and then you can be confident that it is riding like it's supposed to even though you are an idiot my friend logoface now always i mean it doesn't matter but pc gets stoked when you do that looks good for fixtures actually speaking which i should take a photo remind me okay so this is the fun part and now you got to get that all the way up there if you're really strong you can like push it up there but again the sway bar might fight you out of mine hooked up probably disconnect yours uh if you want to be legit or you can use a trans jack or you can lower your car you can use normal jack just if you do it don't do it from the brake rotor jack it up from like the knuckle or something where you can get good pressure on so i'm good to put this back together since when i bring this one up it's gonna be another side up i'll do the other side just because they're attached to the sway bar so if you want to be a nerd you can look up torque specs and stuff but i've never had an issue from over tightening bolts only from not having them tight enough for them coming loose so do with that information while you will and don't forget your cotter pins yeah they're there for a reason we have reached a stance problem it is not possible to put these on at max low because if you look up here pay attention your suspension components when you do this because this upper control arm is already almost touching up top which means that we'll have to either raise it or if you were a true stance boy you could shorten your spindle which would then bring this arm angle down or i've seen some very ghetto people just cut a window up on top of the strut tower so that that uh upper control arm doesn't hit but in our case we'll just raise it up a little bit we got nothing to prove i like to use a something that i can use as a guide for real thumb so i can get them equal this i'm going to want more than with that so i'll just grab a household tool like a block of wood and this can be our essentially feeler gauge to make sure we get both sides the same there we go before i did anything down i'm gonna test fit a wheel real quick just to see roughly where we're at hello it's the next day before we continued with the coilover install i mentioned to adam that it's crucial to tuck the front harnesses that are in the fender wells for ls400s s chassis toyotas everything like that applications different on some cars some of them don't have the harnesses ran through the insides of the fenders but in this case this car does have it so i've already done this job on my ls400 so i'm familiar with it i already took the whole front end apart and the fender off you can see this is the harness that usually runs up inside of here and when you go low you rub through it and then half your car stops working and you have a real bad time so what i did was do it the right way cut a little notch here a little notch here disconnect the harness so now i can flip the harness up and over this lip out of the way of the wheel and the harness will be safe so i'm going to finish that up do the other side and then we can continue with the coilovers depending on the car sometimes the rear come easier sometimes it can be harder in the case of this one you need to pull the whole rear interior apart just to get to the actual strut towers here sometimes they'll be in your trunk sometimes they'll be easier to access other times it's a pain but usually you'll have three bolts on top some cars you might even have two bolts in here i forget which car was like that but one i did was like that and then um in this case just one bolt through the shock then we should be able to wiggle it right out all right let's see is she gonna cooperate i love that if you ever have a suspension bolt that's like giving you a pain to get out you can always stuff a wrench in kind of like this this one's already broken loose and then kinda hit it like this to get it to come loose good little trick that comes in handy harnesses in the front are all tucked passenger side driver side good to go if you guys didn't catch it already we have a spicy new drift car at drift hq and there's some footage that actually was uploaded yesterday so if you guys want to go check out the drift hq channel you find out more about this thing but get ready for it it's a spicy one all right now's the fun part you've got all your coils in and it looks like the ride height should be good but now we're gonna physically mount the wheels these are a set of bbs lms that came with my 34 gtr had them listed for sale no one offered me what they were worth so i decided i would keep them and sure enough i have a good reason to keep them i think they'll kind of look decent with it they're not super aggressive so i shouldn't need a whole ton of camber or need to roll the fenders or anything um but we're gonna put on and then we're gonna check to make sure that we don't have any rubbing issues and i'll show you guys a quick easy way to do that and then we will go ahead and start adjusting oh well yeah watch me put this wheel on oh yeah yeah my arm hair is looking extra different today thanks mike not bad evan is uh you know it's a little sunk but hassle free fitment hassle free fitment well we'll we'll see unless you're in her lips and your quarters say otherwise but i think i think it'll be good just to be clear as well gold wouldn't be my first choice of lug nut but all you might have bought all the black and silver ones from drift hq this is all they got left we got more coming in but you know i've seen people do this before like a block of wood on the rim without a tire to figure out what tires to run um there's a couple websites i usually use will theyfit.com and you can type in all your wheel specs and everything to try to figure out what tires you want to run to like move your wheel in or out if you have to change offset but make sure your handbrake is pulled or it's in park not the best thing to do this on a lift but that's gonna be all right dude if it sits like this that would be so titties and it'll probably sit more like bro probably a little bit closer it's just gonna okay that might just ever so slightly rub yeah no it's gonna rub you think yeah for sure what if i get a little candy out of it if you can get a little bit of camber that's fine but it's still just gonna inevitably hit somewhere here it's like on that weird lip though but i think i think it's going to keep cameron in let's watch him bro it's like not it's like barely touching yeah like i could probably grinder that you could we should also take the the little protective piece off the side i like that i mean it's a nice aesthetic thing it protects it gets in the way it protects it also attack well what if the the paint's gonna not look the best underneath it but dude that's titty fitment right there i don't think it's gonna rub if i'm being honest i think i just lucked out with the most perfect hella flush with me in the first try senior stance boy over here dude i literally feel like i could just like grinder it and then it would be good now the tire will do that itself true so i don't even need to touch it i'll probably just go away did you say the front has a pre-roll yeah like the feeder you know what a pre-roll is right yeah honestly dude i mean it definitely has a little bit more poke in front but i think we might be okay it's only it was mcpherson technically i have jzx upper a arms that are probably a little smaller but they might work they're very similar to these so pain to change normally i'd use ramps or wood but we were having a hard time finding this so broken gram lights will be helpful for us to determine ride height without having to take it all the way off the way what do you think mike something so this is time where you check your fitment see if you need to make any adjustments millennials these days the back we already know cities yeah for the front i just don't know how much it's gonna go in front's sitting on the fender is it yeah yeah the back though the back is fine the back looks to be pretty good yeah the front's got to come up definitely yeah you're rolling them right now yeah it looks great yeah i mean this honestly like this is on the ground just for the photos yeah be sick i just don't think i could turn nope you can't even roll really i mean yeah you would just annihilate that fender god it looks so good though i wish i saw it on the ground what do you think of the rear do you think i should come up with the rear just leave it i would leave it the wheel fitment itself is perfect it's just that tires too beefy this never happens guys wow you see what i'm saying yeah that's pretty impressive i couldn't even fit a piece of angel hair pasta in there is that your favorite time so honestly like for not being a stan scott myself i'm pretty happy with this fitment problem is this is the the fun everyone hop in the back let's go out to lunch car oh you can check my fitbit yeah got that amex dang don't even fit the a max yeah try one of the try one of the other cards oh there you go you're a funny guy um all right all jokes aside this is a good little trick so oh yeah stop stop stop so oh no there goes your special little ziggler no i loved them man they were so cool i mean he said no jumping yeah this was inevitable sorry this was inevitable it needed to come off but adam wanted to keep it now we'll see if we can keep it i think i need to come up with the car anyway so what i was going to say is you know there you go look you never know it happened i just don't want to make contact with the rim that boy gonna get to his destination honestly if we were true stance but we would have gone with stiffer springs but in this scenario i wanted to preserve the ride quality so i think in the rear we only have what are they eights yeah which isn't very stiff at all so i'll come up a little bit and that'll also let me have a little bit more room in the front so i'll show you a cool way to measure that out there's a lot of guess and check work involved with getting the right ride height and part of the reason is because of the different motion ratios with your suspension if you want to say raise this an inch it's probably not going to be exactly an inch on the shock that you need to extend it so i'm gonna show you a trick to remove the guesswork from it so we'll take a quick measurement here when the car is on the ground they call the static it is about an inch and a quarter i feel like ideally i would like to have it come up to let's say what do you think mike an engine three quarters or two inches oh i would say two just for your uh ride quality okay so that means we need to come up three quarters of an inch higher so now we'll take a measurement at full droop it's about three inches so we can go we can pull the wheel off we can adjust the shock until it gets to about three and three quarters and then we'll know that we've pretty much got it where we want it to be on the ground and we'll make that same change all around if your coilovers have been on your car you're getting them used make sure you clean all the threads first uh sometimes when you're doing this as well spraying a little bit of wd-40 or some sort of lubricant can help you but my usual way to go about it you don't necessarily need to use a wrench especially if they're new i like to take my hand go like this and then just spin the shock like this well i try not to spin that lower ring so i can view it kind of to get an idea of how much i'm extending the shock you might not be able to do this on all your cars if there's a lot of load on it but when you can do this it saves you so much time this is the time when having gloves is convenient because you'll end up smashing your knuckles when you're trying to just get one thread at a time and a lot of times there's a lot of stuff in your way if you're raising the car you'll want to use the lower ring and you'll want to spin that basically you want to spin whichever ring is goes up against the other ring so if we were going down we would spin the top ring otherwise you'll end up loosening the two rings that lock your uh preload which if you do by accident i told you how to fix it so don't stress too much but yeah unfortunately this one isn't as easy is my oil pan touching the ground or am i clear now you're good all right i don't know you can still go lower then i'm not scraping no you got like two inches off the ground all right first start see what she sounds like yo it sounds different lowered i think it's like the acoustics echoing off the ground now the most important step of lowering your car that a lot of people will overlook uh for a multiple different reasons getting an alignment so when you lower your car it can be difficult to find a place that will align your car because now it's low and it doesn't fit on a lot of alignment racks or maybe you don't want to spend the money so i'm going to show you a way that you can align the car yourself so right when you're done if you're going to drive to work school the next morning it may not be perfect but you can get it pretty damn you're close these are toe plates so what they do