SPC Light Racing UCA issue

+1
I called when I thought I had an issue and was blown away on how well they treated me and the time they spent conversing with me on the phone.
Their customer service was very very good.

 

Aren't you glad you went? Look at the festive decorations and lovely Christmas cards!

 

We will never hear from OP again and this thread will silently get nuked. He's locked in a room in the basement because he knows too much.

 

Yes. It's not like their office there is a retail outlet so I'm not sure they get too many dickheads like me walking in off the street but I spoke to a guy named Tom who was super friendly and helpful.
He pulled up the specs on the arms for me.
Outside dim should be 11.3" and inside should be 8.2". Pretty much what @YamaDirtrider posted.
He said that these dims should result in the arms being slightly squished on install. In other words, uninstalled should be just slightly wider than installed.
He also said that they've seen a few rare instances where the tube that goes through the coil bucket had a slightly different length from Toyota. He didn't have access to the Toyota dimension at the moment but I told him I'd check mine and check back with him.

As far as the different iterations of their arms, the all forged (not cast he corrected me) arms are indeed in the works. He expected them to be available in a few months. If you want the new arms, he suggested going with a high volume retailer like @ToyTec Lifts and checking with them to make sure that's what they have. I took that to imply that they'll try to move old stock first.
He mentioned a lifetime warranty but confirmed that it only applies to the original purchaser.

I asked him what he thought about my idea of "tweaking" them back in to spec with a bottle jack and surprisingly he didn't recoil in horror. He just said that I shouldn't make them too wide and have to squish them too much on install.

I guess their manufacturing takes place just up one more exit off 25 and he said they generate 10 million pounds of metal shavings a year .

 

I spent a little bit of time in the pit of misery (dilly, dilly) but it was nice and they had beer.

 

Tom is who I am talking to over email as well.

 

so no matter which iteration or arms or bushings they should measure the same. did he have any reasoning behind the multiple iterations of both? seems like when we inquired a few years ago about the zerk on the joint they made it seem like the arms were just fine the way they were...

 

added pictures of mine.
you can see i used the washer on the inside of the bushing on only one side.

 

product development?

The only mention of older styles was that he did say the early version of the spec ride bushing, where they had washers on the inside as well as the outside, bound up the bushings and caused too much rotational resistance that stressed the welds and caused some failures.
He did go out in this cold ass wind and look at my truck.

He said it's way cooler than yours

 

sweet, ive been riding around on a product that is known to cause failures.
good thing i swapped to something else for the time being.

i might go get a set of michelins after hearing he said that.

 

Tom was who helped me!

 

These are the SPC forged uppers for a Ford F-150 - So I assume when they revise the Tacoma ones this is how they will look - i’m OK with the new ones I just received because they still look like aftermarket uppers

 

That’s what I did. Press it over a little, the washers press it back at right width while installing.

I think I bent mine while changing the bushings (wrong way).

No problems since.

 

Here's what I got from today. Using the all thread method to press out the old bushings stretched apart the arms about an inch or so. Measurements are immediately after removing from the truck.

 

Yep...
Just a BCH over 11" on the driver's side UCA.

 

Factory bottle jack was a tight squeeze but worked perfect. Pushing them out just past 11.5 inches made them spring back to 11.25.