Ep.301 – Steering Upgrades and Towing with the JK

We recently ended the popular Jeep Talk Call in Show, but we’re not ending some of the things we learning from it.  We’re adding them to the Jeep Talk Show! First off we’re adding another thirty minutes to the show!  With that additional time we’ll be able to have guest interviews! Sadly we are ending the LIVE broadcast of the show on youtube.  In it’s place we will have video clips from the show available on youtube.  We’re sad because we’re going to miss interacting with the audience.  The great news is you can still interact with us at http://JeepTalkForum.com, info@jeeptalkshow.com or by calling our voice mail line at 530-675-4102!  We love hearing from you guys!
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Hey Tony and Josh, I have Ron North here with Steersmart’s and we’re going to sit and

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Hey Ron, how you doing?(…) Great and thanks to Amy for having me on the show tonight. Oh, we’re excited to hear what you have to tell us. So you’re with Steersmart’s. Do you want to give us a little history on your company?

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Well, you know, it’s kind of exciting. It’s a brand new startup division of a company that’s been in business for about 83 years. We’re probably Ford Motor Company and one of their oldest suppliers. We’ve been in the steering and suspension business ever since 1932.

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So it’s kind of fun heading up a new division and we’re going after the performance aftermarket and Jeep Wrangler being the number one target. We’ve designed some very exciting and interesting products for the Jeep Wrangler.

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So why did you pick the why the Jeep Wrangler? Well, for one thing, Tammy, it’s there’s over a million of them on the highway of the JK’s from the 2006 up. There’s probably a million six on the highway and there’s a lot of off-roaders that kind of have an interest in, you know,(…) beefing up their their Jeep Wrangler with large tires and so forth. So a lot of things with suspension parts need to be, you know, beefed up also.(…) So we took our 83 years of lessons learned and developed one heck of a strong linkage, steering linkage for the Wrangler. And while doing that, we were thinking of some other products. The Jeep Wrangler is is kind of strange to drive. If you’re a mother and you’ve got children in the backseat and you’re worried about safety, we invented the steering attenuator. We call it the Griffin attenuator. And it kind of adds safety to the Jeep for kind of quick lane maneuvering and really reduces a lot of the road harshness that you feel from expansion strips and gravel roads. Kind of a unique product. So it got us into the business and we’re going to continue to develop more products in the future. You know, we’re looking at control arms, track bars and all kinds of things that will be from an experience lesson learned supplier to General Motorsport and Chrysler. So Powers and Sons is my parent company. So we use all their facilities, their engineering, their test labs and their lessons learned as I repeated several times to develop new exciting products for the Jeep Wrangler.

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Now, the steering attenuator,(…) which you guys now call the Griffin, which I know it as the steering attenuator because I don’t know what it was it about a year, year and a half ago, you contacted me and

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you said, hey, do you want to try this out on your Jeep? And I was a little hesitant to try it out because, you know, I was a new new own Wrangler owner and I just wasn’t familiar with all the inner workings of the Jeep. But do you want to tell us how where the attenuator goes and how what it replaces?

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Yes. And, you know, you were one of the first few that tried the attenuator. You and a friend of yours, I sent you two of them. The attenuator is a it fits in the drag link and it’s a complete replacement of the drag link adjuster. Typical Wrangler has a direct steel path that goes right from the knuckle to the gearbox and you feel everything from the road through this direct steel path. The rest of the vehicle, the body and everything, that’s all on bushing. So it’s all isolated from all this harshness that you feel from the road. So this fits right into where the adjuster fits for the drag link for centering your wheel. And it kind of acts like a damper is a simple way of saying it dampers out a lot of this harshness that you feel from the road.

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You’d be surprised how it helps track the vehicle straight. So you’re able to kind of be more relaxed as you’re going down the highway at 55, 70 miles an hour. And the other feature of it that a lot of people haven’t really witnessed is the safety feature of these of the snaps steer. It really reduces the snaps steer that you receive when you kind of turn the steering wheel real quick. Let’s say a deer jumps in front of you and you’re going down the highway. When you turn the steering wheel, your wheels automatically start steering the vehicle, but your body of the vehicle is kind of catching up through all the bushings and the dampers that it has in the in all the the body dampers. So this kind of blows the steering the same as the body would flow. And it just bumps here is kind of reduced and it just makes it a safer vehicle. It could keep it from, you know, rolling over. But the biggest advantage, everybody that’s found is that it just feels a lot less harshness from the road. You don’t feel the potholes that we have up here. And I would I would attest to that 100 percent. It so made my ride on the interstate, which is mostly just when I head up to Roush Creek to go off roading, just so much more relaxing and just the steering is so much.

