Jay Steersmarts.com

Steer Smarts is powered by a dedicated team of enthusiasts and engineers that are fueled by innovation and backed by over a century long legacy of designing and manufacturing chassis components for Detroit’s automotive giants. Every Steer Smarts product is manufactured in the USA and is fully tested in-house in our 10,000 sq/ft Testing and R&D lab. Steer Smarts is committed to providing the Jeep world with inventions like the “No Drill” top mounted drag link and the Griffin attenuator. Our mission is simple, to design and produce the best American made steering and chassis parts available for the Jeep Wrangler.

Hey, did you know you can advertise on the Jeep talk show? Just go to jeeptalkshow.com slash contact to reach out for more information. Our advertising isn’t affordable. It’s just damn cheap.

 

Hi, I’m Tony and welcome to the Jeep talk show, the talk show where we talk about all things Jeep for trail riding to overlanding and everything in between. Every Friday we have an interview with a new and exciting guest. The only thing more fun than interviewing our guests is meeting them in person. So sit back, grab a cold one and get ready for another great guest right here on the Jeep talk show. Are you ready? It’s time for the Jeep talk show with host Tony, Josh, Wendy and Chuck.

 

Well this is a really fun interview. I think you’re going to really enjoy it and I think you’re going to learn something. I know I did. I love interviews like that where I learned something new from around the world.

 

Or from your city and sometimes just down the street. Had a neighbor. It’s the Jeep talk show interview.

 

I do boys and girls. It’s time for another Jeep talk show interview and today or tonight or whenever, whenever the time it is, we’re going to be talking with Jay. Jay, pronounce your last name for me. I have no idea. I’m not going to try it. Beltovin. That’s not so bad. You know, I have trouble pronouncing my last name and it’s I’ve been doing it all my life. So Steersmarch is powered by a dedicated team of enthusiasts and engineers. And just to be sure, this is this you’re with Steersmarch, right Jay? Correct. Okay.

 

So Jay with Steersmarch is powered by a dedicated team of enthusiasts and engineers that are fueled by innovation and backed over a century long legacy of designing and manufacturing chassis components for Detroit’s automotive giants.

 

Every Steersmarch product is manufactured in the USA and is fully tested in house in their 10,000 square foot testing R and D lab. You know, do you do a Fitbit, Jay? Do you walk around the 10,000 square feet and get the steps in for the day? That’s right.

 

Steersmarch is committed to providing the Jeep world with innovations like No Drill top mounted drag link and the Griffin attenuator. I definitely want to talk to you about that No Drill thing because that really, when I first saw that I was like, Oh wow, this is cool. You don’t have to, you know, put it backwards and drill it and all that other crap. So the Steersmarch mission is simple to design and produce the best American made steering and chassis parts available for the Jeep Wrangler. You can see more at steersmarch.com. So www.orgisplainssteersmarch.com. Jay thank you a lot for being with us. We’ve been after you for a while to get you on here. Yeah, it’s been busy one for sure.

 

Locked it down finally. So some of you, some of you to YouTube viewers, which if you’re not watching this interview on YouTube, you should be just go to Jeep. I’m sorry, YouTube and search for Jeep talk show. But if you are a YouTube viewer, you may have seen Jay recently at what was it called coffee and crawlers? I think what was it? Yeah, crawlers and coffee. Okay. I almost had it right. And Jeep talk show Chris was there. He lives fairly close by to where you guys are at. And he went over there for the, for the event and he got you in front of the ice cream machine. I think I can’t remember if I asked you, I can’t remember if this is one, I just happened, you happen to be there when I called Greg, but I asked, I think about the, that ice cream, what’s it called?

 

Chill or something or other? Freeze. Freezy. Freezy. So I was, I think I asked, can you stand up in there to actually hand out ice cream and you can, which I didn’t think it was enough room. Yeah. Yeah. You can stand up in there. We created a roof that kind of telescopes up and yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. And that was, that was one of your babies, right? Where you were involved in that bill, correct?

 

Yep. Yep. How did you come up with that idea of an ice cream? I mean, everybody loves ice cream, but. Yeah. So, I mean, we really set out to, to try to build up some type of show vehicle that was interactive, right? We wanted something that was going to be interactive for people coming by to see our products and our partner products that are on there.

