Transcription
This is now a Subaru Ascent. We just got back from Portland yesterday. Rally Tech had this in their shop all day. They worked insanely hard and we are now running Ascent springs in the back, which the gross vehicle weight rating of a Subaru Ascent is 6,000 lb. We We are ginormous. Just right now, we have all of our fuel tanks loaded. We have both water cans completely full, 10 gallons total of water, everything to the max. and come around. Look at this. Yeah, that's insane. With our Iron Man, I could not fit my foot in here. Even when it wasn't this loaded down, even before this, it looked normal, but now it looks lifted. Yeah. Yeah, dude. This is crazy. We'll get to ride quality in a little bit, but in the 24 hours following having that installed, we have taken it through everything we possibly could. Two of the toughest drives I've been on. Portland Rush Hour, Trader Joe's parking lot. Nice. Which side did we dent before? Um, are we on a new side? I don't remember. And now it's the same dent. We dented the same spot. A what a let down.
Today we took it up into an OV park that we have never been before. And is going to be driving this trail. I honestly don't even know if we can do it. It looks like a tiny trail. We're somewhere in Oregon at an OV park. Never been here. haven't researched it. We just pulled in and we are going to give this a solid shakeddown.
For all the people asking why we picked the cross track, we didn't pick it really. It just sort of picked us. We had some long-distance road trips planned. Our current vehicle wasn't very reliable. It made sense financially for us to get a cross track for a number of reasons. We didn't get one for overlanding. We did not say, "Let's pick out a vehicle and mod it for overlanding." That was that was not something on the table. Well, actually, we were thinking like what's the best commuting around our area, normal commute vehicle that could also do a little bit of going into the mountains, and we're making do with what we got. And it actually massively worked out in our favor because the Cross Track is such a unique vehicle to see out overlanding like this that it's gained us a whole bunch of attention just because it's very not normal. Wow, this is aggressive. I'm really scared. I'm really scared. I'm really scared. Oh my goodness. We can do this. Crazy, dude. That was pretty insane. By the way, we have never taken it off-roading with our hitch basket setup like this. and fully weighted down.
For our first suspension setup, we went with Iron Man. And I've largely avoided doing an in-depth talk about that because I just don't want to be excessively negative towards anyone or anything, but I want to give you guys all the information. I know people that have had Iron Man and it's been fine, and I know a lot more people that have had Iron Man like us and it's not been fine. Ours did not mechanically fail. Granted, we weren't on it for a super long time. It just sagged so much even though we were supposedly running the Spec C. And I say supposedly because I leave a small possibility that they did not send us a Spec C kit. One of our parts for the subframe drop in our Iron Man kit was machined entirely wrong. And I had to go into Overland Truck Store and they swapped out. They had a kit. I was able to swap out, get the correct part thanks to them. And since it started sagging so quickly when we loaded down our cross track, that made me second guess whether we even had the spec C springs to begin with. Probably did 99% sure. I'll give them benefit of the doubt, but I don't even understand the definition of overload because this to me is overload. And nothing with the title overload has remotely been able to handle our overload.
Anyways, on the flip side of that whole conversation, when I said we're giving up on the Iron Man springs, bunch of messages from people that had Rally Tech and said they loved it. I mean, completely different. On one side, I had everyone saying, "Yeah, I had issues with my Iron Man. Yeah, we're sagging a lot right now." And then on the other side, I have a single person that was telling me, "Don't go with Rally Tech." It's complete opposite. So many messages. We love Rally Tech. So, that's that's it. Not trying to be a hater or anything. That's my exact story. If you follow Rally Tech, you've seen on a weekly basis, they are swapping out Iron Man kits for Rally Tech suspension. Even literally yesterday morning when I was on my way to drop this off at Rally Tech, I got a message. Somebody said, "Hey, we're on Iron Man Spec and it's sagging a lot. What do you have because it looks good under load?" And yeah, we were on Rally Tech. But now we're even more on Rally Tech. And now we are on even more Rally Tech. I'm going to move and we're going to shoot with that in the background. Good. Good.
