Father & Son Build - Rear Shocks

In our last video Sam & Nathan got the rear subframe designed, mocked up and installed in preparation for finally installing rear shock absorbers on the back of Nate's Baja Bug. As mentioned previously, the father & son team didn't want to cut into the body to run a rear shock absorber, which is the most common method of running a rear shock when installing 3x3 rear trailing arms. So, with the arms in place, the subframe installed, and a stock replacement Bilstein shock in hand, Sam & Nate began testing mounting locations and cycling the rear suspension. Oddly enough, the location they ended up with utilized the stock shock tower, not the subframe. Watch and enjoy the pair working to finally get the rear shocks installed!

Video Transcript

Hi guys, I'm Sam. And I'm Nate. And we will... we will shock you! Well, not you. We're going to try to put shocks on the back of this Baja Bug, finally.

Step one, done. Step two? Going to be a little bit more work. Think I figured out the decent—yeah, yeah. It looks like the '67 seats. I definitely like the '67 color. So I got that trimmed back down, yay!

So now we sit closer to our body. We can also come in and grind it down to get a little bit more taper on that. If you weren’t afraid of the grinder, I’d say do that. But you’re afraid of the grinder.

I mean, I could put long sleeves on. Well, if you wanted to grind that, you could do that. It’s up to you though. Yeah, I’ll go put some long sleeves, put some pants and socks and shoes on too. All right, boots! Doc boots!

What I’m trying to do is—let me bring you guys in a little closer—what I’m trying to do is maybe cut through here, and then cut straight down through here. But of course, I have the body in the way a little bit, so I’ve got to get the body up out of the way. Probably just use a block and put it in between the bucket here and whatnot to get that up and over. So let me do that real quick.

Well, unfortunately, right now what we’ve got a problem with is this guy here hooking onto that. So I’m going to come back in here and cut this little ear out of the way so I can lift the body up some more to come in here and then chop this down right here and right there. That will be a ledge for this tube to sit on, and that will be our new shock tower. Right about there. Sound good? I hope so, because that’s what we’re going to try.

Did you already cut it down? Nope. I’ve got to try to cut the body up.

Somebody’s actually using the grinder! Yeah, for once. For once! You got a long way to go, buddy. He just got to hammer into it. Look at that. Nice! Keep it going, smooth it all out.

Boom.

All right, Nathan cut that down for us. It’s not too bad. About to come in and cut that down somewhere right in that area right there. That was fun while it lasted. I guess I got all dead batteries for my Ryobi.

Old school shock tower, bye-bye. Shock tower, hello. Nate, come give me a hand, bud. Look at that, almost perfect fitment. Yeah! All right, so now we’ve got to get our shock bolted on. Let me show you my shock tower. Threaded shock boss, notched to the outside diameter on the front, notched to the inside diameter on the back, welded in place, and then cut flush on the backside. Then I grinded it down. We will weld up all of this seam here, and then we’ve got to shorten that out just a little bit—not a whole bunch.

Yeah, I think right now our biggest concern is getting the weather plugged on, getting it pulled over here, and then getting this tube trimmed down just a touch. Ready? Okay, hold please, we’re going to go eat dinner.

All right, homemade chili for dinner was delicious. My wife makes awesome chili from scratch.

That will go somewhere in that neighborhood, a flat tab to set it on to give us a nice footprint. And importantly, a lot of guys are thinking, “Oh, you can’t weld this.” Well, this is actually steel. This is—I don’t know if it’s forged or cast steel—but either way, it is steel. You can weld to it. It is plenty strong. You’ll see that—or you’ll hear that—when I’m going through and welding.

I got it tacked right there, shoe tacked in place, and apparently the tube tacked in place a little bit as well. That’s good there. Kind of have to wing this one, because I can’t see with the shock in the way. But the shock obviously needs to be in place right about there.

Let’s pump her up, Nate. At this point, this shock needs to go back further that way. Same thing up here, but this will give us a good ballpark. Let’s measure travel. Oh, wow, yeah, looks good, huh? So to the bottom of our eyelet, currently 14 inches to the bottom of our eyelet. Nate, you want to do the honors and jack this thing up? Hopefully, this shock tower doesn’t move too much. Oh, you know what? I could have gone a lot further forward with that. You still might. Actually, you know what? I’m going to do that right now.

