- What's going on, guys?
Fuller here from Custom Offsets,
and today we have a video
that I guess kind of stems
from people asking us a
whole bunch of questions,
and a lot of times people
are wondering what's better,
a cheap coilover, or
an expensive lift kit,
and when we mean lift kit,
it's just talking about like
the standard, typical spacer
that's going on top of your strut.
So before we get in to it,
we kinda wanna break down
what the differences are between coilovers
and a spacer lift kit,
'cause a lot of times,
people will come to us
with a certain budget,
so somebody comes in, they
say I wanna spend $2500,
should I spend that $2500 on
a cheaper, more affordable
coilover system, or
should I spend that $2500
and get a nicer, spacer style system,
something that like B&S would offer.
Now obviously B&S has coilovers too,
but they make probably some of the best
strut spacer lift kits
on the market as well.
So coilovers differ from the stock strut
that's on your vehicle,
because you're actually
gonna get some adjustability
with the coilover.
Now most of the time, you're gonna see
that it's got a larger body to it as well,
and a remote reservoir, so as far as like
fluid aeration goes and worrying
about overheating the fluid
that's in your shocks, you
don't have to worry about that
as much with the coilover,
it's designed for
performance environments,
and then when the
adjustability comes in to play,
'cause you can actually kind of play with
how stiff that spring is.
You can't change the rate of the spring,
but you can pre-compress
it, or pre-load that spring
on the coilover, and then
most of the coilovers
on the market today, you'll
see that something like
fox coils in DSC, dual speed compressions,
you can adjust the rebound of that
and the dampening properties of it,
and then on the vertex
coilover, it's the same thing,
it's a number from one to 10,
and you can easily set
it just by turning it
how stiff or how soft
you want the ride to be,
so when people ask
what's gonna ride better,
the spacer kit, or the coilover kit,
it really depends how
you define riding better,
because a lot of times what you'll see
is a true coilover kit may ride stiffer
than your factory suspension,
but if you're planning on
doing some serious off-roading
with your truck, your gonna
want stiffer suspension,
you want it to handle the abuse
that you're gonna throw on it.
Now you can't just go out
and buy a coilover kit
and expect that you're gonna
drive 100 miles an hour
across the dessert and pretend
you've got a Baja truck,
that just doesn't quite work that way,
but if you are going to drive
in that kind of an environment,
you probably do wanna upgrade
to that coilover system
rather than the strut spacer.
So the spacer kits put a spacer
on top of your factory strut.
Now, the companies put a lot
of research and development
in to making sure that you can still have
correct geometry and good
angles with these kits,
so it's not like in the
past, when everybody's like,
oh you're using a spacer
lift in your truck.
It's not really bad, it's
not a bad thing to do,
it's very common, most people out there
that have lifted trucks are
just using the spacer kits.
If you've got a vehicle that
is equipped with MagneRide
or a similar factory option,
you might wanna actually
consider that spacer kit
if you're just driving
on the road primarily.
So you pay extra money
when you buy the vehicle
to get the really nice
riding factory suspension.
If you don't wanna remove
that and delete that,
then a spacer kit might
be a good option for you,
and the spacer kits are typically
significantly less expensive too.
So like a Rough Country spacer
kit is like around $1000
roughly, for like a six
inch kit, like $1100.
Their coilover system is $2100,
so it's double the price,
but at the same time, if you compare
the vertex coilovers to
a fox coilover from BDS,
you're gonna pay like $3600
for that six inch kit,
so there's a substantial price difference
between the two, and that's
why so many people are asking,
if I have a budget of
$2000, do I buy the $1900
six inch BDS kit, that's
just a standard spacer kit,
or do I spend 200 extra dollars, and get
the Rough Country vertex coilovers?
So in my opinion, any time you look at
coilover verses spacer,
I think you're gonna get
a better ride quality out of the coilover
if you have performance in mind,
unless you have a MagneRide truck,
then I think you're gonna
have factory-like ride
if you go with the spacer option,
so it really does depend
on which vehicle you have
and how you're going to use that vehicle.
The only way to maintain, or
to keep your MagneRide system
is to use that spacer
kit, and that's because
you still need to have
the functions of the truck
all working cohesively together for that,
so you need those OEM strut assemblies.
If you take it out, you're obviously
not going to have that.
Your truck still has the
computer that thinks you do,
and you gotta like work
with the electronic system
to delete that from the system,
but the physical components there
that give you MagneRide are
no longer going to be there,
so it's not gonna function
like it did from the factory.
There is also a middle ground option,
and that's going to be
the strut replacement kit.
So there's a few different
companies that offer these.
You can find all the kits
that I'm talking about
on our website at customoffsets.com.
Just enter your make and model
and search by what's popular,
if you wanna see what most
people are going with,
but the strut replacement
that I'm talking about
actually has a longer strut
but reuses your factory spring
that's on your stock struts,
so you have to take it apart,
it's a little more involved as far as
the install process goes, but
it's not too bad by any means,
and then you're just
getting that longer strut
that's designed for a lifted application,
but reusing your factory spring,
so this brings the cost of the kits down,
they won't be necessarily as cheap
as just a spacer kit,
but they're definitely
not nearly as expensive
as a full coilover system,
so kind of like I said in
the middle of the video,
I think if you put a
coilover against a spacer,
the coilover's gonna win
out time and time again,
simply because it's
designed for that much lift,
it's designed for performance,
but if you think a stiffer ride
might not be what you want,
then I would just go with the spacer kit,
or if you're worried about
spending too much money,
then just go with the spacer kit,
but if you have the extra
money, you can set a budget,
and you can still get
like the Rough Country
vertex coilovers, definitely
go with the coilover system.
You're not really comparing
apples to apples here.
It's really like an
apple to something that's
not as exciting as an apple,
I guess you could say.
Some people just don't like
the way a spacer looks,
so that's it, hopefully that
kind of explains it for you.
I know there's a lot of variables,
and a lot of ifs and buts in here,
but depending on your application,
depending on what you want,
I think typically
coilover is gonna win out,
I said it like 12 times,
so you can just decide for yourself.
All these are on the
website, customoffsets.com.
I think that's all you
need to know, peace.