The reason I went with Rally Tech is mainly their mentality and just how they run their business. They do not give no for an answer. They are always going to come up with a solution. It's such a breath of fresh air. As I'm doing stuff and people are like, "You're going to avoid the warranty doing that and all this stuff like that." Reli has not done that once. Even though we are far beyond what a Cross Trek is designed for, they'll be like, "All right, here's your pros and cons and we can come up with a solution for you." They just have the best mentality all around. Pushing the boundaries of our offerings, undertake endeavors that push the limits of our products, testing their capabilities and resilience. Everyone knows when you're doing this stuff, things are going to break. It's just it's part of it. And Rally Tech, in my opinion, has the best support for this sort of thing. I got to meet the owner at the Rally. Pretty tightly run. They're extremely quick on their feet. They can react insanely fast. That's part of our story here is how quickly they took care of us. We were mid-road trip when we decided we were no longer comfortable carrying on with our Iron Man suspension. So, I reached out to Rally Tech. We ended up going with the Bilstein struts. 2-in spacers on the front, 2 and 1/2 in spacer on the rear, and their Outback overload springs on the back. The Cross Track overload springs on the front. That gave us some of our lift back on the rear, but the biggest difference was that we were finally stable again. With the Iron Man, we were very squishy. Going over to the Rally Tech, we felt like we had good control. We weren't bouncing. However, we started having a loud impact sound in the back. Checked the strut bolts, things like that. Couldn't figure it out.
Okay, so fast forward to this trip. The sound was getting bad enough that I wanted to have it checked out. They were amazing and got us a time on their calendar as quick as they could just a couple days later. Yesterday, they put in so much work for us. They checked everything out, found out that their warehouse people had actually sent us the cross track overload springs. So, while this whole time we thought we had been on Outback overload springs, we were on the lower spring rate cross track overload springs, which was a best case scenario thing because that meant it all made sense at that point. I bear the responsibility on that one because I sort of rushed the process. They were mid-car show and still got everything done and sent out to me. It's totally understandable. This is an extremely custom setup. This is not a setup they offer on the website. So, doing the Cross Track Adventure kit with Outback Overload Springs, it's just not something you can get. In fact, especially these Ascent springs. You must earn the right to use ascent springs on your Cross Track by bottoming out their Cross Track overload springs for a month straight. That unlocks the Obsidian spring camo. Once you have that, you can go back into Rally Tech and they will take you down to the experimental science department of the uh We successfully unlocked the next level. Yes, we unlocked we earned the right to these ascent springs. Not only did they find that we were on their cross track overload springs, but we were basically about sitting on the bump stop. So, our noise made sense. That's why the ride probably felt so stiff, I guess you could say. It's interesting because we're basically sitting on the bottom of our struts nearly.
I don't think either you or I care about ride quality. Like when people are like, "Well, it's going to be stiffer or something." I mean, this feels great now. Everything today. I thought I thought it felt It feels so good. I I just Yeah. I can't believe we're so stupid and have been bottoming out our strut for a month straight. I mean, once again, it's all on us. How are you supposed to know? There were ways we could have known. Once again, we only have this car. We only do overlanding. We only do all of this stuff because we like making cool videos and pictures. I didn't include that in the why we got a cross track, but part of the reason we love this setup is it's so minimal. Once it's packed up, we're in this little adventure buggy that can do anything we've needed it to do. Yeah, it's so cool. it fades into the background of our adventure where we're not spending the day like, "Okay, where can we get a trailer? Where can we do whatever?" And that segus into why I went with Rally Tech, which is I think it is the most simple, durable setup. I didn't want to deal with coilovers. I'm not a car guy. I'm not going to be tuning things. I don't want I don't want to have to do anything to maintain it. Rally tech setup. The Bilstein struts are I think the most set it and forget it durable setup you can get. They swapped us to the Outback overload springs and that still was not enough. The main issue is how much weight we have leveraged out here. Just so much leverage this far back that he could basically pull the strut all the way down just from right here. Versus if you're up here and you lose that leverage, it's pretty rock solid. So, probably as we get into warmer weather and can strip back gear, we'll work on removing weight from the back. That said, Rally Tech Specialty is coming up with solutions. That's what they did. They kind of ran me through all the options and left the ball in my court. I was waffling back and forth whether I wanted to go to Ascent Springs or try to put a bunch of time into redistributing our weight, removing some stuff off the back. That's when Rally Tech said the one thing I needed to hear, which was they felt the most comfortable sending us down the road on Ascent Springs, and they got it done same day. And I literally could not be happier or more confident with that decision after the driving we have done today. And how it's performed, how it sits, everything about it is amazing. Oh, this is the gnarly bit. Yeah. Nice. Not a single hit. Oh, here's another one. Whoa, dude. We didn't even bottom out on that. I know. Normally, we would have Oh, nice, dude. That's just crazy. I don't know how cautious I should be. I'm like testing it out. This is crazy. Not a single bottom out, man. And it felt good.