Okay, I’ll continue. Ready? Hold. Don’t go too far. Just going to take a second. Grab me the hammer real quick.

That looks a little bit better. Grab the stinger. Keep going up. Got it measured. It’s still going. Gosh. Is that it? Nope. All right, drop that back down. All right, bring it up. So, 28 and a quarter. Wow, look at that. That’s only 10 inches—no, 14. Oh, shoot, 28! Never mind, not 14 to 24. I’m freaking out. It was 14 and a half inches. That ain’t bad at all.

So, 28.25. What we got in the front was 14. Nathan, how much shock travel do we have?
Fourteen and a quarter inches. Nice! That’s pretty good. Not bad. It’s all under the car—not all under the car—in the car. Stock shock absorber, stock Bilstein replacement shock absorber. Let her drop. Let drop. Let drop! Or push it down. Take a second. It was tested in the Nordschleife, which is in Germany. Yeah, the Nürburgring Nordschleife. It’s not even stiff, which I was super scared about. I was scared that it was going to be like the original front. Yeah, it’s got some resistance, but it’s not as bad as the front was originally. That’s much better.

Nathan, we have a technique that works for shocks. Yeah, buddy! Inside or under? Outside and under! Yeah, buddy! It’s inside the stock fender well. Has anybody done this before? Probably not. Is that going to stop us from doing it? No.

What do we do to mount it? Well, we use our upper spring plate bolt. I’ll end up double-shearing that. I’ll run another plate out here, box this into the trailing arm to hold both sides of the shock. But there we go. We have a shock tower underneath the fender well and still have 14 inches of travel. Not bad, not bad at all. All right, I’m going to get to doing some welding here.

We got the shock in place. Hopefully—this is why we’re going to have the other support come in. Let’s try the quick-up test.

Pull it all the way up. I’m going to get it up off the jack completely—off the stand completely. There we go. It is freestanding on that tube. And it bent up against the body. So, extreme bottoming out—that’s why we are going to put a brace in between here and here. But obviously, we need to be clear of the body. We’ll brace that and weld a bracket from here to here on the backside, just to keep that tower from flexing. It’s a lot of travel, especially when you consider the front’s only seven and a half.

Yeah.

All right, dude, we got one side done. Kind of. We still got to work on the trailing arm. Trailing arm? Yeah, I got to notch the trailing arm back, and then we got to box this section here so that we have some support on the outside here. Yeah. Does look a bit beat down. Yeah, well, that’s going to flex. That’s why this is rubber-mounted. But if we have it captured on both sides, then it’s fine. It won’t bend the hardware. Actually, go up again, because we do need an upper suspension stop. So we were well away from that stock mount there. Even if we didn’t cut it, we were still way far away from that. So we need to get a bump in here—a bump stop to prevent this from going up and over-compressing this shock, because that will blow out that shock super quick.

Yeah, buddy.

Nothing else—maybe we’ll run a bump stop off the top of this right here. I think that’ll work. Nate, you ready to call it a night? No. All right, well, I guess we’re going to go work on the other side now. All right, well, now we got to make another one of these towers for that side. We got to cut that side down and whatnot and so forth.

Have they seen the orange dash? Oh, have you guys seen the orange dash? Nathan, why don’t you give them a view of the orange dash? Orange. Nathan, what color is the car going to be? Orange. Not really—orange dash, just a glove box. Orange glove box.

So Nathan has been busy picking out color schemes. Seat upholstery. Headliner. Carpet colors. Are you going to go oatmeal carpet? Yeah, we’re going to probably maybe custom-order some PRP seats. Mhm. We’re going to do a tan headliner. Yeah. Brown vinyl door panels. Mhm. And then brown and tan seats. Mhm.

Where’s the other shock boss? The one that’s down here on the floor? Yeah, that’s the one. It’s down here on the floor.

Because custom suspension is what we do.

About there?

Yes. I do like my new welder.

That will do. So while that cools off, I’m going to start cutting off everything down here. Got it. And that looks literally awesome having shocks in place now.

Right now, we put that in there. We can get the longer bolts for that, and we can start setting this side up, and we’re almost done to this side.