is they press up against the wheel nice and flat and then you're able to have a measuring point so you can measure the distance in the front of the wheel to the other side and the rear of the wheel to the other side the idea is when you lower a car you end up changing the suspension geometry let's say the wheels will have minimal tire wear if they're parallel sometimes when you lower cars they can tow out or they can even tow in and what that does not the camber very common misconception the camera doesn't wear out your tires like crazy but if you lower your car and you don't correct the toe this your tires are literally fighting each other the entire time you'll probably get a little bit worse gas mileage but more than anything you're just going to eat through your tires and if you have any little bit of camber it's just going to annihilate them super fast the rule of thumb in the rear typically on most rear wheel drive cars they'll run about an eighth inch of toe in that just gives stability so what we'll do we'll put them up and let's see where it's at lowering it without adjusting anything so if you look at both pieces of measuring tape you can see the number in front is significantly smaller than the number in back pretty much a half inch smaller a half inch of towing is way too much we run that on some drift cars but for a street car you will annihilate through your tires it will not drive nice if you are cheap and you don't want to buy toe plates you can use tape measures with anything that is flat that you can use as a measuring surface if you got a piece of steel laying around you can just press that up against the wheel and have a friend hold it if you have two by fours that are relatively straight if you have a cutting board or some people will even measure from the actual inside of the rim to the other side inside of the rim uh just the toe plates and the idea of having something with slits in them just makes a little easier because if you're on your own you can have it stay on the other side you can look and measure so now that we know that we're a half inch way too much in we need to bring the wheels back out and i'm going to show you how to do that so depending on your car uh you may or may not be able to get enough adjustment out of the stock arm most japanese cars and i mean pretty much all cars have eccentric bolts and i'll show you what these do but certain cars like 350z you need to buy adjustable tow arms otherwise you can't correct it enough when you lower it it's always a good idea to kind of mark your starting point just just to kind of have a point of reference we're going to try to turn both sides the same uh that'll be really helpful since we're using toe plates since it's hard to kind of keep the car from like crab walking if you adjust one side too much so if you watch the arm with these bolts work i want this wheel to toe out so i need this arm to get shorter so when i turn this this way so you'll see the arm goes in when i turn this bolt you'll see as i turn the arm the wheel will go outward and then we'll do the same this side now that your car is lower uh you're gonna have less absorption so you're probably gonna start to blow out bushings and have other issues and things going on it's always a good idea whenever car is in the air kind of shake the wheel side to side shake it up and down hit it a couple times if you feel any player movement have a buddy do it and then look on the inside put your finger by any ball joint and see if you can find where the play is it's pretty easy to figure out whether it's like wheel bearing ball joint bushing etc so rear should hopefully be good if not we might need another adjustment and we'll start working on the front i will say we've done this a lot so i'm not surprised that we got a perfect first try but uh we have right now like 1 16 toe in i'd be fine with anything from like zero to an eighth zero if you're putting down a lot of horsepower will be kind of sketchy because the car won't want to go straight and might have a little more tendency of walking around but you never want toe out in the rear ever unless you're done this side uh has about a half inch of toe out um in the front if you have like a car that you spirited drive and like you want really sharp turn in i might run up to like an eighth inch toe out on a street car but traditionally on most cars you'll want to run like an eighth inch of toe in and that'll kind of give you some stability and the car won't be pulling all over the place on the highway or high speed also just to add like this may seem like archaic and like oh this is not going to be as good but i'll tell you uh it is probably just as if not sometimes more accurate than some alignment racks there are plenty of times i've had a car aligned somewhere and then i've put toe plates on it and it's been wildly off we're lucky we've had our friend eric over at pep boys and then we've had lewis over at phillips in the past who are both great guys and know what they're doing and are great at aligning lower cars and are great with their alignment rack but unfortunately there are a lot of places out there that are not the best with their alignment racks and their mechanics don't have much experience so a 50 set of toe plates might be well worth it in the long run so we've got a half inch toe out depending on if your tie rod is in the front or in the back we now need to bring the wheels inward and uh traditionally speaking don't don't quote me on this too much usually if i remember correctly i think each flat spot usually comes out to be around an eighth so we're gonna start with about four to five flat spots and i'll show you what i mean by that it's good to kind of remember how much each flat spot equates to in your toes so you aren't guessing and checking a bajillion times just make sure you do the same on both sides and your steering wheel should stay straight for the most part so you'll see the tire it's kind of at a steep angle uh they make roll center correctors for this because when you hit bumps it's going to make your steering wheel do a bunch of weird stuff we don't really care about that i never remember whether like you go up or down to tighten or loosen on each side so i usually try both until i can get it to come loose and i say about five flat spots so the easiest way that i remember this if the nut backs off going up and comes off then that means everything will pull in if you go the other way so i usually use the nut as my frame of reference so i don't forget which way it goes and since we're trying to get the front to go in we need to extend this out to push the rear of the wheel out so we're gonna go the same direction as the nut which is upward and by flat spots i mean these little like flat spots here it's probably really hard to see on camera but they're there i promise so we'll go one two three four five and then we'll lock it down and do the same on the other side a good thing to remember if you went down on the other side to loosen you're gonna go up on this side to loosen confusing but it'll make sense once you're looking at it underneath the car if this is a drift car be perfect we have like a tad hair out so what i like to do at this point since i know now one flat spot is all i need in each side to get it about eighth inch toe in i'll take the car and i'll drive it to make sure the center of the steering wheel is straight if it's not straight it is going to be so physically hard for me to explain this in video but if you just think about it really hard if your steering wheel is turned a little bit to the right when you're going that means your wheels are straight you would want to turn them a little bit to the left to correct it so then you would either add a little toe out to that wheel it's gonna sound like a bunch of mumbo jumbo but just think really hard if your steering wheel is crooked you can basically turn it straight and then toe in that wheel that you just turned outward and then that would effectively straighten your wheel without you having to mess with the wheel and then it makes sense okay all right thank you i needed that affirmation yeah yeah appreciate it all right toe's good we're all set you didn't need an alignment you're good to drive you won't eat up your tires your car will drive normal and i hope you learned something uh we're gonna go test this out drive it around go take some pretty photos and see how it looks am i hitting no no god this thing is so titties bro he's too excited all right let the record hold even though you guys are watching this after we've aligned it we haven't aligned it in this clip because we're trying to use daylight that noise that you hear is the tires fighting each other because of tow which makes sense because of what i just explained to you guys align your cars they're also brand new appreciate our hard work god it looks so tasteful i love it i know it's so simple it's like nothing over the top it doesn't look like i'm trying to prove anything by being like super low and just like whipping my uh my testosterone all over the place you did all that for nothing he put my head back here oh no i don't know his head's pretty big oh yeah remember how i talked about like not doing this right before work or school i have to take this to the airport tomorrow so it's actually important that it's i'm gonna take bets let's take beds yeah there's a pretty big speed bump there let's take bets you you are you are good on speed bumps dude hey hop in let's go test out the ride all right rub test not too bad no like like for a stan's car i'm driving pretty aggressively and god the turning is so sharp now the problem is i also put grippier tires on it so like it'll definitely rub if i make it rough that noise is the tire stickers us drifters don't take them off we let nature do that for us also if you take them off and you drive through the shop it gets all the glue on the floor stand i will tell you firsthand no stance guy ever does like this why because they're always nervous what if they're trying to run away from the hitters i hope you like this video it's a little bit different i've been wanting to install coilers on this car and for me to take a day of my time to work on a car it needs to be something that i can make content of otherwise i'll just never get around to it so i wanted to make something a little bit different and hopefully some of you guys learned something maybe you gotta laugh maybe it was complete waste your time by the way if you liked it like the video leave a comment maybe share it with a friend that's stupid that's gonna make one of the mistakes i mentioned in this video and help some people out i appreciate you guys tomorrow taking this baby to the airport and i'm flying up to drive one of my favorite tracks that i haven't driven in a long time with a really good friend hope you guys are gonna like that video stay tuned it'll be up not tomorrow but the next day there's gonna be a good one oh yeah stop stop stop so oh no when you sayso you can fit when i turn this bolt yes uh all right boys today the celsius getting some love it's been a while you might know that i have this car you might not she's a gem and today we're gonna do some work on here i heard a little knocking noise in the rear maybe it's my suspension get it all right boys we're doing a coilover install today i kind of want to take a little bit of a different approach we got a set of bc's off-the-shelf vr series for this car and i wanted to make a video kind of highlighting some of the tips and tricks if it's your first time installing coilovers or maybe if you think you're a pro some tips and tricks if you want to avoid headache or save some time i'm not a celsiur expert by any means this basically uh jdm ls400 mike knows how to do coilovers on it i don't we'll see if there's any tips and tricks relative to the chassis but i'm more focused on the generic stuff like making sure that you can get the right ride height set up what do you do about alignment afterwards what if you don't have the right tools we'll go into all that all right first mistake we may have already made make sure before you get into any of this that you have the right lug nut tool please don't have locks please don't have locks please don't have sick if you have like wheel keys or something make sure you have your wheel key and if you do have wookies and you're using your wheel key don't lose it you'll be miserable it sucks cutting wheel locks off cars sucks obviously we have a nice shop here anything and everything that we're doing could be done on jack stands use jack stands don't be an idiot i feel like every person knows someone that was working on a car and had a car fall off jack stands or fall off the hydraulic jack or a hydraulic jack fail so it's not worth the laziness find something to put in your car cement bricks spare tire frozen vegetables wood i guess wood works yeah good split though careful that against the grain not with the grain that's the key mike to be successful in life you need to go against the grain that's what i'm saying oh you you can't do it with the