 

And just give us an outlet to interact with people. And a lot of the shows are all done in the summer months. So of course it’s outside.

 

The ice cream truck seemed like a natural fit, something to get people to gravitate towards that asset and strike up conversations. It’s a lot of fun. Yeah, I guess so. I guess it’s kind of hard to say, Hey, if you would just bend over and look under the Jeep here and we’ll show you what we want to show you. It’s much better to have something that was like almost like a big sign, like, come over here, come over here. Yeah, that’s a good idea. I didn’t think about that. And it’s like a big Hot Wheels car, which is cool. So love it. It’s kind of taken on this new personality. So you got people going to shows, even if they’re familiar with our products or know our products, this thing is almost like a character that they want to come and check out. So it’s been a lot of fun. And you guys have actually taken this thing off road as well, right? Cool. Yeah. Yeah. It’s been to Easter Jeep Safari and out in Moab and it all sorts of stuff out there. So what’s it? I’d be obviously it’s based on a Jeep, but what year and model Jeep was it based off of? Well, it’s a 2024 four by E is what it is. And of course it’s, that’s what it started life as. And now it’s got Dana 60s underneath it and 43 inch tires and everything else you could throw at it. So definitely a different animal right now. What kind of comments have you guys been getting with it? I don’t know if you were there at SEMA with it. You were there with a DJI, I believe. So what kind of comments are you guys getting about it? So we, we unveiled it last year at SEMA. So 2023 SEMA show.

 

Everybody’s loved it. I don’t think I’ve had anybody come by that’s hated on it. Maybe snickered in the background, but as soon as you know, it starts playing the ice cream theme music. It’s everybody has a big smile on their face and that’s kind of the whole point of it. Right. Oh yeah. Not to take it too serious. Everybody, everybody builds a really hardcore rock crawler, all the good builders out there.

 

And we just wanted to do something different, right? It can do a lot of that stuff, but still have a lot of fun, lighthearted, and opportunities. And I don’t think I mentioned this already. It is a working ice cream thing. I mean, you have a freezer in the back and you can have ice cream back there. We do. Yeah. Yeah. We picked up with ARB.

 

We picked up with ARB freezers in the back, which is really cool. It gives us a lot of flexibility to serve a variety of different things.

 

We do at times have a soft serve ice cream machine in the back sometimes. That’s another thing that we pull out on occasion, but it’s very, very flexible, which is cool. So we can use it for a variety of different things. Coffee and donuts, when it’s crawlers and coffee. We did another event like that out at EJS early on the trails. We had coffee and donuts out there with the Fred Williams Off-Road Fred. It was a lot of fun.

 

So presents a lot of good opportunities for us to have some fun with it. So is it big enough to chill a keg of beer?

 

That is… Don’t act like you don’t know.

 

Definitely. It is quite roomy in the back, believe it or not.

 

A couple people can stand up in the back of that thing. At the same time, there’s stainless counters in the back and plenty of room to…

 

All right. All right. Not saying yes, not saying no. That’s good.

 

Well, it was a really cool idea, but the question has to be asked. How do you top it for the next year’s SEMA? Do you actually go the Quake LED route and literally top it with another Jeep on top? No. I mean, we’re not trying to just go for shock factor. That wasn’t the point of it. It really is to be functional, but to be fun. We want it to be lighthearted, but not goofy.

 

So I mean, it’s kind of borderline, but it’s not quite… I mean, it is functional. I think it’s neat. I like the colors on it too, because the colors are very bright and just really stands out. So that’s really, really neat. And of course you had it fully set up with all the Steersmart stuff, obviously, right? Absolutely. Yeah, it’s fully outfitted with all of our chassis components. So now of course your name of your business is Steersmarts.

 

So one would assume, people that may not be familiar with Steersmarts would assume it has something to do with steering. But can you give us the 50 cent tour of what you guys do? Because it’s obviously a lot more than just steering. Yeah. The primary core of the business was built on steering components.

 

The parent company that goes back over a hundred years.

 

It’s a tier one supplier that has been supplying GM Ford Chrysler, a lot of the large OE manufacturers with steering components, primarily tie rods, drag links, track bars, relay rods, pitman arms, things centered around steering.

