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Mark McCurdy. Georgia Main Food Group. Retail Concepts. Fresh St. Market - Vancouver House. University Of Oregon Fresh Marketcafe. View All. The Industries We Serve. Let's Get Started. Name Required First Last. This is big for those of us who live in harsher climates.
Not to mention the integrated aluminum skid plates and a spot for mounting a limiting strap. Beyond shot. I needed to replace my bushings, and on my previous builds, I had never taken the extra step to dial in my front suspension with a set of aftermarket control arms. Experience has shown me that function needs to be prioritized over form.
Not to say the two are mutually exclusive. So, I took the situation as an opportunity to take my Tacoma build to the next level and really fine-tune the front end of my truck.
As you can see from the close-up, the guys at DK sure know how to drop a nice bead of welds. Too clean! Better hang on to your seat. This is the more technical stuff. Abuse and off-roading are two things that are inseparable.
By taking your truck off the pavement, and pushing its capabilities on the trail, you increase the strain and therefore decrease the longevity of your parts.
If you want to build a reliable truck that can handle a lot of abuse, you need to be properly equipped. These Dirt King Performance Lower Control Arms are over-engineered to hold up to everything you can throw at them, without losing the on-road capabilities that the truck was originally designed for. They are designed in CAD to guarantee the best fitment. The factory arms are not only in a vulnerable spot, but they could much be much stronger.
If you do really nail one of them, the internal ribbing ensures protection for a vital component that keeps your truck on the road to your final destination. The factory ball joints are upgraded to heavy-duty Moog ball joints that require little maintenance and can be serviced without difficulty.
The tests showed that the Moog ball joint helped to keep the vehicle tracking better on the asphalt, the sealed housing reduced noise, had a longer overall life span, and, to top it off, these ball joints are easy to find at your local auto parts store. Those are some serious benefits. DK chose Delrin bushings for the inner mounts. When determining the best option to use for these LCAs, the team had to choose between vulcanized rubber bushings, polyurethane bushings and uniballs.
The vulcanized bushings similar to OEM bushings were seen to restrict suspension travel. The polyurethane bushings were not hard enough, and wore out prematurely due to the amount of force applied to the LCA. The control arms also feature a recessed shock mount and a conveniently placed drain hole.
These arms are made to fit any and all shocks built for the Toyota Tacoma. The arms come with a progressive steering stop that can properly control the suspension while it articulates, for optimal steering while avoiding excess strain on the CV axles or tie rods.
The LCAs work well with bump stops and have a spot for mounting a limiting strap. This kit is completely bolt-on. There are no modifications required and all the necessary hardware and directions are included. They come coated with a tough satin black powder coat and the parts that will degrade over time are all replaceable. That means these control arms will probably outlast your truck. The control arms come wrapped in plastic wrap and are surrounded by a shape conforming foam.
When you spend a lot of money on quality parts, this is the level of attention and care which you should expect. Dirt King also organizes its hardware and instructions really well. There is a dedicated bag that also comes with some swag. Dirt King… they do not cut corners.
Big props. I thought it was important to note something about alignment before I get started on the install. A lot of people will argue that you should, or could, mark the alignment cams to keep as good of an alignment post-install as possible. I know the alignment will be trashed after the install, and the short drive to the alignment shop, about miles, is not enough to ruin any relevant amount of tread on the tires. However, the choice is yours. I just personally choose to skip this step.
One final thing to note. Depending on the amount of corrosion you have, you may need to use some sort of rust penetrant to aid in removing the various nuts and bolts. Park your Tacoma on level ground, set the emergency brake, throw a wheel chock behind the rear tires for good measures , and remove your front tire.
Next, set up a couple of jack stands at reinforced points on the frame. I left my hydraulic jack to hold some weight, with most of the weight on the black and red jack stand towards the rear of the truck. The front jack stand was placed under the front skid plate cross-member, just in case.
If you wanted to be super safe, you could take the tire you removed and toss it under the center of the car as well. To start, you could leave the swaybar attached.
It limits the travel of the front suspension at full droop, so I chose to remove it. For the record, I have done an LCA swap both ways, without a ton of extra work. So this part is up to you. You could always try to keep everything attached and remove it if absolutely necessary. My intention was to not run the sway bar after this install, so I chose this time to remove it completely. The sway bar attaches to the spindle, between the upper and lower control arms.
Grab your 17mm socket and ratchet and loosen this bolt. In my case, I had to bust out the vice grips. I grabbed the shaft of the swaybar end and was able to easily loosen the nut. Some models may have a swaybar link that has a slot for an Allen key to make removal easier. Technically, the vice grip was gripping the area where the swaybar end has a boot to keep grease inside the end link.
You could argue that this might damage the boot, but this is the easiest way to prevent the assembly from spinning. Even so, not a huge deal. I had to give mine quite a few solid hits to remove it.
At this point, the limiting part of the suspension is the shock. To remove this nut grab your extension and 19mm socket, or your 19mm wrench, along with another 19mm socket. Before you remove the alignment bolts and cams, remove these two 19mm bolts, and the control arm will pivot on the attachment points on the frame. While the control arm is still attached, this is a good time to remove the cotter pin and use your 24mm socket to loosen the castle nut on the ball joint.
Remove the rear bolt, cams and sleeve. If the entire assembly spins, you might need to use an open-ended 19mm wrench on the head of the bolt. The control arm will not fall out when you do so, so no worry there.
Repeat the process from the rear bolt, on the front one. Once these two bolts and cams are removed, the lower control arm will drop right out. Be careful here to not overextend the inner portion of the CV on the axle. This piece is officially referred to, by Toyota, as the ball joint bracket. With the control arm removed, now is a great time to swap in a new bump stop, or add the bump stop spacer from Dirt King.
Since I already have extended DuroBumps front bump stops , I skipped this step. If you are keeping the factory bump stop, install the spacer now. Check it out. The factory LCA is not necessarily designed to hand the loads of a built truck that sees a lot of action off-road. The steel is thinner and certain design aspects, like the holes, can contribute to corrosion over the long term.
A smaller, but important feature, the mount for the lower shock bolt on the factory control arm collects all sorts of gunk. Dirt King saw this flaw and added a dedicated hole to help drain anything that might build up in the area.
Again, from the bottom, you can see the difference in the amount of material and ultimately strength. Not to mention that shiny skid plate for extra protection. The second step is actually greasing each of the fittings.
This included both pivot joints and the Moog ball joint. You could do this when the control arm is installed, but this way is much easier, at least as far as my experience went. Dirt King includes grease for this step, in a couple of small tubes, but I went the extra length to grease them all with my grease gun.
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