Marlin Crawler's New Rock Crawling Long Travel IFS Suspension System (#RCLT)

Does the UCA line up with the holes on your coil bucket?? I'd be more worried about that. IF you can line those holes up then the bolt will go thru unless the bolt is bent. Put the UCA on and use some punches or drift pin to line up both sides of the UCA...if you cant do that then you've got a problem with the UCA. IF they line up on both sides then its a bolt problem

 

Thanks for that info. I just checked the bolt with a straight edge and it is not bent. It slides right into the driver side UCA the same way the driver side bolt slide right into it. It’s definitely the passenger side UCA mounting lug alignments are off. Hopefully Marlin gets back to me.

 

that’s a good point

 

The UCA does seem to line up but upon further inspection I can see that the rear lug angle isn’t quite in line with coil bucket and front lug. The bolt slides in by hand until it enters about a half inch into the rear hole then it jams up. It’s definitely misaligned because the bolt won’t slide in when it’s off. I’m just curious if anyone else has run into this because I figured the UCA was made on a jig with very minimal tolerance discrepancies. Thanks for your help.

 

I don’t think it’s commonplace to get UCA bolts with any long travel kit. Hopefully you’ll get some satisfaction from Marlin. Do you have a lot of followers on Instagram or a popular YouTube channel perhaps? That might help.

 

Try rotating the bushings around, or mix and match them from front to rear. I wonder if one of them is not true. Or if you have a straight edge that can fit through the arms without bushing and check in several spots around their circumference.

 

That’s a good idea. I’ll give it a try tomorrow and update.

Edit: I just laid the bolt that I verified was straight on the outside of the UCA mounting lugs and have attached a pic showing how it sits on the rear lug when flush on the front. I’ll push the sleeve bushing and poly bushing out tomorrow and check from the ID but doesn’t look good.

 

LOL we don’t need to get into that. I just think there’s gotta be more people with this issue.

 

There's not a lot of kits out there to actually get a good metric for this error.

 

I doubt you’ll be the only one if the jig is bad. That sucks. I really do hope you get squared up soon (no pun intended). The LT kit I have came with the wrong misalignment spacers (Fox’s error) and I had replacements in the mail the same day. I didn’t even call, I had just posted on TW trying to figure it out first haha Everything else was impeccable, but that showed me how important it was to have good support behind the product. Those guys will go to the end of the world for their customers and that speaks volumes. The odds are against Marlin, but maybe they can turn a new leaf.

 

That new leaf is sadly going in the wrong direction.

 

In case anyone is interested this is what I was told (see pic). I already messed with that UCA as much as I could and the bolt ain’t going in.

 

Thank you for the response. Hope to catch you guys on the trail soon. Finally got the truck to a point where we could do some tests. Sad to say we were waiting for the right brake lines... good news is the truck is performing better than expected! We did the CTI tests and the results were slightly better than yours. The rear is getting so much flex that the drive shaft is hitting the gas tank skid plate!

Our tests got more flex per corner when only one corner at a time was lifted.














Notice the limit straps are still slack. We weren't able to fully flex the rear nor get to full bump at the front.

 

Oh heck yeah.

 

That’s not very reassuring. I’d hate to see anything with less of a tolerance than that…

 

Yeah, I don't even look at shocks that are vehicle specific anymore because its more about stroke length than how it bolts any more. especially when you've put universal mounting points.

If the material isn't cooled properly it can warp when you pull it off the jig.

 

I'm a machinist/fabricator and idc what the tolerance on the sleeves are, the cups aren't concentric. That's a huge deviation seeing the picture of it off the truck. I've never made anything that off and just shipped it on like it was fine.

 

Are there coils on these front shocks, or are they air shocks?

 

Looks like ORI

 

Pretty cool, never seen those before.