 

So that’s really where we started the business. Now naturally with us being more in the niche consumer side of the business, enthusiast market, primarily Jeep, working on some Bronco, working on some Tacoma, some truck application. But it’s really focused on enthusiast vehicle.

 

Steering can only take you so far. So naturally we started to branch out into more chassis components and collateral products.

 

And that’s kind of where we’re at today. So we do have a full line of steering, traditional cross-steer products, tie rods, drag links, then getting into the track bars, which is a little more borderline chassis, full line of racketry to support the chassis as well. We got reinforcement brackets for steering gearboxes and track bar brackets on the frame side, both on the axle side. We got all sorts of different components like that that we have. Plus we have a bunch of new products coming down the line that expand into that chassis around a little bit more. So that stuff will be coming down the line in the next 12 months or so.

 

So really that’s where we started. Still our core, still our primary core is steering, but traditionally we’re going to take what we know and how we do stuff and expand that further on into the chassis side. So at this point, don’t look for us to come out with bumpers or anything like that. We’re going to stay true to where it is we… What you’re known for. Yeah, probably what you’re known for.

 

Yeah. And I think that’s good too, because it’s nice to, if you know that you need better steering for your vehicles and it’s even better steering for the JL and the JT. I come from a TJXJ world where the tie rods are almost non-existent. They’re just tiny little things.

 

But when I got the Gladiator in 2021, I was like, “Oh wow, look at these parts. They’re huge. They’re beefy.” And then I speak with Henderson and some other folks and they say, “Oh yeah, but it’s not nearly as beefy as the Steersmart stuff.” And it’s not like it’s, I don’t think it’s significantly larger. It’s how you guys build it, what it’s made out of and the thickness, the wall thickness. Correct me on any of this. It’s kind of twofold, right? So the factory stuff looks bigger. It physically looks bigger, but the reality is it physically isn’t bigger. When you look at the actual ball stud itself and the socket, internally on the factory stuff, the JK and the JL are essentially the same.

 

You’re looking at the ball size when you look at the spherical ball inside that joint. It’s based on a 26 millimeter socket design.

 

That’s the same as JK. JK was about a 26 millimeter as well when you look at the actual ball socket.

 

When you look at ours, our product goes and over sizes that to about a 30 millimeter socket. Oh my goodness. 30 millimeter sockets about the equivalent of like an F250, but essentially an F250, 350, 450, I think it goes up to about a 550 uses about that same socket size in what we’re running in a Jeep Wrangler product. And we do that all the way back to JK as well. So that’s just the essence of the socket itself. When you look at the tubes, the tubes are larger diameter, but the misconception is the wall thickness of the actual tube is a lot thinner.

 

And actually you go back to JK and JK utilize a little bit thicker wall. It was a smaller diameter and a thicker wall. So it was a more rigid product. They oversized that tube, thinned out the wall a little bit because the mission with JL JT was to save weight. To drop any weight out, you got to go with thinner wall. Problem with that when you’re going into a Jeep or some type of vehicle with a cross steer. So it doesn’t matter if it’s a Jeep, if it’s a heavy duty truck, that’s got solid front axles.

 

A thinner wall and products that cross over and tie together the steering knuckles on axles, any of that’s going to allow frequencies to start to go through that. And the thinner the wall, it acts more like a tuning fork. So that frequency has a lot more ability to travel through that at a higher rate.

 

Problem with those frequencies going through that induces things like wobble, death wobble, you know, phenomenon like that. It opens up that window to allow that to happen at a little bit greater rate. That’s why you see a lot more of the JLs and the JTs complaining about things like death wobble versus the JK. It still was there. It just wasn’t, didn’t seem like it had the effect necessarily on as great of a scale as the JL and the JT.

 

And that’s something that we definitely improve upon on our product. So when you look at the physical diameter of the adjuster sleeve, a factory is a 40 millimeter.