Yeah.

That’s why I didn’t want to just..Yeah. Would have cost another day of working.

Here we need to get the other Bilstein shock, which is there. I got that. So how come you can’t use a bodywork dolly and a hammer to get..Because you can’t get a dolly in back behind there, because there’s body. I mean, most of it would. Right here. It’s all body. Right here. For the dents up in there. Believe me, I’ve been doing this a little bit.

That saw is hot. And that bag is not.

How come Nathan is—calls—blah blah blah?

That’s Kyle, actually. Oh. Dang! Oh, wow. That’s Jordan’s car. Kyle’s buddy is Jordan, building his own 11 car. He’s going to be ready in time for the race. At the river? Looks like it. Another Desert Dreams Motorsports 1600? Very cool. Yeah, it’s pretty much ready to race now. It was a bare roller last Friday. Wow. Wow. Shoot, they’ve been busy. Say, how come we can’t be that busy? Uh, because I have a regular 9-to-5 job. And— Oh, yeah. You don’t like fabricating.

We got a shocking— Yeah, that’s a bit better.

All right, so that’ll be our platform on the bottom. That will be our cut mark there, and we’ll get this guy cut back and..

Was that hole always— No, it just appeared. Oh. Now we have a holy bucket! All right, that’s that. Uh, is this my helmet or your helmet? Yours. Mine’s on the— Oh. Well. Wow, my butt just fell through the lid. Oh, well. A lot of things have fallen through the lid today. Mr. Bucket!

I’m just going to pick a spot, and then we’re going to stick it based on that one over there. And I’m going to stick that right there.

You don’t know what the heck happened. This.. Done! All done? All done. Let’s get to do some welding. Backside over here. I’m glad! I’m glad we did. Go! Tonight you said that I think you need it.Can you grab me the impact, please?

That’s hot. Super duper hot. Yeah, buddy. We got shocks. We got two towers! Yay! Nate, how many shocks in the back of your car? Uh, eight? No. Three? No. Two? Yeah, buddy. We got deuces on the shocks, bud. And four in total! Nathan. Yeah. We got two shocks in the back of your car, bud. Yeah. One shock, two shock, red shock, blue shock. Uh, yellow-blue shock. Yellow shock.

So, with that, we are shocked. Two shocks. Rear subframe is done enough. Obviously, I still need to brace the shock towers to the subframe. At that point, the body can come off, and we can start mocking up and getting everything else underneath here all welded up and done. We can weld in the back transmission—or the back access cover plate. We can get the rest of the subframe all welded up. The body’s in the way. Here we can make the brace for the shock tower. Back suspension’s almost done. And then we’ve got to widen the beam. Then we’ve got to widen the front beam. And then—AC! AC. We’ve got to—yeah. We’ve got to get the condenser and a couple other things for the backside. Condenser and dryer, I think, are the big things for the back. Few—oh, you know what? At this point, we’ve got to do—we don’t have our mount for our rear bumper anymore. So we’ve got to get our rear bumper bolted back in place. Yay! And we’ve got to figure out a way to mount the bumper to this subframe. See if I have some tubing couplers. If not, I might have to order some tubing couplers. I got to make certain to bring home the roll cage before this weekend so we can build our feet to make sure we can connect our roll cage into our subframe and get that done.

And then— Front! And then we can get the whole chassis all cleaned up and painted and detailed. Well, I mean, before that we need to do an AC mock-up. Because we’re probably going to run tabs off this. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So we’re going to have to get some AC stuff and make sure that we don’t have to— Yeah. Do anything else on the chassis. Yeah. Get the floor pans in. So I need to find a super compact AC condenser that will fit above the transmission, below the body, in this general area here.

Anyway, we’re getting there. We got shocks. We got more work to do on the back. A couple steps closer to having the rear subframe and all the rear suspension done. Front’s not going to be too bad as far as widening the beam. And then the next step after that is electric power steering. A couple used junkyard components I got off eBay. One of the two isn’t working. I don’t know if it’s a control module or the steering column, but I don’t know. I’ll test that out, try and diagnose that. If anybody has any tips on that, let us know in the comments below.

In the meantime, thanks for watching. Life’s full of good people. If you can’t find one, be one. Later, guys. Boomsha!