grain unless it'll split in life don't go with the grain go against the grain words for mike devine himself most cars are metric so you'll probably need some metric tools whether you have a tool kit or you want to like look up a diy for your specific car to make sure you have the tools first if you're working on like a bmw or something or a german car you might have some torx bits that you need i know i've run into that issue before and then you go borrow them from someone so try to make sure you have all the tools first you don't wind up if it's a daily with your car half down for you know a day or two and missing work or something um if you can get a car to borrow while you're working on your car would make a lot less stressful um pretty much every single person i know is always running that situation where you're like trying to do something in your car that you think is going to take an hour and then you're running like a seized bolt or something that ends up making everything take forever and then you're screwed working at 2am at night trying to get a rig stuff just you can drive to school which was my case or work the next day also don't try to be a fan wear gloves girls don't think it's cool if you work on cars without gloves they think it's cool when you come home and you have clean hands not when you have like four inches of grease underneath your fingernails preferably over rubber gloves i used to use like the actual cloth gloves that you can get at like autozone when you're doing coilover stuff you're going to end up punching a bunch of arms and a bunch of underneath your car and it's sick to not split your knuckles it's easy to be lazy but if you're prepared like it is so nice at the end of the day just like and then you can like pick your nose with confidence you need to worry about getting like gross up there you know what i'm saying i'm gonna put this on the lift you know tools you need i have no idea what i need but it doesn't matter because i have a full box right here 10 14 17 19. and hammer okay maybe some wd-40 maybe a torch maybe a flathead this thing's pretty clean but you northeastern boys if you've never jacked up your car before look up where the jacket from because you can actually get up and it sucks when we have to keep buying these s chassis where the pinch welds are because someone jacked it up in the wrong spot just in case we end up buying your car in the future don't it up usually cars will have like a little reinforced area where there'll be two marks on the pinch welds you kind of know where to put your jack stands um it can be kind of a pain if you need to get your jack stands there and you need to like jack up from your subframe or whatever if you have a bmw you're sorry they suck to jack up because you got to put like a thing in the hole and then you can't get anything under it because it's got all this plastic stuff if you got a bmw i wouldn't even waste your time putting coilovers on because chances are you have some maintenance that you need to do and that's more important and it's going to cost you a lot more than lowering your car okay i know there's someone watching this out there that had a broken window regulator on like an e chassis and they still went out and bought coilovers fix your window why am i lowering the cells here you might ask well you know some people do it for looks there's fancy boys they like to go to car shows with dragon frame and then all their friends give them the instagram and tick tock likes and that's cool i respect that some people are for performance you know you want to take corners better put grip your tires change your alignment whatever lower your center of gravity for this elsier a little bit of both your boy doesn't want to show up looking like this if you can fit two fists chief that ain't it so i want to be looking cool this is my my airport grocery getter i drive this thing actually quite a bit i want to look cool i want to have some decent fitment on it but also on the performance side there are many times i find myself with friends with fast cars whether it's someone driving a r34 a turbo s nsx behind me and i'm trying to leave them in the dust i'm trying to show them that i got that driver mod so i want a little bit more performance as you can see by those first clips there's a little bit of body roll some stuff going on i can't feel the crispness of the suspension and honestly these cars have such soft suspension from the factory that i have multiple times gotten motion sick driving it because it feels like you were driving uh like cruise ship you're just like it's very accurate actually yeah it's cool for like the first five minutes but when you don't have music it feels like you are going to go insane whether you're on jack stands or lift rock if this truly is your first time doing like a major thing on your car don't worry like it is not that bad you should be fine one thing that if you plan to work on your car a lot that is extremely convenient to have is a cordless impact i will say it doesn't really matter what brand you have at this point most of them are pretty good obviously milwaukee has a huge lineup of tools and that is why we use them but in the end of the day they're all pretty much the same just beware that's wrong size whatever brand you choose you'll end up getting more of their tools so do your research if you go to buy your first portable impact make sure that that's the brand you want to stick with so you can share all the same batteries because that's the expensive part they make these fancy little sockets that have clear protector on them so if you don't want to scratch up your beautiful rims look at that no chance of scratching these rims oh whoops don't put that in it's definitely going in audrey's aside i legitimately thought about having three pcos convert these into uh three-piece wheels but not a big fan of the faces no i could pick a better wheel to do that with which i may or may not have done it may or may not be coming soon if you have a bad back this is a good time to have a friend that can lift things for you thanks mike yes sir damn look at those brakes mike was telling me a lot of people actually steal the brakes off this for other stuff i think some chaser people use them they make brackets for mark fours they make brackets for like isf's and gs300s and sc300 mark iv like a supra you're saying that super people want the brakes from my daily traditionally you'll have two different styles of front suspension at least in most of the cars that i've ever lowered you have one that has an upper arm or you'll have one that's mcpherson where there's none of this and it just goes directly to the shock i feel like the upper arm stuff can be a little bit more of a pain to like kind of wiggle the shock out we'll see in this case if there's enough clearance or evolved to unbolt stuff and i'll kind of give you tips and tricks for how to break stuff loose i've done coils on everything from like an s13 to an e-chassis to even doing lowering springs on a brand new turbo s and nine times out of ten it's the same oh look at that beauty the sharks are supposed to hold the hood up right yep they're supposed to do that i got ripped off i thought this thing was mint that's a big engine huh four liters four cams yeah you only got one broke the pitch after my drop yeah i like that yeah hopefully you don't have a strut brace if you have a nice car it probably has a strut brace going from here to here our end is way too big for that if you have a strobe racer and there's probably probably also tiny so that sucks i see why you need to overcompensate with coilovers we're cheating again using power tools but i get a haircut in like an hour so i got to get a on quick i don't know the order if you should take these out or not take these out first i pretty much always do i like to just take chances also if you're putting coilovers on your car you've never changed your oil you're an idiot change your oil now you can do this this is the fun part all right it looks like there might be a little bit of hope that we can actually finagle this thing out some cars won't have a lot of droop a lot of times you can fix that by unbolting one of the sway bar end links and then a little give you a little bit more droop we'll see if we need all that droop in this i don't know if we need oh man i was supposed to do suspension bushings and that's i don't know if i'm enough time to do that in this video we might have to continue that tomorrow if all you have your suspension off you have a sudden urge like every other male the first time they work on their car don't worry we've all done it do you paint your brake calipers don't paint your rotors we've all seen the memes don't be that guy please your biggest enemy with this is going to be damaging bolts threads stripping things so if for whatever reason you need to tap a bolt or something put the nut on a little bit and tap the nut because if you tap the threads and screw them up you're gonna have bad time a lot of times you run into an issue like this where you can't get your shock out uh i always try the last thing possible to pop things at a ball joints just because they can be a pain if we were going to take this spindle out of the ball joint i would pull the cotter pin out i would take the nut off and then rather than hitting the threads you can usually just smack a hammer on the side of this and that'll kind of like break the threads free and then it drops i should actually just do that instead i was going to be lazy and just take like the lower bracket off maybe we'll do that just for illustrative purposes you northeastern boys it ain't gonna be that easy i love how because i'm from the northeast i only talk about northeast like anywhere else that gets snow irrelevant don't put your eyes under there because it's gonna be messy you also don't want to hit this boot because if you do you're going to end up like splitting it i'm kind of putting pressure on this with my arm as i pull i might be able to do it going down but i think it works better if i do this there is a special tool that you could use to like separate ball joints on cars but i've heard that they split boots so i've never used them ah it worked not bad boy dude yeah my dust boot was blown it's a good thing i'm replacing it uh you guys can find this on my ebay store if you're interested these are great for ass chassis if you want more grip one thing i forgot to mention be mindful of your brake lines i know some cars people actually have to modify or extend or relocate brake lines when they do coil overs or move things because like if i want to go drop this out and i just tore the brake line you had a really bad time there'd be no taking cool pictures at your 7-eleven if you got broken brakes just in case you accidentally hit the threads it might be a good idea to leave your nut on so on this car we are going to be using bc's off-the-shelf br series a lot of people always ask us because we do sell coilovers at lg mfg and drift hq for recommendations for a street light track car you know a little bit of spirited inspired driving i will say 99 of the time the off-the-shelf spring rates are targeted around that however i do highly recommend if you have a car that you want the best ride possible and plan to do track and street driving going up to the ds series what that does is it gives you a digressive damper and that'll let you get a better ride while also having the best performance possible however the br spec is still a fantastic coilover one of the best you can get for the money and i think i have zero intention of going over speed bumps so i'm gonna start with this thing as low as i possibly can and we can always go up from there usually if you're a super low boy bc sells extreme low if you've got an engine swap we can help you figure out what spring rates to go with just send us a message and we'll take care of you if you don't have a vice you can probably get away with doing something like this we do have a vice but i'm lazy and devices on the other side of the shop so very very very important if you're using a set of bc's i don't know if other coilovers are adjusted differently you need to adjust from the actual body of the shock don't mess with your preload if you do mess with your preload i'll show you in a second how to set it back where it's intended to be but don't mess with that right now just worry about getting this boy wherever you want it uh some like a little tip i have if you kind of know roughly where you want it you can use little marks on the shock rather than counting lines say you wanted to go max high you can always use these little holes in the coilover as a rule of thumb for the minimum amount you want before it starts getting sketchy and then you know all four shocks are the same however as we'll get into our ride height and fitment stuff you will find that on your car even if you have all the shocks the same length you'll likely be lower in certain areas cars aren't perfectly weight distributed on all four corners sometimes you'll have a little bit of jacking due to suspension