 

We go to an inch and five eighths on our standard chromoly product. The difference is that’s that 40 mil is roughly about an eighth of an inch thick tube. We go to a quarter inch wall chromoly. So it’s a lot more rigid material that reduces that frequency going through those products. I never even thought about that because it allows the component to resonate like a tuning fork. Exactly. And depending on the thickness would determine how much energy it’s required to make that vibration happen. Exactly. The thicker, the more energy it’s going to require to make it vibrate. So when you look at a lot of the components back to JK, a lot of those bars were solid bars. When you look at the drag link, it was a smaller diameter drag link, but it was a solid bar right. So that solid bar, again, it takes a lot more to induce a frequency through that solid bar than it does the hollow tube that’s currently on the factory jail adjuster. When you go to the track bar, same thing. The track bar on the JK was a solid track bar. It was a smaller track bar, which again, I mean, that’s doing a different thing because it’s deflecting, but it still allows frequencies to travel through that a lot less than the jail, which looks like a large diameter track bar, but it’s a hollow track bar with a thin wall.

 

And again, the residents that go through that trigger a lot of anomalies in the steering when you’re trying to control that lateral movement of the axle. Could that also could that also have a little bit to do with maybe the gladiators wobble? I mean, not wobble, but it’s drifting on the road. It has a little bit to do with that. A lot of the drifting has more of that is caused with steering gearbox.

 

So when you’re looking at lash in the gearbox and you’re also looking at deflection in the actual sector shaft, that really has a lot to do with a little bit of the wandering and that kind of slightly, I don’t want to say completely dead, but uninspiring feel at the top center of the wheel where you feel like you’ve got a little bit of play from side to side before you hit an engagement point.

 

That’s really coming down to more deflection in the steering box itself and in that sector gear. You got to remember that’s that point in the steering system holds the biggest amount of single weight point as a lever action. When you’re talking about that pitman arm extending off at the bottom of that sector shaft and then the entire weight of your cross-steer setup. So your tie rod, your drag link, as well as the weight of your wheels is all acting on that specific point as a lever causing the very end of that sector shaft coming out of that steering gear to flex.

 

And then by the time it translates up into your steering wheel, which is what the driver feels that input, it feels pretty… It gets amplified. The distance gets amplified. It does. So you can correct me on this, but you guys relatively recently, six months, maybe a year came out with a sector shaft brace, I would assume to help with this situation. It does. It does. It absolutely does that. So what that does is that instead of traditionally the sector shaft sitting in a single shear position where it’s mounted on the frame rail side only through the box, what we do is we pick up a secondary shear point to trap that underneath the pitman arm. So now there’s no way for that to flex. It’s trapped in a dual shear position and two points of contact on either side of that pitman arm. So now any additional lever action that you get, it’s going to eliminate almost all the flex that you’re going to feel translated up into the steering wheel.

 

So that does definitely make a big impact on dropability and it improves the feel of the vehicle. And also, I mean, a lot of safety aspects, right?

 

It lessens the likelihood that you’re going to want to overcorrect in situations where you got to steer out of potentially a collision or anything like that. You want to miss a pothole.

 

You don’t have a tendency to overcorrect, which could get you into trouble. And I would assume this is, it makes it a huge difference, even if you don’t feel it, when you start putting larger tires and heavier wheels on it, because now you have a lot more torque, if you will, that was wanting to move that gearbox. That sector shaft around. So bracing it above and below seems like a great idea. All of the additional unsprung weight that you get from wheels and tires on the outside,

 

and every time you go up a tire size, it goes exponentially, right? Of course. By the time you get to a 42 and you’re almost 200 pounds a corner, you had another 400 pounds of weight on there. You’re definitely going to add additional strain on there and feel that in your steering wheel.

 

So I don’t have a direct comparison because I’ve never used any steer smart stuff. I’m talking about the XJ. I don’t even think you guys have anything for XJ, TJ. I think you start with JK, is that correct? Yeah. That is correct. But there was another manufacturer that I did purchase, and you may know about XJs. XJs are unibody. There’s no frame. So the steering box is connected to shaped metal and not even box shaped metal. So it really has a tendency to flex, but I got a sector shaft brace for it, and it was a huge difference.