Are there drawbacks? Potentially. The other cross track they did ascent springs on. He is still running Bil Billstein struts with Ascent springs, but the super high spring rate of the ascent springs did blow out his first set of Bilsteen struts, which his had a couple years of abuse prior to getting the Ascent Springs put on them. Ours are nearly brand new struts. So, we get to find out for science, guinea pig style, if the ascent springs cause these Bilsteen struts to fail quicker. I think the spring rate on these ascent springs are 480, which the cross track overload are 265. So, these are essentially double, it should have gotten twice as stiff, but since we're no longer on the bump stops like we were, it honestly feels a little bit better. And there there's just I I have zero complaints. This is not too rough. No, no, it just feels like you're driving a truck. Yeah. Wait, we did rough. Awesome. You mean that in the lifted sense? Is that what you're saying? Yeah. Well, and also I don't know. I just feel cool. Okay. All right. That's not very scientific data for me. All right. It's It's epic. It I I all day. First of all, when I drove away from Rally Tech, huge smile on my face an hour through the Portland rush hour traffic. Had two guys hanging out their window with cell phones yelling at my car. Looks epic. I can't park this thing and walk away without turning around and looking back at just how lifted we are. It's absurd. That's crazy. That's kind of insane. It's insane. Absurd that we're this heavily loaded and we still are lifted and we could not get it to bottom out today. And it and and it wasn't a rough ride at all. No, not at all. Not at all. It's literally incredible, man. This is crazy how nice this is. I This is like butter. I'm like really expecting things to be a struggle. It's It's just plowing through everything. The cargo is totally fine. We have never gone to an OV park loaded down like this. Yeah. Not Not bottomed out once. We have a little bit of a forward rake now. Surprisingly, with the two and a half inch spacers in back and the ascent springs, we're angled forward a little bit. Once we unload it, it'll be even more aggressive. But the Nash Fab roof rack actually sits kind of with a backwards tilt. So the tent has always been tilted back and we've always had to park downhill to get it level. Now it's almost completely level as is. Everything is literally perfect.
Definitely reach out to Rally Tech if you are doing any sort of a build. They have a lot of experience with this stuff and they can add all of our rigs experience now that we took it into the shop. They would have nailed all of this from the get-go if we were able to get our cross track to Portland for them to do it all. But then we wouldn't have gotten to hang out with Milton. So that's true. It's true. Everything happens for a reason. I'm happy we ended up with the journey that we've had this far. If you can get your vehicle into Rally Tech, they could put on corner scales. they could figure out exactly what your weight is on each strut. They they would have nailed this from the get-go had we gotten it there. And that's exactly what we did this time around. Pulled it into the shop. They were like, "Oh yeah, that's what we're dealing with. Okay, let's uh let's try this. This we we spent five nights on this ridge line so that we could get into Rally Tech." And it was worth it. And it's an epic ridge line to spend five nights on. June is going to be your last chance to get everything at the current pricing they've been at. They've been at that pricing for a long time now. And in July, they're going to be raising some of the prices on stuff. Their ability to do this all in a day for us, swap us out to the springs we needed. Check everything out. If you think they're expensive, they're not for everything they offer. Like, businesses like that can operate the way they do because they charge what they're worth. There is no brand in this Subaru outdoor off-roading world I feel better about referring people to than Rally Tech because they have taken such incredible care and set us up with this build. They didn't tell us there's anything we can't do. They just told us, "Yep, we can come up with a solution for you." That's what we do. That's what they did for us. And it might be good to note, too, that they don't pay us to recommend them. We just recommend them because we think they're worth recommending. Yeah. In this video, I just wanted to tell you guys about our experience. This isn't like a collaboration or sponsored video or anything like that. They don't know we're doing this. Yeah. Yeah. This is just an information dump I would have liked to have when I started this build now that we're one of the few that survived building a cross track this far. Every You're way too proud of the fact that you drive a cross track at this point because everyone chickens out and gets a Toyota before they get to this point. We have made it. We have made it this far. We're one of the few. We could talk about it. Hey, we can't afford to get a Toyota. So, and we can't afford talk to them. Shoot them an email if you've got a project going on. If you're up in the Seattle area, Milton helped us out a ton, too. Between Milton and Carrie, they have a ton of experience with different builds and setups and things like that. So, if you're up north, hit him up if you need a second set of eyes or opinions on your project. his intuition is spot on when it comes to this sort of stuff. Uh, shout out Orvis Overlanding out east. They are an authorized dealer and they have experience with Rally Tech gear, so you can check them out if you are out east. June is going to be your last chance to get everything from Rally Tech at the current price. We have a discount code I'll put in the uh link down below. You can just use our link or the discount code. Either of those, we'll give you 5% off everything at Rally Tech. We'll be back to our normal adventuring. Follow the channel if you want to keep up to date on how our ride performs. We'll be doing all sorts of stuff. Probably taking it on the beach one more time. I'm thinking 10 miles on the coastline because that was the sketchiest drive in our Iron Man because it was high speed and there were a lot of ruts and rough stuff and when we were hitting those we were just tearing the fender walls out. By high speed he means like 25 maybe 30. Okay. Way to save yourself. Yes, that is the speed limit on the beach. We don't drive faster than that. Of course not.