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I call it tighter because it’s not as loose and you don’t have to hold on as as tightly and you’re not, you know, getting your muscles all tensed up. But the funny thing was, is when you first offered it to me, I was like really nervous and I didn’t want to try it. And so, you know, I did take the attenuator that you offered it to me and I sent it up to Jeff in Delaware and he tried it out and he was like, God, it was an easy install and he loved it. And then I started seeing all these other people on the forums who were ordering it and they were like raving about it. And I was like, oh, God, why didn’t I get one? Why didn’t I like why did I pass this up? And so, you know, a lesson learned there for me, I’m not going to pass up any more of these awesome deals because it was a really it’s a really great product, especially if you’re doing a lot of highway driving. I gave them to on the form and that really started a role. And I think I sold one hundred, one hundred and fifty to these members on the on the form. And I’ll tell you, these guys are sharp. They know their business with jeeps. And that’s why they’re on the form. And I never got a bad review out of the hundred people that bought them and put them on. And it’s just all remark what a miracle, you know, it is to the car.

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So now, didn’t you don’t you have like some new video out for the the griffon? So people do we have something to take a look at here? We sure do. You know, I went to a marketing company all about six months ago and they said, hey, you ought to name your products after these legendary creatures. And the griffon is one of them. And yeah, I do have a video on it. You want to take a break right now and show the video? Yep. Let’s take a watch.

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Your Jeep Wrangler was created to help you explore the natural beauty of our great land from the ground up. And for those Wrangler owners with a simpler worldview, may we suggest the griffon by Steersmarts, the highly engineered drag link adjusting sleeve that improves your safety and virtually eliminates that jittery steering wheel feel at highway speeds.

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The griffon from Steersmarts, the stuff of legends.

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Powered by powers and sons.

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Ron, that was a pretty funny video there. It was some great marketing.

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We had some fun making it, you know, I’m sure you did. I’ve been flying over the desert lands and so forth.(…) You know, it was a lot of fun making that video.

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So now you were just at SEMA just a couple of weeks ago and I think you introduced some new product there. Is that correct? Yes, we did.(…) First time in a booth. First year in business, really, if you want to look at it that way. And we had quite an audience. We had a whole lot of press come and look at our product. We designed and built a new steering linkage called the Yeti. If you think the other video was was something, wait till you see this one. But it’s a real heavy duty linkage for the Wrangler. And it’s almost equivalent to like a class four truck. You know, the powers and sons, all we do is build truck linkages and we build them from class two to class seven trucks. So we took a lot of that lesson learned on what kind of sockets and tubes and heat treats and materials. And we put together a Yeti linkage that’s the strongest, most durable linkage ever built for Wrangler. I got this video. And you want to show the Yeti video? Yeah, why don’t we take a look at that?

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I first saw it when I was 16. I’ve been tracking it ever since for over 55 years. It’s a Yeti. You can tell by the tire tracks here and here. Well, that could be from my car.

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Yeah, right. 55 years of research and I don’t know what I’m talking about.

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You know what? This interview is over.

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Introducing Yeti series heavy duty linkage from Steersmart’s the strongest, most durable linkage you can get. Engineered from the ground up to give you maximum performance.

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Yeti series heavy duty linkage from Steersmart’s the stuff of legends.

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Powered by powers and sons.