 

Just wonderful. And it was a lot like driving my wife’s TJ, which of course is a body on frame and that steering box doesn’t flex. And there may be more than one reason, but certainly be attached to a frame makes a big difference. So I can well imagine that if you’re having wandering issues, and I don’t think that was an issue with the JL, but with the JT, there was a lot of people talking about brand new ones. Also, and you correct me on this. I think that when the JL first came out, there were people complaining about death wobble. And I was shocked because you don’t normally see death wobble until components start wearing and getting a little 16th inch of a gap in there. So is that something that you guys remember and were designing for or just had a solution already for them? No, it was. I mean, we, one of our first development vehicles, we got an early A-Team JL. And what we did is we bought what we thought was going to be the best case scenario for this thing to be optimal. Right. So it was a bone stock sport, no power or anything, 16 inch wheels, on road tires. I mean, it was this thing should have drove perfect. Right. Yeah, you’re basic. Right.

 

Within 500 miles, this thing had instant death bubble right off the factory.

 

Why? Again, we used it as kind of like our captured problem child and did a ton of development on that. So that definitely helped us accelerate it, isolate a lot of things, and then start to create solutions for the JL and JT. And we started that right off the bat. So one thing that we noticed right off the bat is track bar early, especially early ones, is that they were really horrific. Like the early track bars were really bad. By the second, third iteration, I mean, slightly better, but they didn’t improve it enough. They hardened some of the durometers and stuff like that, but still pretty bad.

 

That’s been one of the biggest single products that improves a lot of the death bubble and harmonics that go through the steering system is the track bar.

 

And what we did is we came out with a monster track bar. It’s almost two inches in diameter. Nice.

 

So to try to get frequencies and to get this thing to deflect is nearly impossible.

 

It is heavy, so you’re adding some weight, but the reality is… Do you want to live or do you want to add weight?

 

It makes such a difference. I mean, you’re not going to notice a difference in fuel mileage or anything like that.

 

But it does tone down that front end dramatically.

 

And I think we’re still out there. We’re still one of the cheaper options for a true adjustable track bar.

 

Yeah, you guys definitely do have good prices. I’ve been looking at them since Greg Henderson, Unofficial Use Only, talks very highly of you guys. And I was asking him about the Gladiator because I’m looking at the Gladiator front end parts and they’re so much bigger. Like I said earlier than the TJ and the XJ. So I’m glad you mentioned what the reality is of that. And I also asked Greg because it’s like what I was looking at was like three basic parts. And I asked Greg and I figured this was the case because it was the case on the XJ and the TJ. You don’t have to buy it all at once. You can buy a piece, put it on, save up, collect some more aluminum cans, buy another piece and put that on. So it’s not all at once. And our guys are really good. We got a really good tech line.

 

Everybody’s welcome to call if they got any concerns. They can also reach us through email. And our tech guys will walk them through kind of what they think for their specific scenario will help them the most and kind of check that list off as they go.

 

And it really depends on the sensations people are feeling, the phenomena that they’re dealing with.

 

And we’ll give them kind of a checklist of, “Hey, you know what? We really think you should start here to get it driving better. And then the next place would be this and then this.”

 

Everybody’s welcome to dive in and just get it all done with once if you can. Oh, yeah, absolutely. That’s a nice way of going. And Greg told me, he goes, “That’s where you’re going to notice your biggest difference. You may not notice it as much if you piecemeal it. It’ll be as good as it was if you did it all at once, but you would notice a dramatic difference in steering replacing the three main components.” Yeah. And really with the jail and the gladiator, the first two places that I always recommend people to start with. If you could start anywhere and honestly, you can do it for less than 600 bucks.

 

It’s one of our sector shaft braces and it’s an adjustable track bar. If you did those two things, you will night and day instantly notice drivability of your vehicle if you have a JK or a JL. Yeah, I was looking at the tie rod, starting with the tie rod. So that’s interesting. I didn’t realize. Yeah, drag link I can see. I’m not drag link. Yeah, the drag link and tie rod again, I mean, it’s great to start with the biggest impact right initially if you’re going to have to pick and choose components.

 

Those two components right off the bat will, you’ll notice it as soon as you drive the vehicle after installation immediately. You will with the tie rod and the drag link, especially if you have something more than 15, 20,000 miles, you’ll definitely notice an improvement with those products as well.

