I’m not sure if this was brought up before, but any suggestions? I have kings ext travel sitting patiently. I’ve read about total chaos but for nearly $750 is it worth it? now days others are making the same product for less, but I’d like to hear your suggestions.

Also which rear coils would you recommend?
Thanks in advance


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What lift height are you looking for in the rear...

I would recommend the High Caster UCA's from JBA, they come in standard duty as well as heavy duty. I have the standard on mine and it's an awesome product and an awesome company.

Also, highly affordable.

Ironman Pro Forge UCA. Zero maintenance, sealed ball joint and very well made.


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Total Chaos, jba (if you don't mind them packaging a bunch of Jesusy crap in the box with your truck parts), or a lot of guys seem to be having good luck with Dirt King. I'll never forgive spc for their cheap Chinese steel that broke, and anything that uses a ball joint rather than a uniball? Why bother? Might as well stay stock.

Total Chaos parts are expensive because they are developed on the race track through years of R&D and trial and error, not copied from another company. You're getting a premium part that will likely outlast your truck, not knockoff garbage that Joe-blow welded in his garage.

As for your springs, figure out how much load you intend to carry in the back and go from there. You did get a set of kings for the back too, yes?

I have JBA and Dobinson coils. Very, Very happy with both.

I would steer clear of the generic Ebay ones (mine broke),
Tough Country (don't correct caster),
and Freedom Offroad (they're a Chinese import reseller who doesn't do anything other than warehouse and resell import products, so if you ever need something like a replacement ball joint - you're probably out of luck, they don't even know what ball joint the arms use - I've asked. They know about as much about their products as the stocker at Walmart knows about the huffy bicycle on the shelf).

I personally have JBA arms. The one thing I don't like is that they rub if I want to run my 20" wheels without spacers. They work fine for me with my OEM TRD OR 17" wheels. But that's something to consider.

If I were buying again - I'd go with Ironman. IMO they are the best of the currently available arms at least how they are designed. I don't know about geometry without having personally measured a set.

Finally - ball joints are better than uniballs. They last longer, have less maintenance, and there's no strength advantage to uniballs. The loading on the upper arms is minimal. No one ever breaks an upper control arm. I'm aware of one example I've ever heard of and that was in the 2018 Baja 1000 on a LC200 and the arm broke at the weld at the bushing. - they have to run OEM UCAs in stock class. And that was once in about 20,000 race miles on 39" tires on a 6000lb race truck.

I'd also go for rubber bushings over poly. Rubber is more expensive and has more resistance to flex, but it absorbs more energy and offers a better ride. The best bushings I've seen are on the newer SPC arms - they're a rubber bushing with a free flexing ball internally.

You'll probably be fine with any of the variety of options other than the ones I mentioned as being known problematic arms.

Good luck!

Thank you all for the replies! Yes I’ve been reading a lot and honestly I want the best bang for my buck being I want something to last, yes I’ve got the kings rear shocks as well. As for height, I have the tuff country 4” lift on and I kind of want to keep it near the same?! and the load is your usual camping fishing gear, nothing to crazy. We do mainly dirt bumpy off-road, maybe once in awhile we go a little up the mountain haha


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I also went with JBA for easily replaceable ball joints and zerk fittings for greasing.

As some have mentioned, you have to watch your backspacing as a bigger tire on a conservative offset might cause rub.

With that said, JBA guys should be able to help you out with inquiries as their customer service is above and beyond. The effort of voluntarily keeping you apprised of your order status is a breath of fresh air in this industry.

I went through Filthy Motorsports and settled on the SPC UCAs and 600lb Dobinson rear springs. Very happy with the setup and no issues.

A 4 lift likely will make the ride rougher as it pretty much takes all of your available down travel away. Have you considered compromising at 3 or less? Especially for the bumpy off road parts you frequent.

In 2005 toyota recalled 750,000 4r's over ball joint failures. The typical 1" uniball that most manufacturers use have a loading strength of nearly 100,000lbs, ball joints don't even come close.

The primary reason for upgrading uca's is to achieve more caster. Jba advertises their arms are capable of getting to 3° whereas conventional wisdom around here is that upwards of 4° may be required to run 285's without doing a BMC. I'm not trying to shit on jba, if I were doing it again I may have gone that route, but I'm super happy with my Total Chaos uppers a d lowers

I have the exact dilemma. To complicate things, I already have the JBA UCA. But another issue I’m having is the color scheme.