geometry and weird stuff going on maybe your car was in a crash before so it's good to have a starting point but understand that you might end up adjusting them slightly different and that's perfectly okay in our case though we're going to start all the way down because i'm trying to look cool if you are going all the way down try to go all the way down and then like do a half turn back otherwise if god forbid it seizes there it's going to be a mega nightmare to break it loose so mike has that happened to you before yeah he's like he's like nodding behind the captain yeah so like i said if you are dumb and you messed up and you adjusted from the wrong place you've now affected your preload so the rule of thumb with bcs basically go until you get a spring snug like you just kind of tighten the top upper ring by hand okay tighten the lower one into it hold the shock with one hand take it turn turn turn turn turn until you can fit one wrench between it that's about how much preload they're intended to come with and then you're not messing them up and then you can be confident that it is riding like it's supposed to even though you are an idiot my friend logoface now always i mean it doesn't matter but pc gets stoked when you do that looks good for fixtures actually speaking which i should take a photo remind me okay so this is the fun part and now you got to get that all the way up there if you're really strong you can like push it up there but again the sway bar might fight you out of mine hooked up probably disconnect yours uh if you want to be legit or you can use a trans jack or you can lower your car you can use normal jack just if you do it don't do it from the brake rotor jack it up from like the knuckle or something where you can get good pressure on so i'm good to put this back together since when i bring this one up it's gonna be another side up i'll do the other side just because they're attached to the sway bar so if you want to be a nerd you can look up torque specs and stuff but i've never had an issue from over tightening bolts only from not having them tight enough for them coming loose so do with that information while you will and don't forget your cotter pins yeah they're there for a reason we have reached a stance problem it is not possible to put these on at max low because if you look up here pay attention your suspension components when you do this because this upper control arm is already almost touching up top which means that we'll have to either raise it or if you were a true stance boy you could shorten your spindle which would then bring this arm angle down or i've seen some very ghetto people just cut a window up on top of the strut tower so that that uh upper control arm doesn't hit but in our case we'll just raise it up a little bit we got nothing to prove i like to use a something that i can use as a guide for real thumb so i can get them equal this i'm going to want more than with that so i'll just grab a household tool like a block of wood and this can be our essentially feeler gauge to make sure we get both sides the same there we go before i did anything down i'm gonna test fit a wheel real quick just to see roughly where we're at hello it's the next day before we continued with the coilover install i mentioned to adam that it's crucial to tuck the front harnesses that are in the fender wells for ls400s s chassis toyotas everything like that applications different on some cars some of them don't have the harnesses ran through the insides of the fenders but in this case this car does have it so i've already done this job on my ls400 so i'm familiar with it i already took the whole front end apart and the fender off you can see this is the harness that usually runs up inside of here and when you go low you rub through it and then half your car stops working and you have a real bad time so what i did was do it the right way cut a little notch here a little notch here disconnect the harness so now i can flip the harness up and over this lip out of the way of the wheel and the harness will be safe so i'm going to finish that up do the other side and then we can continue with the coilovers depending on the car sometimes the rear come easier sometimes it can be harder in the case of this one you need to pull the whole rear interior apart just to get to the actual strut towers here sometimes they'll be in your trunk sometimes they'll be easier to access other times it's a pain but usually you'll have three bolts on top some cars you might even have two bolts in here i forget which car was like that but one i did was like that and then um in this case just one bolt through the shock then we should be able to wiggle it right out all right let's see is she gonna cooperate i love that if you ever have a suspension bolt that's like giving you a pain to get out you can always stuff a wrench in kind of like this this one's already broken loose and then kinda hit it like this to get it to come loose good little trick that comes in handy harnesses in the front are all tucked passenger side driver side good to go if you guys didn't catch it already we have a spicy new drift car at drift hq and there's some footage that actually was uploaded yesterday so if you guys want to go check out the drift hq channel you find out more about this thing but get ready for it it's a spicy one all right now's the fun part you've got all your coils in and it looks like the ride height should be good but now we're gonna physically mount the wheels these are a set of bbs lms that came with my 34 gtr had them listed for sale no one offered me what they were worth so i decided i would keep them and sure enough i have a good reason to keep them i think they'll kind of look decent with it they're not super aggressive so i shouldn't need a whole ton of camber or need to roll the fenders or anything um but we're gonna put on and then we're gonna check to make sure that we don't have any rubbing issues and i'll show you guys a quick easy way to do that and then we will go ahead and start adjusting oh well yeah watch me put this wheel on oh yeah yeah my arm hair is looking extra different today thanks mike not bad evan is uh you know it's a little sunk but hassle free fitment hassle free fitment well we'll we'll see unless you're in her lips and your quarters say otherwise but i think i think it'll be good just to be clear as well gold wouldn't be my first choice of lug nut but all you might have bought all the black and silver ones from drift hq this is all they got left we got more coming in but you know i've seen people do this before like a block of wood on the rim without a tire to figure out what tires to run um there's a couple websites i usually use will theyfit.com and you can type in all your wheel specs and everything to try to figure out what tires you want to run to like move your wheel in or out if you have to change offset but make sure your handbrake is pulled or it's in park not the best thing to do this on a lift but that's gonna be all right dude if it sits like this that would be so titties and it'll probably sit more like bro probably a little bit closer it's just gonna okay that might just ever so slightly rub yeah no it's gonna rub you think yeah for sure what if i get a little candy out of it if you can get a little bit of camber that's fine but it's still just gonna inevitably hit somewhere here it's like on that weird lip though but i think i think it's going to keep cameron in let's watch him bro it's like not it's like barely touching yeah like i could probably grinder that you could we should also take the the little protective piece off the side i like that i mean it's a nice aesthetic thing it protects it gets in the way it protects it also attack well what if the the paint's gonna not look the best underneath it but dude that's titty fitment right there i don't think it's gonna rub if i'm being honest i think i just lucked out with the most perfect hella flush with me in the first try senior stance boy over here dude i literally feel like i could just like grinder it and then it would be good now the tire will do that itself true so i don't even need to touch it i'll probably just go away did you say the front has a pre-roll yeah like the feeder you know what a pre-roll is right yeah honestly dude i mean it definitely has a little bit more poke in front but i think we might be okay it's only it was mcpherson technically i have jzx upper a arms that are probably a little smaller but they might work they're very similar to these so pain to change normally i'd use ramps or wood but we were having a hard time finding this so broken gram lights will be helpful for us to determine ride height without having to take it all the way off the way what do you think mike something so this is time where you check your fitment see if you need to make any adjustments millennials these days the back we already know cities yeah for the front i just don't know how much it's gonna go in front's sitting on the fender is it yeah yeah the back though the back is fine the back looks to be pretty good yeah the front's got to come up definitely yeah you're rolling them right now yeah it looks great yeah i mean this honestly like this is on the ground just for the photos yeah be sick i just don't think i could turn nope you can't even roll really i mean yeah you would just annihilate that fender god it looks so good though i wish i saw it on the ground what do you think of the rear do you think i should come up with the rear just leave it i would leave it the wheel fitment itself is perfect it's just that tires too beefy this never happens guys wow you see what i'm saying yeah that's pretty impressive i couldn't even fit a piece of angel hair pasta in there is that your favorite time so honestly like for not being a stan scott myself i'm pretty happy with this fitment problem is this is the the fun everyone hop in the back let's go out to lunch car oh you can check my fitbit yeah got that amex dang don't even fit the a max yeah try one of the try one of the other cards oh there you go you're a funny guy um all right all jokes aside this is a good little trick so oh yeah stop stop stop so oh no there goes your special little ziggler no i loved them man they were so cool i mean he said no jumping yeah this was inevitable sorry this was inevitable it needed to come off but adam wanted to keep it now we'll see if we can keep it i think i need to come up with the car anyway so what i was going to say is you know there you go look you never know it happened i just don't want to make contact with the rim that boy gonna get to his destination honestly if we were true stance but we would have gone with stiffer springs but in this scenario i wanted to preserve the ride quality so i think in the rear we only have what are they eights yeah which isn't very stiff at all so i'll come up a little bit and that'll also let me have a little bit more room in the front so i'll show you a cool way to measure that out there's a lot of guess and check work involved with getting the right ride height and part of the reason is because of the different motion ratios with your suspension if you want to say raise this an inch it's probably not going to be exactly an inch on the shock that you need to extend it so i'm gonna show you a trick to remove the guesswork from it so we'll take a quick measurement here when the car is on the ground they call the static it is about an inch and a quarter i feel like ideally i would like to have it come up to let's say what do you think mike an engine three quarters or two inches oh i would say two just for your uh ride quality okay so that means we need to come up three quarters of an inch higher so now we'll take a measurement at full droop it's about three inches so we can go we can pull the wheel off we can adjust the shock until it gets to about three and three quarters and then we'll know that we've pretty much got it where we want it to be on the ground and we'll make that same change all around if your coilovers have been on your car you're getting them used make sure you clean all the threads first uh sometimes when you're doing this as well spraying a little bit of wd-40 or some sort of lubricant can help you but my usual way to go about it you don't necessarily need to use a wrench especially if they're new i like to take my hand go like this and then just spin the shock like this well i try not to spin that lower ring so i can view it kind of to get an idea of how much i'm extending the shock you might not be able to do this on all your cars if there's a lot of load on it but when you can do this it saves you so much time this is the time when having gloves is convenient because you'll end up smashing your knuckles when you're trying to just get one thread at a time and a lot of times there's a lot of stuff in your way if you're raising the car you'll want to use the lower ring and you'll want to spin that basically you want to spin whichever ring is goes up against the other ring so if we were going down we would spin the top ring otherwise you'll end up loosening the