 

But from a steering wheel input standpoint, because the tie rod has the damper and you have some type of damper, a lot of people have aftermarket dampers, even on stock components,

 

that damper has a tendency to mask what you’re doing with that level of component on the tie rod. So if you have some worn out joints, that damper is kind of making up for that additional play you get in the joint.

 

Because what it’s doing essentially that damper is creating a level of drag on your steering system. So what it’s doing, even if your joints are starting to wear, that damper is actually creating a little bit of positive drag on there and preloading that joint, which creates kind of a false sense, right? So unless you go down there and really start inspecting the joint, disconnect all that stuff, and really start to analyze play in the joints, a lot of times you’re not going to feel it in the steering wheel until it gets to a point where it’s pretty bad. Right. Right. And really, it’s all about mitigating the vibration in the system, right? That is a, that’s a big thing, right?

 

Cross your vehicles, it’s in, death wobbles kind of inherent in all of the setups.

 

Doesn’t matter what vehicle range it’s on, it doesn’t matter if it’s a Dodge Ram 2500, 3500, an F-250, a Wrangler, a Gladiator. Death wobble is always a thing, right? It’s always something that’s kind of lurking in that type of setup. That’s the nature of the geometry of those vehicles. The biggest thing you can do is close a window in which those scenarios happen, right? So it’s going from, hey, my setup has a one in 10 shot. So every time I hit a railroad track or a pothole, I can get this thing to trigger. Right. Well, something’s going on. So now it’s, okay, you start going through the process and now it’s one out of a hundred times I can get it to trigger.

 

Okay. Then it’s, you know, you want to continue to keep closing that window to where, what’s the likelihood of you driving that vehicle for the life of the vehicle and you get the one in a million shot of it happening.

 

That’s the key, right? Because it’s all circumstantial based on inputs and frequencies going through that.

 

And it’s not foolproof. You just can’t get it a hundred percent and you can get it to where it’s almost like that. Right. You’ll notice it over the course of you driving the vehicle.

 

But under that one in a million chance, there’s a, you know, there’s the right scenario where you’re off camber, your tires are at the right pressure. You hit a bump, it induces a frequency that just goes through your system because it allows that frequency to run through it and you could get it to trigger, but then never have it again. Oh yeah. It’s a sweet spot type thing. Just the right circumstances. And I’ll mention this. I have had my XJ brand new to 1998. I drove it daily for at least 21 years, probably 22 years, never had death wobble, but it wasn’t original components. I upgraded a couple of times. And so I think if you need a reason to consider buying steer smarts, it would be upgrade your components before you have death, death wobble, especially if your wife is going to drive your vehicle because otherwise you may be selling it.

 

Great insurance. It does provide great safety factor. Right. Back to things like as simple as that sector shaft brace.

 

It’s two fold doing things, right? It’s beefing up your chassis. It’s improving a lot of the chassis parts. So you got reinforcement brackets there, but back to the safety side of it, it really does improve the safety of the vehicles.

 

People don’t realize it, but as things wear, or even if they don’t wear, if things are moving and creating scenarios, like you were saying, that feel less inspiring to the driver input, whether there be slight dead spots or again, you say the wobble or just something doesn’t feel as confident and inspiring. You have a tendency to get into scenarios or when you’re faced with scenarios, trying to overcorrect or overcompensate to get yourself out of those scenarios. And by doing that, a lot of times you get yourself into more trouble, right?

 

Whether that’s you overcorrect and you put yourself into a ditch or God forbid your 16 year old daughter’s driving the car. Exactly. Right. You don’t want that scenario to happen.

 

And our products really do improve that safety aspect because it does make it more confidence inspiring to drive. The inputs become more finite.

 

It’s back to your point, it’s driving where you compare driving your XJ to a TJ.

 

It’s like taking your Jeep and comparing driving your Jeep to driving more of like a Durango. It’s more fine tuned and refined when it comes to the inputs to get the vehicle to respond the way you want it to. And luckily technology, like the technology that you guys have, give you the ability to have that confident steering on a Jeep. I mean, a lot of the stuff will just poo poo like, yeah, it rides rough. Yeah, it’s noisy. That’s all part of being a cool kid. Yeah. Yeah. But you don’t have to have bad steering on a Jeep anymore. No, you don’t have to be. And again, we also know from the OE side, we know why Jeep did what they did. Got a dig on them. Their mission was to reduce weight and to reduce weight. And cost. Yeah. And cost. You can’t go with certain things. You have to make sacrifices, right?