Jba’s are red and kings are blue. To me, it does not look good together.

Options:

1. Jba in red
2. Purchase new UCA already blue or black (Total Chaos or Camburg)





3. Powder coat jba to blue ?

Ball joints can fail. Those were lower ball joint failures, not upper and they failed as a result of a machining error that scarred the wear surface and over 100+k miles they wore out to the point that some came apart. But it was also a problem in design where the old lower joint was inverted from how the 5th gen is designed so it was pulling apart, not inherently pushing into the socket. The 5th gen LCA/spindle design fixed that even if you were still using the old style ball joints.
You can see why the old style was a big engineering failure.
Old:


New:


The 1" uniball may be stronger in an absolute sense, but the're not stronger in this application because in both cases they'll be mounted in single shear and the through-bolt of the unball is typically weaker than the ball/stud in the balljoint. Given that it will be a pure lateral loading - the weakest point of the ball joint assembly is stronger than the weakest point in the uniball assembly.

The second issue is that uniballs don't last very long. And that's really the issue for me. Both are strong enough for the UCA. But one lasts many times longer. Uniballs are open joints typically with no lubrication other than a small PTFE liner. And they have no internal adjustments for wear - so as soon as they wear even a relatively small amount they become loose, have more dirt intrusion, and accelerated wear. The result is short service life. Ball joints are sealed and lubricated joints that are typically internally spring loaded to adjust for wear as they age without becoming loose. The JBA joints have external threaded adjusters to preload the ball joint as it wears. So they last many times as long in normal use. If Toyota used uniballs in its suspension that need to be replaced every 50k miles - it wouldn't go very well. A uniball on the lower joint might not even last 50k miles. The uniballs in my fox shocks only last about 15-20k miles.

The plus side is that uniballs are cheap, easy to swap, and strong. They usually come with weld-in cups that makes fabrication pretty easy. And they can be mounted in double shear configuration with 360* free rotation. So for a racing application they're great. For a daily driver I wouldn't choose them if I didn't have a specific need for them.

FWIW I've measured dimensions of the JBA arm compared to the stock one and they move the center of the ball joint 22.5mm. That translates to approximately 5-6* of caster. So if you had 0 caster with the OEM arm, you should have 6* caster with the JBA before getting it aligned. It's actually a bit of a problem if you want to run less than 3" lift, you can end up with too much caster. Maybe JBA has backed off a bit on that??

Here's a picture of a JBA ball joint vs a tubular arm with an OEM size ball joint. The JBA joint is stronger than it needs to be. But it is pretty heavily built.



In the pic I plotted the location of each arm. Green is OEM, Blue is Tough Country and Red is JBA. The TC arm adds approximately 5mm of longitudinal adjustment relative to the frame (meaning caster) and adds about 7mm of lateral (camber - moving the point away from the frame). The JBA arms adds 22.5mm of caster and is approximately the same camber. The result on mine was that the TC arm could not get camber into spec and left caster worse than before due to maxing out the cams on camber setting.




I think the JBA arms could - and should be redesigned in a few ways. They should redesign the plate so it clears OEM backspaced wheels. That's an easy fix. They should also double drill the mounting plate so that the ball joints can be installed in 2 different configurations for either extra 2* of caster or extra 6* degrees of caster. Again that would be minimal cost/effort and make them work a lot better for situations like mine where I like to run about 2" lift and I have problems with too much caster. I can easily get a perfect alignment, but if I set it to only 3 or 4* of caster - then I'm rubbing even my 33" tires on the inner fender/firewall area. With 34" tires it's a no-go. So I have to set the wheel more forward (more caster) and then I end up with more like 6* of caster. So it's too much. And OEM arms are too little. Some adjustment would be really useful for me. And it wouldn't cost anything other than a re-design and have all of the plates laser cut with a second hole pattern.

So JBA arms aren't the perfect arm by any measure. They're just pretty okay and reasonably priced.

In a perfect world - I'd just order 500 UCAs from MOOG's china factory and they'd just build OEM style arms for $10 each with my adjusted geometry and they'd use OEM balljoints and just have more caster and be stamped with an additional 15 degree angle on the mounting seat for the joint so they would handle the extended travel without maxing the ball joint motion range. It's a super easy fix if someone wanted to order a bulk set to get them to make some new dies for the stamping.

Seems like $5 worth of Rustoleum would solve your problem.