two rings that lock your uh preload which if you do by accident i told you how to fix it so don't stress too much but yeah unfortunately this one isn't as easy is my oil pan touching the ground or am i clear now you're good all right i don't know you can still go lower then i'm not scraping no you got like two inches off the ground all right first start see what she sounds like yo it sounds different lowered i think it's like the acoustics echoing off the ground now the most important step of lowering your car that a lot of people will overlook uh for a multiple different reasons getting an alignment so when you lower your car it can be difficult to find a place that will align your car because now it's low and it doesn't fit on a lot of alignment racks or maybe you don't want to spend the money so i'm going to show you a way that you can align the car yourself so right when you're done if you're going to drive to work school the next morning it may not be perfect but you can get it pretty damn you're close these are toe plates so what they do is they press up against the wheel nice and flat and then you're able to have a measuring point so you can measure the distance in the front of the wheel to the other side and the rear of the wheel to the other side the idea is when you lower a car you end up changing the suspension geometry let's say the wheels will have minimal tire wear if they're parallel sometimes when you lower cars they can tow out or they can even tow in and what that does not the camber very common misconception the camera doesn't wear out your tires like crazy but if you lower your car and you don't correct the toe this your tires are literally fighting each other the entire time you'll probably get a little bit worse gas mileage but more than anything you're just going to eat through your tires and if you have any little bit of camber it's just going to annihilate them super fast the rule of thumb in the rear typically on most rear wheel drive cars they'll run about an eighth inch of toe in that just gives stability so what we'll do we'll put them up and let's see where it's at lowering it without adjusting anything so if you look at both pieces of measuring tape you can see the number in front is significantly smaller than the number in back pretty much a half inch smaller a half inch of towing is way too much we run that on some drift cars but for a street car you will annihilate through your tires it will not drive nice if you are cheap and you don't want to buy toe plates you can use tape measures with anything that is flat that you can use as a measuring surface if you got a piece of steel laying around you can just press that up against the wheel and have a friend hold it if you have two by fours that are relatively straight if you have a cutting board or some people will even measure from the actual inside of the rim to the other side inside of the rim uh just the toe plates and the idea of having something with slits in them just makes a little easier because if you're on your own you can have it stay on the other side you can look and measure so now that we know that we're a half inch way too much in we need to bring the wheels back out and i'm going to show you how to do that so depending on your car uh you may or may not be able to get enough adjustment out of the stock arm most japanese cars and i mean pretty much all cars have eccentric bolts and i'll show you what these do but certain cars like 350z you need to buy adjustable tow arms otherwise you can't correct it enough when you lower it it's always a good idea to kind of mark your starting point just just to kind of have a point of reference we're going to try to turn both sides the same uh that'll be really helpful since we're using toe plates since it's hard to kind of keep the car from like crab walking if you adjust one side too much so if you watch the arm with these bolts work i want this wheel to toe out so i need this arm to get shorter so when i turn this this way so you'll see the arm goes in when i turn this bolt you'll see as i turn the arm the wheel will go outward and then we'll do the same this side now that your car is lower uh you're gonna have less absorption so you're probably gonna start to blow out bushings and have other issues and things going on it's always a good idea whenever car is in the air kind of shake the wheel side to side shake it up and down hit it a couple times if you feel any player movement have a buddy do it and then look on the inside put your finger by any ball joint and see if you can find where the play is it's pretty easy to figure out whether it's like wheel bearing ball joint bushing etc so rear should hopefully be good if not we might need another adjustment and we'll start working on the front i will say we've done this a lot so i'm not surprised that we got a perfect first try but uh we have right now like 1 16 toe in i'd be fine with anything from like zero to an eighth zero if you're putting down a lot of horsepower will be kind of sketchy because the car won't want to go straight and might have a little more tendency of walking around but you never want toe out in the rear ever unless you're done this side uh has about a half inch of toe out um in the front if you have like a car that you spirited drive and like you want really sharp turn in i might run up to like an eighth inch toe out on a street car but traditionally on most cars you'll want to run like an eighth inch of toe in and that'll kind of give you some stability and the car won't be pulling all over the place on the highway or high speed also just to add like this may seem like archaic and like oh this is not going to be as good but i'll tell you uh it is probably just as if not sometimes more accurate than some alignment racks there are plenty of times i've had a car aligned somewhere and then i've put toe plates on it and it's been wildly off we're lucky we've had our friend eric over at pep boys and then we've had lewis over at phillips in the past who are both great guys and know what they're doing and are great at aligning lower cars and are great with their alignment rack but unfortunately there are a lot of places out there that are not the best with their alignment racks and their mechanics don't have much experience so a 50 set of toe plates might be well worth it in the long run so we've got a half inch toe out depending on if your tie rod is in the front or in the back we now need to bring the wheels inward and uh traditionally speaking don't don't quote me on this too much usually if i remember correctly i think each flat spot usually comes out to be around an eighth so we're gonna start with about four to five flat spots and i'll show you what i mean by that it's good to kind of remember how much each flat spot equates to in your toes so you aren't guessing and checking a bajillion times just make sure you do the same on both sides and your steering wheel should stay straight for the most part so you'll see the tire it's kind of at a steep angle uh they make roll center correctors for this because when you hit bumps it's going to make your steering wheel do a bunch of weird stuff we don't really care about that i never remember whether like you go up or down to tighten or loosen on each side so i usually try both until i can get it to come loose and i say about five flat spots so the easiest way that i remember this if the nut backs off going up and comes off then that means everything will pull in if you go the other way so i usually use the nut as my frame of reference so i don't forget which way it goes and since we're trying to get the front to go in we need to extend this out to push the rear of the wheel out so we're gonna go the same direction as the nut which is upward and by flat spots i mean these little like flat spots here it's probably really hard to see on camera but they're there i promise so we'll go one two three four five and then we'll lock it down and do the same on the other side a good thing to remember if you went down on the other side to loosen you're gonna go up on this side to loosen confusing but it'll make sense once you're looking at it underneath the car if this is a drift car be perfect we have like a tad hair out so what i like to do at this point since i know now one flat spot is all i need in each side to get it about eighth inch toe in i'll take the car and i'll drive it to make sure the center of the steering wheel is straight if it's not straight it is going to be so physically hard for me to explain this in video but if you just think about it really hard if your steering wheel is turned a little bit to the right when you're going that means your wheels are straight you would want to turn them a little bit to the left to correct it so then you would either add a little toe out to that wheel it's gonna sound like a bunch of mumbo jumbo but just think really hard if your steering wheel is crooked you can basically turn it straight and then toe in that wheel that you just turned outward and then that would effectively straighten your wheel without you having to mess with the wheel and then it makes sense okay all right thank you i needed that affirmation yeah yeah appreciate it all right toe's good we're all set you didn't need an alignment you're good to drive you won't eat up your tires your car will drive normal and i hope you learned something uh we're gonna go test this out drive it around go take some pretty photos and see how it looks am i hitting no no god this thing is so titties bro he's too excited all right let the record hold even though you guys are watching this after we've aligned it we haven't aligned it in this clip because we're trying to use daylight that noise that you hear is the tires fighting each other because of tow which makes sense because of what i just explained to you guys align your cars they're also brand new appreciate our hard work god it looks so tasteful i love it i know it's so simple it's like nothing over the top it doesn't look like i'm trying to prove anything by being like super low and just like whipping my uh my testosterone all over the place you did all that for nothing he put my head back here oh no i don't know his head's pretty big oh yeah remember how i talked about like not doing this right before work or school i have to take this to the airport tomorrow so it's actually important that it's i'm gonna take bets let's take beds yeah there's a pretty big speed bump there let's take bets you you are you are good on speed bumps dude hey hop in let's go test out the ride all right rub test not too bad no like like for a stan's car i'm driving pretty aggressively and god the turning is so sharp now the problem is i also put grippier tires on it so like it'll definitely rub if i make it rough that noise is the tire stickers us drifters don't take them off we let nature do that for us also if you take them off and you drive through the shop it gets all the glue on the floor stand i will tell you firsthand no stance guy ever does like this why because they're always nervous what if they're trying to run away from the hitters i hope you like this video it's a little bit different i've been wanting to install coilers on this car and for me to take a day of my time to work on a car it needs to be something that i can make content of otherwise i'll just never get around to it so i wanted to make something a little bit different and hopefully some of you guys learned something maybe you gotta laugh maybe it was complete waste your time by the way if you liked it like the video leave a comment maybe share it with a friend that's stupid that's gonna make one of the mistakes i mentioned in this video and help some people out i appreciate you guys tomorrow taking this baby to the airport and i'm flying up to drive one of my favorite tracks that i haven't driven in a long time with a really good friend hope you guys are gonna like that video stay tuned it'll be up not tomorrow but the next day there's gonna be a good one oh yeah stop stop stop so oh no when you sayso you can fit when i turn this bolt yes uh all right boys today the celsius getting some love it's been a while you might know that i have this car you might not she's a gem and today we're gonna do some work on here i heard a little knocking noise in the rear maybe it's my suspension get it all right boys we're doing a coilover install today i kind of want to take a little bit of a different approach we got a set of bc's off-the-shelf vr series for this car and i wanted to make a video kind of highlighting some of the tips and tricks if it's your first time installing coilovers or maybe if you think you're a pro some tips and tricks if you want to avoid headache or save some time i'm not a celsiur expert by any means this basically uh jdm ls400 mike knows how to do coilovers on it i don't we'll see if there's any tips and tricks relative to the chassis but i'm more focused on the generic stuff like making sure that you can get the right ride height set up what do you do about alignment afterwards what if you don't have the right tools we'll go