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Hey, Ron, that was another good video. How did you come up with the names, the Yeti and the Griffin?(…) This marketing company said we ought to call you Steersmart’s you know, and we ought to call your products after these kind of legendary creatures, the beast. And they came up with the Griffin, you know, which is part lion and eagle. And right. Of course, the Yeti being the snowman, he looks like a mean guy. Right. And our linkage is meant to be mean. It’s it’s it’s strong. And, you know, so it kind of goes hand in hand. We went along with it and we’re getting a lot of response at SEMA. They said, my God, you know, we had these names up on our back backdrop and we had the pictures of the creatures there. And it was a big hit. You know, the Yeti linkage, we have a couple of exciting things about it. For years, when people lift their their jeeps, they go to the top mount drag link. And what they’ve been doing is drilling out the knuckle and taking a right hand drive drag link, put it on a left hand drive vehicle. So it mounted on top. And they had this little bushing that they would slip into a seven eights hole and mount the upper drag link in that kind of a manner. So we came up with a patent pending process that leaves the hole in the knuckle alone. We use that tapered hole that Chrysler drilled in these knuckles for the Jeep. And we come up with what we call a reverse tapered mount. And we patented this process because it’s quite unique. There’s no drilling to get a top mount. We got a heavy duty drag link that goes in and bolts in and you’re you got it installed and you’re done in minutes. There’s no drilling. And, you know, it’s just terrible to drill out that material out of the knuckle and lose some of your safety factor. You’re losing a lot of material on that. Well, and I we found out that we have a reverse pin technology we’ve been using for almost 20 years now with Ford Motor Company. It keeps linkage from flopping in this.

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You know, if you got like a an assist that’s kind of a hydro assist power steering assist or you have dampers that attaches to the tie rod, you know, the stock linkage and a lot of these competitors that have linkages for Wrangler, they’re linkage flops all around. Ours, you could go down a washboard road and it’s as steady as can be. So it’s kind of a unique couple of patents on this product that really makes our linkage unique from the competition.

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So with the Griffin and with the Yeti, as far as off-roading,(…) I well, I can attest that the Griffin there is no it doesn’t affect off-roading at all. But neither of these is going to make off-roading any different.(…) I mean, I guess for the Yeti, it would make it better. The Yeti will make it stronger. We’ll be the strongest. You know, you get these 37 inch tires and, you know, you jack it up three, five, six inches and you’ve got a lot of weight. A lot of people add armor to their vehicles and so forth.(…) So, you know, we’ll be strong enough and able to handle the loading that some of these off-highway, you know, ventures will see in a vehicle.

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So any new products in the future that you can kind of hint to?

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Well, we are going to come out with this is a Jeep program, but we are going to come out with a Yeti for the Ram truck. And we are going to come out with some unique ideas of the heavy duty Griffin that I mentioned that fit the Yeti.

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There’ll be a Griffin Yeti like, I don’t know what name we’re going to give that one. Right. We’re looking at track bars next. There seems to be a good market for a good strong track bar. So that’s going to be our next heavy duty product. And then we’re going to look at control arms for the Jeeps.(…) So what about, I know you just do the Wranglers,(…) any other Jeeps that you would be, you know, like the Cherokee or any of those that you would be working on products for? A lot of your Jeeps are rack and pinion. You know, Jeep is the Wrangler is kind of unique in its layout of steering. It’s got the linkages. So we’re linkage people. We have been like we build all the F series Ford truck linkages have been for 30 some years. And we just want all the GM contract for the 2,500 to 4,500 trucks. So we’re a linkage type company and that’s what we’re going to specialize in. We’re going to come out with the attenuator for also Ford and Chrysler. We already have it on the GM truck, a compliant relay ride. So we’re here, we’re steering experts and that’s what we’re good at. And that’s the market we’re going at is chassis for like the Wrangler.(…) Good. Stick with the Jeep Wrangler. It’s number one in our book. It’s quite a deal. Mine too. I think Tony and Josh might disagree with me a little bit there, but that’s okay. We all have our favorite Jeeps that we like. So Ron, it was great that you took the time out to talk with us. I’m so excited that I was one of the first to get to try out the attenuator because it’s a excuse me, the Griffin. It’s always going to be attenuator to me.

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But I’m I was very honored to be able to be one of the first to put it on my Wrangler and look forward to seeing some of your newer products coming out. Well, you know, you’re on our website. You know, that’s right. If anyone wants to check it out, you can go to steer smarts dot com and just sit on that(…) homepage for a little bit. And you can see that I’m one of the opening three pictures there. Me and my Jeep from a long time ago when my hair was curly. Yeah. Thanks for giving us permission to put you on. Oh yeah. Anytime.

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But Ron, thanks again for taking the time out and we look forward to seeing more of your your Jeep products.(…)

Broadcasting

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You’re my friend, you’re my new friend.