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

Yeah I see most guys with tacos in the most extreme cases on here and out in the desert jumping in the sand and doing short and medium runs of medium sized whoops since bigger than that starts to give most trucks a hard time with their basic layout.

 

That’s my whole point, a Tacoma will never be able to handle what I would consider “driving hard” and because the truck can’t handle the abuse there really isn’t any value in building a spindle that can.

 

100% The only person that runs them that I’ve seen on here wheels hard (in desert and mountains) and had had his truck for 10+ years and decided to buy them last year. They’re not necessary, but then again most things aren’t on this area of the forum. They’re out there so people can put it on their truck nonetheless.

 

Yes, I was shocked about that too. All this "you dont need to chop your cab mount", but I had already done a cab mount relocation so I thought all was good. Once I was in the waiting line I realized there was a lot more involved.

 

I agree the kit is awesome, but I think you waited in a different queue. Your kit is gray, the first public production batch from Feb 2021 orders were black.

 

We specifically asked for them to come uncoated so we can weld on a bump strike pad where our bumps hit so we didn't have to rebuild our mounts. We painted them with SteelIt. I believe our kit was in the second batch of production runs as many people received theirs before us.

 

Ahh that's cool. I apologize for being a bitter internet detective. If I knew uncoated was an option I would have done that too. We just got caught in the trap of "it's shipping in 2 days", "it's shipping on Monday.. Friday for real... we had an issue with a part... its shipping in a week." Just on and on for months, with no clear indication of what was holding it up.

 

My take and I have stated it before. The ability to have an idea design a part and build it does not mean one knows how to run or manage a business. Marlin's difficulty with being able to deliver is not isolated to the RCLT. What happened with the crawl box?

 

We were in the same boat, as I mentioned above we waited 2 years to get our hands on our kit. I try and think the best of people, and seeing the iterations the kit has gone through since it first started I know a lot of time has been spent working on it, I also know how much time it takes to constantly update a customer base on products. Do I agree with everything Marlin Crawler has done with this kit release, no not at all. Do I respect them for what they have accomplished, absolutely, the instruction manual alone is incredibly impressive on the level of detail gone into it and it made our 3-day timeframe for install way less of a headache, including having Toyota part numbers readily available for replacement parts. Their focus has 100% been on the product and it left the consumer hanging a bit for sure, but at the end of the day, I'd rather have the really expensive suspension on my truck the best it possibly could be than something half-ass slapped together to hit a deadline.

 

Building a kit specifically for the 2004-present line, advertising it, even beginning a thread for it on the world’s biggest Taco forum, taking people’s money and clearly saying it will be delivered in x weeks. Great.

Now trying to think the best of a company that a. Doesn’t offer any concrete, linear reasons for kits not being sent b. Stops responding to their OWN thread on the world’s biggest Taco forum that supports potentially the majority of their clients c. sends kits to people that will inherently advertise their product to an even larger group of clients while keeping customers who paid for their kit in a reoccurring cycle of broken promises. Come on, there is absolutely nothing impressive in what’s happened - not one iota or i-yota

 

Mike would be a great politician.

 

If you use the word investor in the place of client, what I posted above is literally a Ponzi scheme method as he used the money from the initial orders to send kits out to those who could give him more exposure and more clients rather than to his clients paid in full. Obviously there’s a product eventually ending up in the hands of clients making it unlike a Ponzi scheme, but it isn’t a pleasant business model for most customers.

 

That paints quite the mental image!

 

It’s just a baby, geeze don’t get so uptight about it

 

Agreed. I wanted this to be successful as I wanted it. I was ready to order before I left Afghanistan later summer 2020. Clearly that never happened because of the uncertainty of the company itself. So, I bought a pair of WP RNVGs instead. They've built such drastic timeliness into their delivery it would be extremely difficult to figure out if you got pelfreyd or not.

I'm trying to bounce out on another deployment so maybe I'll just SAS instead.

 

Gold

 

This. All the SAS. Will be the same money with more travel

 

Very vivid.. I like it.

 

Every time I read the first page or so of his posts that became more and more clear. So much fluff.

 

Wow another influencer with RCLT, Nate at Dirt Lifestyle has a +3.5 kit in hand. Paying customers still waiting for this??