into all that all right first mistake we may have already made make sure before you get into any of this that you have the right lug nut tool please don't have locks please don't have locks please don't have sick if you have like wheel keys or something make sure you have your wheel key and if you do have wookies and you're using your wheel key don't lose it you'll be miserable it sucks cutting wheel locks off cars sucks obviously we have a nice shop here anything and everything that we're doing could be done on jack stands use jack stands don't be an idiot i feel like every person knows someone that was working on a car and had a car fall off jack stands or fall off the hydraulic jack or a hydraulic jack fail so it's not worth the laziness find something to put in your car cement bricks spare tire frozen vegetables wood i guess wood works yeah good split though careful that against the grain not with the grain that's the key mike to be successful in life you need to go against the grain that's what i'm saying oh you you can't do it with the grain unless it'll split in life don't go with the grain go against the grain words for mike devine himself most cars are metric so you'll probably need some metric tools whether you have a tool kit or you want to like look up a diy for your specific car to make sure you have the tools first if you're working on like a bmw or something or a german car you might have some torx bits that you need i know i've run into that issue before and then you go borrow them from someone so try to make sure you have all the tools first you don't wind up if it's a daily with your car half down for you know a day or two and missing work or something um if you can get a car to borrow while you're working on your car would make a lot less stressful um pretty much every single person i know is always running that situation where you're like trying to do something in your car that you think is going to take an hour and then you're running like a seized bolt or something that ends up making everything take forever and then you're screwed working at 2am at night trying to get a rig stuff just you can drive to school which was my case or work the next day also don't try to be a fan wear gloves girls don't think it's cool if you work on cars without gloves they think it's cool when you come home and you have clean hands not when you have like four inches of grease underneath your fingernails preferably over rubber gloves i used to use like the actual cloth gloves that you can get at like autozone when you're doing coilover stuff you're going to end up punching a bunch of arms and a bunch of underneath your car and it's sick to not split your knuckles it's easy to be lazy but if you're prepared like it is so nice at the end of the day just like and then you can like pick your nose with confidence you need to worry about getting like gross up there you know what i'm saying i'm gonna put this on the lift you know tools you need i have no idea what i need but it doesn't matter because i have a full box right here 10 14 17 19. and hammer okay maybe some wd-40 maybe a torch maybe a flathead this thing's pretty clean but you northeastern boys if you've never jacked up your car before look up where the jacket from because you can actually get up and it sucks when we have to keep buying these s chassis where the pinch welds are because someone jacked it up in the wrong spot just in case we end up buying your car in the future don't it up usually cars will have like a little reinforced area where there'll be two marks on the pinch welds you kind of know where to put your jack stands um it can be kind of a pain if you need to get your jack stands there and you need to like jack up from your subframe or whatever if you have a bmw you're sorry they suck to jack up because you got to put like a thing in the hole and then you can't get anything under it because it's got all this plastic stuff if you got a bmw i wouldn't even waste your time putting coilovers on because chances are you have some maintenance that you need to do and that's more important and it's going to cost you a lot more than lowering your car okay i know there's someone watching this out there that had a broken window regulator on like an e chassis and they still went out and bought coilovers fix your window why am i lowering the cells here you might ask well you know some people do it for looks there's fancy boys they like to go to car shows with dragon frame and then all their friends give them the instagram and tick tock likes and that's cool i respect that some people are for performance you know you want to take corners better put grip your tires change your alignment whatever lower your center of gravity for this elsier a little bit of both your boy doesn't want to show up looking like this if you can fit two fists chief that ain't it so i want to be looking cool this is my my airport grocery getter i drive this thing actually quite a bit i want to look cool i want to have some decent fitment on it but also on the performance side there are many times i find myself with friends with fast cars whether it's someone driving a r34 a turbo s nsx behind me and i'm trying to leave them in the dust i'm trying to show them that i got that driver mod so i want a little bit more performance as you can see by those first clips there's a little bit of body roll some stuff going on i can't feel the crispness of the suspension and honestly these cars have such soft suspension from the factory that i have multiple times gotten motion sick driving it because it feels like you were driving uh like cruise ship you're just like it's very accurate actually yeah it's cool for like the first five minutes but when you don't have music it feels like you are going to go insane whether you're on jack stands or lift rock if this truly is your first time doing like a major thing on your car don't worry like it is not that bad you should be fine one thing that if you plan to work on your car a lot that is extremely convenient to have is a cordless impact i will say it doesn't really matter what brand you have at this point most of them are pretty good obviously milwaukee has a huge lineup of tools and that is why we use them but in the end of the day they're all pretty much the same just beware that's wrong size whatever brand you choose you'll end up getting more of their tools so do your research if you go to buy your first portable impact make sure that that's the brand you want to stick with so you can share all the same batteries because that's the expensive part they make these fancy little sockets that have clear protector on them so if you don't want to scratch up your beautiful rims look at that no chance of scratching these rims oh whoops don't put that in it's definitely going in audrey's aside i legitimately thought about having three pcos convert these into uh three-piece wheels but not a big fan of the faces no i could pick a better wheel to do that with which i may or may not have done it may or may not be coming soon if you have a bad back this is a good time to have a friend that can lift things for you thanks mike yes sir damn look at those brakes mike was telling me a lot of people actually steal the brakes off this for other stuff i think some chaser people use them they make brackets for mark fours they make brackets for like isf's and gs300s and sc300 mark iv like a supra you're saying that super people want the brakes from my daily traditionally you'll have two different styles of front suspension at least in most of the cars that i've ever lowered you have one that has an upper arm or you'll have one that's mcpherson where there's none of this and it just goes directly to the shock i feel like the upper arm stuff can be a little bit more of a pain to like kind of wiggle the shock out we'll see in this case if there's enough clearance or evolved to unbolt stuff and i'll kind of give you tips and tricks for how to break stuff loose i've done coils on everything from like an s13 to an e-chassis to even doing lowering springs on a brand new turbo s and nine times out of ten it's the same oh look at that beauty the sharks are supposed to hold the hood up right yep they're supposed to do that i got ripped off i thought this thing was mint that's a big engine huh four liters four cams yeah you only got one broke the pitch after my drop yeah i like that yeah hopefully you don't have a strut brace if you have a nice car it probably has a strut brace going from here to here our end is way too big for that if you have a strobe racer and there's probably probably also tiny so that sucks i see why you need to overcompensate with coilovers we're cheating again using power tools but i get a haircut in like an hour so i got to get a on quick i don't know the order if you should take these out or not take these out first i pretty much always do i like to just take chances also if you're putting coilovers on your car you've never changed your oil you're an idiot change your oil now you can do this this is the fun part all right it looks like there might be a little bit of hope that we can actually finagle this thing out some cars won't have a lot of droop a lot of times you can fix that by unbolting one of the sway bar end links and then a little give you a little bit more droop we'll see if we need all that droop in this i don't know if we need oh man i was supposed to do suspension bushings and that's i don't know if i'm enough time to do that in this video we might have to continue that tomorrow if all you have your suspension off you have a sudden urge like every other male the first time they work on their car don't worry we've all done it do you paint your brake calipers don't paint your rotors we've all seen the memes don't be that guy please your biggest enemy with this is going to be damaging bolts threads stripping things so if for whatever reason you need to tap a bolt or something put the nut on a little bit and tap the nut because if you tap the threads and screw them up you're gonna have bad time a lot of times you run into an issue like this where you can't get your shock out uh i always try the last thing possible to pop things at a ball joints just because they can be a pain if we were going to take this spindle out of the ball joint i would pull the cotter pin out i would take the nut off and then rather than hitting the threads you can usually just smack a hammer on the side of this and that'll kind of like break the threads free and then it drops i should actually just do that instead i was going to be lazy and just take like the lower bracket off maybe we'll do that just for illustrative purposes you northeastern boys it ain't gonna be that easy i love how because i'm from the northeast i only talk about northeast like anywhere else that gets snow irrelevant don't put your eyes under there because it's gonna be messy you also don't want to hit this boot because if you do you're going to end up like splitting it i'm kind of putting pressure on this with my arm as i pull i might be able to do it going down but i think it works better if i do this there is a special tool that you could use to like separate ball joints on cars but i've heard that they split boots so i've never used them ah it worked not bad boy dude yeah my dust boot was blown it's a good thing i'm replacing it uh you guys can find this on my ebay store if you're interested these are great for ass chassis if you want more grip one thing i forgot to mention be mindful of your brake lines i know some cars people actually have to modify or extend or relocate brake lines when they do coil overs or move things because like if i want to go drop this out and i just tore the brake line you had a really bad time there'd be no taking cool pictures at your 7-eleven if you got broken brakes just in case you accidentally hit the threads it might be a good idea to leave your nut on so on this car we are going to be using bc's off-the-shelf br series a lot of people always ask us because we do sell coilovers at lg mfg and drift hq for recommendations for a street light track car you know a little bit of spirited inspired driving i will say 99 of the time the off-the-shelf spring rates are targeted around that however i do highly recommend if you have a car that you want the best ride possible and plan to do track and street driving going up to the ds series what that does is it gives you a digressive damper and that'll let you get a better ride while also having the best performance possible however the br spec is still a fantastic coilover one of the best you can get for the money and i think i have zero intention of going over speed bumps so i'm gonna start with this thing as low as i possibly can and we can always go up from there usually if you're a super low boy bc sells extreme low if you've got an engine swap we can help you figure out what spring rates to go with just send us a message and we'll take care of you if you don't have a vice you can probably get away with doing something like this we do have a vice but i'm lazy and devices on the other side of the