 

Again, they weren’t set out trying to make it drive more like a Jeep, right? Right. They refined a lot of other things, but the sacrifice that they had to make, we knew we provided them with solutions that could have provided a different outcome. I figured I wasn’t going to ask, but I figured you did. And again, I mean, that’s just the dance that you have to make a lot of times, right? But it does open up the window for companies like ours to provide a better solution for people in a different avenue, right? For the aftermarket. But it is good. And in the misconception too, the other thing that’s kind of interesting with the steering things, a lot of people think that they have to wait until they do bigger tires or do a lift kit.

 

And that’s not the case. Our components, even the big components, will package 100% under a stock ride height vehicle.

 

So you can take a vehicle right off the showroom floor. You can install our components on there and you can get that thing driving more like something you wished it drove like. Yeah.

 

And it’s very intentional the way we went and we did that.

 

All the way down to the forgings. I mean, that’s another aspect of us and what we’re able to do with our side of the business.

 

We have access to all of our OE forging plants. So we own our own forge stateside. So we’re not only designing and developing these products stateside, we’re actually forging the metal and stateside, which allows us to go create competitive products like that tie rod or the track bar I was telling you about.

 

That’s a solid forging.

 

We can forge it in a way to clearance up to a Dana 60 in the front and still maintain something that’s an inch and seven eighths in diameter, almost a two inch diameter bar. And you get an idea that two inch diameter bar is the equivalent of what’s on a Class A motorhome for their track bar.

 

And you can still get the diff cover off, right? Without having to remove any steering components. Absolutely. There you go. And that’s where, again, I mean, you can only do that if you can control the forging process. Because if you don’t, a lot of the other companies in the aftermarket are relegated to take what’s already in existence, try to cobble it together and make something work.

 

You’re talking drop forged dies. I mean, those are expensive dies. You’re talking 80 to $100,000 for dies, depending on what you need to do.

 

So we have access to a lot of the manufacturing facilities that allow us to do this stateside. We can control all that. It’s all right up here in north, right up in the northeast, Midwest area between Michigan, Northwest Ohio, Great Lakes region. Everything is manufactured right here. That’s narrow. That’s great. And the other great thing about it is it’s not like you guys are super expensive, which a lot of us made the stuff is. So you’re keeping the price down. It makes it affordable to get better steering. And it is a premium product. So it’s not, again, there’s really cheap guys out there in steering. And before one, you’re going to buy cheap steering components. You’re going to have cheap steering components. Well, you guys don’t mind. You’re going to be there to sell them the good stuff whenever they decided they’re the error of their ways. Unfortunately, it’s terrible that people have to learn a hard lesson sometimes. Right.

 

But yeah, we want to make sure that this stuff is accessible. We want to make sure that you get high quality premium, US made parts that are fully engineered, tested. I mean, you go back to the testing.

 

All of our aftermarket components go through the same testing parameters that the OEs demand from us on the OE side. So it goes through lifecycle testing, salt spray, and environmental testing.

 

It goes through ultimate fatigue life testing where they’re applying. I mean, there’s huge test beds that have hydraulic rams that we mount products in. And we apply, you know, at minimum, I think the force loads on the JL are about 3,000 pound loads continually on these products until we have a fatigue.

 

To give you an example of that with our tie rods, the factory tie rods, the BOGI for the OE is that 3,000 pound plus minus load in that fixture. It runs for about 127,000 cycles. That’s kind of their targeted lifecycle test for these products on a tie rod or a drag link.

 

And for the OEs, there’s a formula that they go through and they equate that to meeting their 336, right?

 

When you look at our products, we go through that same testing cycle and our products go on average about a million cycles. Wow.

 

So factory 127,000, ours, a million cycles. And then a lot of times in most of the Jeep stuff, all the Jeep stuff, actually, we suspend that test at about a million cycles.

 

And then what we end up doing, because we really don’t see a failure point at a million cycles.

