 Hi everyone, Emmy here again and welcome to another episode of Cobb U. We all love to modify our cars. We'll upgrade our intake, exhaust, turbos, we'll even put brand new wheels with sticky tires on it for better grip. And while we do this for various reasons, the outcome is always the same. We just want to go fast and squeeze every ounce of performance that we can out of our cars. But when we think about upgrading our vehicles, we often overlook vehicle suspension. That becomes more and more important as we upgrade the power to our vehicle. So today we're going to be looking at a basic overview of suspension and how all the components work together to give you the ride that you want. Now the suspension affects the way that we feel every second that we're in our car. It handles the comfort, control, and contact. Comfort refers to smoothing out the bumps on the road and providing a comfortable ride. Control refers to safely accelerating, braking, and cornering. Comfort refers to keeping the tires planted to the road to give you the most traction. A vehicle setup with proper suspension responds substantially better, too, and takes those corners harder and faster, in turn, putting a big grin on your face, making your car look pretty sick, too. There are two ways of looking at suspension setups. First is going to be your specialty setups, which is race cars, show cars, low riders. And second is what we do here at Cobb, which is focusing on the daily driver who wants good handling and a comfortable ride. So today we're going to focus on the latter, because specialty setups are extremely unique to each case and that they go beyond what most of us are going to use. Proper suspension setups become more important as we increase power. Because as the power increases, the demand on the individual suspension components increases as well. If you don't have the proper suspension to handle all that power, well, that can result in some undesirable handling characteristics, such as under or oversteering. Suspension is the sum of various parts that do different jobs, but all work together to give you the ride and handling that's best suited for your needs. So proper suspension tuning is like a symphony, not a solo act. So let's take a look at all the individual components and we'll talk about how they all work together. Today we'll be looking at springs, shocks, struts, anti-sway bars or anti-roll bars, end links, and suspension bushings. The springs are basically a heavy duty wire coiled around an axis and are going to be located either next to or over the shock and they're going to do two things. First, they compress and expand to absorb the motion of the wheels as forces of the road act upon them. This movement is dependent on spring rate, which is the amount of force required to compress the spring a given distance. This in turn affects the stiffness or smoothness of the ride. Second, they can lower the center of gravity by decreasing the height of the car. How much it lowers the vehicle will vary from spring to spring. Next, we have shocks and struts. We hear people use the words shock and strut interchangeably all the time, but the truth is they're two very different components that have something in common. They both function as dampers. Now the purpose of dampers is to control unwanted spring motion and slow down and reduce vibrations from the road. They do this by allowing an internal piston to move up and down in hydraulic fluid within a housing. This turns the kinetic energy into heat energy, which dissipates into the atmosphere. Now what makes them different is a shock's only job is to dampen. Now on the other hand, a strut contains a damper, but is also a structural link of your suspension and in some cases can affect your alignment and steering. Now to better understand this distinction, if you were to remove a shock, you could still drive your car because your suspension is still intact. It's going to drive horribly, but you can still drive it. Now if you were to remove a strut, you can't drive your car anymore because you've literally just removed a piece of what's actually holding your suspension together. Now it's important to understand that a car will either have a shock or a strut at each wheel, but never both at the same location. Anti-sway bars are used along with shocks or struts to give a moving car added stability by controlling and reducing body roll. And providing better weight distribution on your tires. An anti-sway bar is a metal rod that spans from one side of the car to the other and basically joins each side of the suspension together. When the suspension at one wheel moves up and down, the anti-sway bar transfers the movement to the other wheel to share some of the load. This is what helps to reduce and control body roll. Some anti-sway bars also have adjustability via the connection points on the end. These would be set depending on the desired roll stiffness. The end links themselves are like arms that come in various lengths and widths. They generally connect the anti-sway bar to a lower control arm, allowing forces to be transferred from a heavily loaded axle to the opposite side. When upgrading your anti-sway bar, you may need to upgrade your end links as well. Quite simply because the factory end links may not be strong enough to handle the additional stress. And an end link that isn't strong enough may bend or even snap, making that pretty new anti-sway bar useless. Suspension bushings are small, flexible rubber pieces that are found between pivot points and moving parts. They absorb shock and allow movement between the chassis and suspension components. Bushings come in various sizes and stiffness ratings. Factory bushings are designed to reduce noise, vibrations, and harshness. In other words, they make our car more comfy and tend to live a long life in normal driving conditions. Most aftermarket bushings are made of polyurethane, which is stiffer. This makes everything nice and tight together. This increased stiffness in all the moving parts provides the driver with a more direct feedback of what the car's doing as a whole, which makes you feel more connected to your car. Now, with this connection, however, you're gonna hear those noises, feel the vibration and feel the harshness. One last note, bushings will wear over time, and if not replaced, they can cause things like loose steering, suspension noise, pulling, and excessive tire wear. Now that we've learned all the parts, let's see how they all work together. When you're taking a corner, the car will lean and weight will shift to the outside of the turn. This will make the spring and damper compress on that side while the other side will slightly extend. At the same time, the anti-sway bar is keeping the car's body parallel to the road, optimizing the contact patch of the tires. This, in turn, maintains the tire's traction through the corner. And that's a basic suspension overview, with just a few parts and some adjustments, your car can have a properly set up suspension that'll complement all those other mods you've done and make it really fun to drive. One more note, anytime you're making adjustments to your suspension, you're gonna wanna realign your car because your alignment's gonna be affected. Not a big deal, just something good to know. And now, it's time for the pro tip of the day. Whether you like imports, classics, or American-made muscle cars, one thing you commonly see is that people like their car to look and feel aggressive. And most of the time, lowering their car is part of that process. And in most cases, lowering it a little bit can actually be a good thing. But when changing ride height, there can be too much of a good thing. Now we're not talking about your race car or your show cars that have a suspension set up for one purpose. What we're talking about is your daily driver or your weekend toy that you're trying to get the most performance out of. Lowering it too much can cause a plethora of problems. One that's obvious is the guy that's scraping around the ground. It's dangerous because the car can't handle or brake properly. And that's because to lower a car that much, you usually have to break a bunch of rules like excessive camber, tires rubbing in the wheel well, incorrect alignment, tire size, and so on. And he's hitting things, so he's bound to break something on his car. And in some places, it's straight up illegal. Now for the guys that actually care about performance, adjustability and setup are the issue. You can go out and dump your checking account on the nicest set of suspension parts that allow you to adjust your ride height, damping, camber, etc. But then people wanna crank it up to 11. Parts are designed to work within ranges. If you exceed those ranges, you can actually make your car perform worse than if you did nothing at all. So just keep all these things in mind when you're working with your suspension. And that's gonna do it for this episode. Thanks for joining us and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you can check out future episodes. I'm Emmy, your host for Cobb U. Remember, check out Cobbtuning.com for all your parts and tuning needs. Do you like the storage solutions featured in our studio? Then visit sonictoolsusa.com to get more detailed product information.