shop so very very very important if you're using a set of bc's i don't know if other coilovers are adjusted differently you need to adjust from the actual body of the shock don't mess with your preload if you do mess with your preload i'll show you in a second how to set it back where it's intended to be but don't mess with that right now just worry about getting this boy wherever you want it uh some like a little tip i have if you kind of know roughly where you want it you can use little marks on the shock rather than counting lines say you wanted to go max high you can always use these little holes in the coilover as a rule of thumb for the minimum amount you want before it starts getting sketchy and then you know all four shocks are the same however as we'll get into our ride height and fitment stuff you will find that on your car even if you have all the shocks the same length you'll likely be lower in certain areas cars aren't perfectly weight distributed on all four corners sometimes you'll have a little bit of jacking due to suspension geometry and weird stuff going on maybe your car was in a crash before so it's good to have a starting point but understand that you might end up adjusting them slightly different and that's perfectly okay in our case though we're going to start all the way down because i'm trying to look cool if you are going all the way down try to go all the way down and then like do a half turn back otherwise if god forbid it seizes there it's going to be a mega nightmare to break it loose so mike has that happened to you before yeah he's like he's like nodding behind the captain yeah so like i said if you are dumb and you messed up and you adjusted from the wrong place you've now affected your preload so the rule of thumb with bcs basically go until you get a spring snug like you just kind of tighten the top upper ring by hand okay tighten the lower one into it hold the shock with one hand take it turn turn turn turn turn until you can fit one wrench between it that's about how much preload they're intended to come with and then you're not messing them up and then you can be confident that it is riding like it's supposed to even though you are an idiot my friend logoface now always i mean it doesn't matter but pc gets stoked when you do that looks good for fixtures actually speaking which i should take a photo remind me okay so this is the fun part and now you got to get that all the way up there if you're really strong you can like push it up there but again the sway bar might fight you out of mine hooked up probably disconnect yours uh if you want to be legit or you can use a trans jack or you can lower your car you can use normal jack just if you do it don't do it from the brake rotor jack it up from like the knuckle or something where you can get good pressure on so i'm good to put this back together since when i bring this one up it's gonna be another side up i'll do the other side just because they're attached to the sway bar so if you want to be a nerd you can look up torque specs and stuff but i've never had an issue from over tightening bolts only from not having them tight enough for them coming loose so do with that information while you will and don't forget your cotter pins yeah they're there for a reason we have reached a stance problem it is not possible to put these on at max low because if you look up here pay attention your suspension components when you do this because this upper control arm is already almost touching up top which means that we'll have to either raise it or if you were a true stance boy you could shorten your spindle which would then bring this arm angle down or i've seen some very ghetto people just cut a window up on top of the strut tower so that that uh upper control arm doesn't hit but in our case we'll just raise it up a little bit we got nothing to prove i like to use a something that i can use as a guide for real thumb so i can get them equal this i'm going to want more than with that so i'll just grab a household tool like a block of wood and this can be our essentially feeler gauge to make sure we get both sides the same there we go before i did anything down i'm gonna test fit a wheel real quick just to see roughly where we're at hello it's the next day before we continued with the coilover install i mentioned to adam that it's crucial to tuck the front harnesses that are in the fender wells for ls400s s chassis toyotas everything like that applications different on some cars some of them don't have the harnesses ran through the insides of the fenders but in this case this car does have it so i've already done this job on my ls400 so i'm familiar with it i already took the whole front end apart and the fender off you can see this is the harness that usually runs up inside of here and when you go low you rub through it and then half your car stops working and you have a real bad time so what i did was do it the right way cut a little notch here a little notch here disconnect the harness so now i can flip the harness up and over this lip out of the way of the wheel and the harness will be safe so i'm going to finish that up do the other side and then we can continue with the coilovers depending on the car sometimes the rear come easier sometimes it can be harder in the case of this one you need to pull the whole rear interior apart just to get to the actual strut towers here sometimes they'll be in your trunk sometimes they'll be easier to access other times it's a pain but usually you'll have three bolts on top some cars you might even have two bolts in here i forget which car was like that but one i did was like that and then um in this case just one bolt through the shock then we should be able to wiggle it right out all right let's see is she gonna cooperate i love that if you ever have a suspension bolt that's like giving you a pain to get out you can always stuff a wrench in kind of like this this one's already broken loose and then kinda hit it like this to get it to come loose good little trick that comes in handy harnesses in the front are all tucked passenger side driver side good to go if you guys didn't catch it already we have a spicy new drift car at drift hq and there's some footage that actually was uploaded yesterday so if you guys want to go check out the drift hq channel you find out more about this thing but get ready for it it's a spicy one all right now's the fun part you've got all your coils in and it looks like the ride height should be good but now we're gonna physically mount the wheels these are a set of bbs lms that came with my 34 gtr had them listed for sale no one offered me what they were worth so i decided i would keep them and sure enough i have a good reason to keep them i think they'll kind of look decent with it they're not super aggressive so i shouldn't need a whole ton of camber or need to roll the fenders or anything um but we're gonna put on and then we're gonna check to make sure that we don't have any rubbing issues and i'll show you guys a quick easy way to do that and then we will go ahead and start adjusting oh well yeah watch me put this wheel on oh yeah yeah my arm hair is looking extra different today thanks mike not bad evan is uh you know it's a little sunk but hassle free fitment hassle free fitment well we'll we'll see unless you're in her lips and your quarters say otherwise but i think i think it'll be good just to be clear as well gold wouldn't be my first choice of lug nut but all you might have bought all the black and silver ones from drift hq this is all they got left we got more coming in but you know i've seen people do this before like a block of wood on the rim without a tire to figure out what tires to run um there's a couple websites i usually use will theyfit.com and you can type in all your wheel specs and everything to try to figure out what tires you want to run to like move your wheel in or out if you have to change offset but make sure your handbrake is pulled or it's in park not the best thing to do this on a lift but that's gonna be all right dude if it sits like this that would be so titties and it'll probably sit more like bro probably a little bit closer it's just gonna okay that might just ever so slightly rub yeah no it's gonna rub you think yeah for sure what if i get a little candy out of it if you can get a little bit of camber that's fine but it's still just gonna inevitably hit somewhere here it's like on that weird lip though but i think i think it's going to keep cameron in let's watch him bro it's like not it's like barely touching yeah like i could probably grinder that you could we should also take the the little protective piece off the side i like that i mean it's a nice aesthetic thing it protects it gets in the way it protects it also attack well what if the the paint's gonna not look the best underneath it but dude that's titty fitment right there i don't think it's gonna rub if i'm being honest i think i just lucked out with the most perfect hella flush with me in the first try senior stance boy over here dude i literally feel like i could just like grinder it and then it would be good now the tire will do that itself true so i don't even need to touch it i'll probably just go away did you say the front has a pre-roll yeah like the feeder you know what a pre-roll is right yeah honestly dude i mean it definitely has a little bit more poke in front but i think we might be okay it's only it was mcpherson technically i have jzx upper a arms that are probably a little smaller but they might work they're very similar to these so pain to change normally i'd use ramps or wood but we were having a hard time finding this so broken gram lights will be helpful for us to determine ride height without having to take it all the way off the way what do you think mike something so this is time where you check your fitment see if you need to make any adjustments millennials these days the back we already know cities yeah for the front i just don't know how much it's gonna go in front's sitting on the fender is it yeah yeah the back though the back is fine the back looks to be pretty good yeah the front's got to come up definitely yeah you're rolling them right now yeah it looks great yeah i mean this honestly like this is on the ground just for the photos yeah be sick i just don't think i could turn nope you can't even roll really i mean yeah you would just annihilate that fender god it looks so good though i wish i saw it on the ground what do you think of the rear do you think i should come up with the rear just leave it i would leave it the wheel fitment itself is perfect it's just that tires too beefy this never happens guys wow you see what i'm saying yeah that's pretty impressive i couldn't even fit a piece of angel hair pasta in there is that your favorite time so honestly like for not being a stan scott myself i'm pretty happy with this fitment problem is this is the the fun everyone hop in the back let's go out to lunch car oh you can check my fitbit yeah got that amex dang don't even fit the a max yeah try one of the try one of the other cards oh there you go you're a funny guy um all right all jokes aside this is a good little trick so oh yeah stop stop stop so oh no there goes your special little ziggler no i loved them man they were so cool i mean he said no jumping yeah this was inevitable sorry this was inevitable it needed to come off but adam wanted to keep it now we'll see if we can keep it i think i need to come up with the car anyway so what i was going to say is you know there you go look you never know it happened i just don't want to make contact with the rim that boy gonna get to his destination honestly if we were true stance but we would have gone with stiffer springs but in this scenario i wanted to preserve the ride quality so i think in the rear we only have what are they eights yeah which isn't very stiff at all so i'll come up a little bit and that'll also let me have a little bit more room in the front so i'll show you a cool way to measure that out there's a lot of guess and check work involved with getting the right ride height and part of the reason is because of the different motion ratios with your suspension if you want to say raise this an inch it's probably not going to be exactly an inch on the shock that you need to extend it so i'm gonna show you a trick to remove the guesswork from it so we'll take a quick measurement here when the car is on the ground they call the static it is about an inch and a quarter i feel like ideally i would like to have it come up to let's say what do you think mike an engine three quarters or two inches oh i would say two just for your uh ride quality okay so that means we need to come up three quarters of an inch higher so now we'll take a measurement at full droop it's about three inches so we can go we can pull the wheel off we can adjust the shock until it gets to about three and three quarters and then we'll know that we've pretty much got it where we want it to be on the ground and we'll make that same change all around if your coilovers have been on your car you're getting them used make sure you clean all the threads first uh sometimes when you're doing this as well spraying a little bit of wd-40 or some sort of lubricant can help you but my usual way to go about it you don't necessarily need to use a wrench especially if they're new i like to take my hand go like this and then just spin the shock like this well i try not to spin that lower ring so i can view it kind of to get an idea of how much i'm extending the shock you might not be able to do this on all your cars if there's a lot of load on it but when you can do this it saves you so much time this is the time when having gloves is convenient because you'll end up smashing your knuckles when you're trying to just get one thread at a time and a lot of times there's a lot of stuff in your way if you're raising the car you'll want to use the lower ring and you'll want to spin that basically you want to spin whichever ring is goes up against the other ring so if we were going down we would spin the top ring otherwise you'll end up loosening the two rings that lock your uh preload which if you do by accident i told you how to fix it so don't stress too much but yeah unfortunately this one isn't as easy is my oil pan touching the ground or am i clear now you're good all right i don't know you can still go lower then i'm not scraping no you got like two inches off the ground all right first start see what she sounds like yo it sounds different lowered i think it's like the acoustics echoing off the ground now the most important step of lowering your car that a lot of people will overlook uh for a multiple different reasons getting an alignment so when you lower your car it can be difficult to find a place that will align your car because now it's low and it doesn't fit on a lot of alignment racks or maybe you don't want to spend the money so i'm going to show you a way that you can align the car yourself so right when you're done if you're going to drive to work school the next morning it may not be perfect but you can get it pretty damn you're close these are toe plates so what they do is they press up against the wheel nice and flat and then you're able to have a measuring point so you can measure the distance in the front of the wheel to the other side and the rear of the wheel to the other side the idea is when you lower a car you end up changing the suspension geometry let's say the wheels will have minimal tire wear if they're parallel sometimes when you lower cars they can tow out or they can even tow in and what that does not the camber very common misconception the camera doesn't wear out your tires like crazy but if you lower your car and you don't correct the toe this your tires are literally fighting each other the entire time you'll probably get a little bit worse gas mileage but more than anything you're just going to eat through your tires and if you have any little bit of camber it's just going to annihilate them super fast the rule of thumb in the rear typically on most rear wheel drive cars they'll run about an eighth inch of toe in that just gives stability so what we'll do we'll put them up and let's see where it's at lowering it without adjusting anything so if you look at both pieces of measuring tape you can see the number in front is significantly smaller than the number in back pretty much a half inch smaller a half inch of towing is way too much we run that on some drift cars but for a street car you will annihilate through your tires it will not drive nice if you are cheap and you don't want to buy toe plates you can use tape measures with anything that is flat that you can use as a measuring surface if you got a piece of steel laying around you can just press that up against the wheel and have a friend hold it if you have two by fours that are relatively straight if you have a cutting board or some people will even measure from the actual inside of the rim to the other side inside of the rim uh just the toe plates and the idea of having something with slits in them just makes a little easier because if you're on your own you can have it stay on the other side you can look and measure so now that we know that we're a half inch way too much in we need to bring the wheels back out and i'm going to show you how to do that so depending on your car uh you may or may not be able to get enough adjustment out of the stock arm most japanese cars and i mean pretty much all cars have eccentric bolts and i'll show you what these do but certain cars like 350z you need to buy adjustable tow arms otherwise you can't correct it enough when you lower it it's always a good idea to kind of mark your starting point just just to kind of have a point of reference we're going to try to turn both sides the same uh that'll be really helpful since we're using toe plates since it's hard to kind of keep the car from like crab walking if you adjust one side too much so if you watch the arm with these bolts work i want this wheel to toe out so i need this arm to get shorter so when i turn this this way so you'll see the arm goes in when i turn this bolt you'll see as i turn the arm the wheel will go outward and then we'll do the same this side now that your car is lower uh you're gonna have less absorption so you're probably gonna start to blow out bushings and have other issues and things going on it's always a good idea whenever car is in the air kind of shake the wheel side to side shake it up and down hit it a couple times if you feel any player movement have a buddy do it and then look on the inside put your finger by any ball joint and see if you can find where the play is it's pretty easy to figure out whether it's like wheel bearing ball joint bushing etc so rear should hopefully be good if not we might need another adjustment and we'll start working on the front i will say we've done this a lot so i'm not surprised that we got a perfect first try but uh we have right now like 1 16 toe in i'd be fine with anything from like zero to an eighth zero if you're putting down a lot of horsepower will be kind of sketchy because the car won't want to go straight and might have a little more tendency of walking around but you never want toe out in the rear ever unless you're done this side uh has about a half inch of toe out um in the front if you have like a car that you spirited drive and like you want really sharp turn in i might run up to like an eighth inch toe out on a street car but traditionally on most cars you'll want to run like an eighth inch of toe in and that'll kind of give you some stability and the car won't be pulling all over the place on the highway or high speed also just to add like this may seem like archaic and like oh this is not going to be as good but i'll tell you uh it is probably just as if not sometimes more accurate than some alignment racks there are plenty of times i've had a car aligned somewhere and then i've put toe plates on it and it's been wildly off we're lucky we've had our friend eric over at pep boys and then we've had lewis over at phillips in the past who are both great guys and know what they're doing and are great at aligning lower cars and are great with their alignment rack but unfortunately there are a lot of places out there that are not the best with their alignment racks and their mechanics don't have much experience so a 50 set of toe plates might be well worth it in the long run so we've got a half inch toe out depending on if your tie rod is in the front or in the back we now need to bring the wheels inward and uh traditionally speaking don't don't quote me on this too much usually if i remember correctly i think each flat spot usually comes out to be around an eighth so we're gonna start with about four to five flat spots and i'll show you what i mean by that it's good to kind of remember how much each flat spot equates to in your toes so you aren't guessing and checking a bajillion times just make sure you do the same on both sides and your steering wheel should stay straight for the most part so you'll see the tire it's kind of at a steep angle uh they make roll center correctors for this because when you hit bumps it's going to make your steering wheel do a bunch of weird stuff we don't really care about that i never remember whether like you go up or down to tighten or loosen on each side so i usually try both until i can get it to come loose and i say about five flat spots so the easiest way that i remember this if the nut backs off going up and comes off then that means everything will pull in if you go the other way so i usually use the nut as my frame of reference so i don't forget which way it goes and since we're trying to get the front to go in we need to extend this out to push the rear of the wheel out so we're gonna go the same direction as the nut which is upward and by flat spots i mean these little like flat spots here it's probably really hard to see on camera but they're there i promise so we'll go one two three four five and then we'll lock it down and do the same on the other side a good thing to remember if you went down on the other side to loosen you're gonna go up on this side to loosen confusing but it'll make sense once you're looking at it underneath the car if this is a drift car be perfect we have like a tad hair out so what i like to do at this point since i know now one flat spot is all i need in each side to get it about eighth inch toe in i'll take the car and i'll drive it to make sure the center of the steering wheel is straight if it's not straight it is going to be so physically hard for me to explain this in video but if you just think about it really hard if your steering wheel is turned a little bit to the right when you're going that means your wheels are straight you would want to turn them a little bit to the left to correct it so then you would either add a little toe out to that wheel it's gonna sound like a bunch of mumbo jumbo but just think really hard if your steering wheel is crooked you can basically turn it straight and then toe in that wheel that you just turned outward and then that would effectively straighten your wheel without you having to mess with the wheel and then it makes sense okay all right thank you i needed that affirmation yeah yeah appreciate it all right toe's good we're all set you didn't need an alignment you're good to drive you won't eat up your tires your car will drive normal and i hope you learned something uh we're gonna go test this out drive it around go take some pretty photos and see how it looks am i hitting no no god this thing is so titties bro he's too excited all right let the record hold even though you guys are watching this after we've aligned it we haven't aligned it in this clip because we're trying to use daylight that noise that you hear is the tires fighting each other because of tow which makes sense because of what i just explained to you guys align your cars they're also brand new appreciate our hard work god it looks so tasteful i love it i know it's so simple it's like nothing over the top it doesn't look like i'm trying to prove anything by being like super low and just like whipping my uh my testosterone all over the place you did all that for nothing he put my head back here oh no i don't know his head's pretty big oh yeah remember how i talked about like not doing this right before work or school i have to take this to the airport tomorrow so it's actually important that it's i'm gonna take bets let's take beds yeah there's a pretty big speed bump there let's take bets you you are you are good on speed bumps dude hey hop in let's go test out the ride all right rub test not too bad no like like for a stan's car i'm driving pretty aggressively and god the turning is so sharp now the problem is i also put grippier tires on it so like it'll definitely rub if i make it rough that noise is the tire stickers us drifters don't take them off we let nature do that for us also if you take them off and you drive through the shop it gets all the glue on the floor stand i will tell you firsthand no stance guy ever does like this why because they're always nervous what if they're trying to run away from the hitters i hope you like this video it's a little bit different i've been wanting to install coilers on this car and for me to take a day of my time to work on a car it needs to be something that i can make content of otherwise i'll just never get around to it so i wanted to make something a little bit different and hopefully some of you guys learned something maybe you gotta laugh maybe it was complete waste your time by the way if you liked it like the video leave a comment maybe share it with a friend that's stupid that's gonna make one of the mistakes i mentioned in this video and help some people out i appreciate you guys tomorrow taking this baby to the airport and i'm flying up to drive one of my favorite tracks that i haven't driven in a long time with a really good friend hope you guys are gonna like that video stay tuned it'll be up not tomorrow but the next day there's gonna be a good one oh yeah stop stop stop so oh no when you say\n"