 

So we could run it continually for another week or however long that has to run on that test bed.

 

But what we end up doing is up in the actual input force. So we’ll take it up to 4,000 pound load next. We’ll run that continuously until we start to see a fatigue. So we do like a stepping process. We do factory loading and then we’ll do increased loading. And we usually see another quarter million to a half million cycles at the higher load

 

on the same test bed. Yeah, I’d be very proud of that. I mean, when it tests that well, so much better than OEM.

 

OEM plus is really what it sounds like. It’s a big one. And we do a lot of benchmarking as well. So we’ll take a lot of competitive test product out there and put it on the test fixtures. Same way.

 

And we’ll run that stuff and we’ll see where they stack up against us. We have yet to see anybody in market stack up to our ultimate fatigue life.

 

So it is definitely something that keeps us honest. We want to make sure that we’re always going to provide that product out to everybody else out there. Yeah. I mean, if you’re selling something to somebody, you want it to be the best. Let me ask you this. Do you test? Well, how do you guys feel about aluminum steering components? I don’t think you guys doing any aluminum. I think it’s all aluminum. Do you? So what do you think about aluminum, especially doing these tests?

 

It’s good. I mean, our aluminum stuff runs the same way.

 

So we’ll run that stuff in the same manner. We’ll do the 3000 pound loading test. It’ll run. I think the aluminum, we got it to run 1.2 million cycles and then we upped it to four and got another 250,000 cycles out of that.

 

It’s great. It just depends on what you plan on doing with the vehicle. It looks good.

 

It’s weight wise. It’s about the same when you’re looking at the aluminum versus a chromoly just because a chromoly is a tube where the aluminum is a solid bar. So it’s kind of negligible from a weight saving standpoint. You do get more flex out of the aluminum than you do with a chromoly. It’s just a stiffer, more rigid material. The aluminum provides good rigidity, but it does allow for a little more flux.

 

So you can flex it. We traditionally test ours to flex to just about the point where you impact the diff cover and then it does spring back. Now it doesn’t spring back a hundred percent. It’s like 99.5% spring back rate.

 

But to the naked eye, it looks pretty straight. People like it that do a lot of rock crawling, a lot of rigorous off-road where they’ll see impacts in that front. It is more forgiving from that standpoint.

 

But our aluminum products are a little bit different. We developed an aluminum product that uses a clamp setup. So we have some heavy duty oversized clamps that we utilize to retain our torque on the tie rod ends. A lot of the aftermarket utilizes a jam nut style.

 

And usually that jam nut style is really where a lot of the ultimate fatigue issues come into play because you get bolt stretch.

 

And with something that size, usually the shank diameter on most of the Jeep stuff out there is about an inch and a quarter diameter. So it’s a pretty large jam nut.

 

You really have to get that thing to get to proper bolt stretch and retention north of five, 600 foot pounds of torque.

 

It’s hard for the average person to do that. That’s huge. Yeah. Yeah. So on the flip side, you look at our clamp setup.

 

Our clamps have to be torqued to about 45 to 50 foot pounds of torque. Oh, that’s not bad at all. No, you can do it with hand tools. So adjustments out on the trail make it super easy. It’s easy to have a couple, a socket and an open end wrench in a bag and a pouch and a toolkit.

 

It’s usually a 15 and an 18 and you can do adjustments on the trail, on the road, in your driveway, no specialty tools. And you can get that thing to torque down and be good to go. Jam nuts on the flip side, it’s a little harder.

 

There’s certain instances where you just start face to run it, I get it. But when you have guys that are referring that, it really doesn’t come down to a preference. It really comes down to their ability to design a product where they’re relegated again to something that’s off the shelf because they don’t have the ability to go tool up or have specialty tooling to develop parts the way we do. Right.

 

Excuse me. No, no problem. That’s really what it boils down to.

 

So a lot of times you’ll get the marketing pitch of why we use jam nuts because of XYZ. Nah, it’s cheap and it’s accessible. That’s why you use them. Get anybody. I don’t like the idea of the torque that you got to put to those things to keep them tight. You don’t want that thing, you certainly don’t want it backing out. That’d just be a fun ride. Yeah. You’re just the passenger at that point. It does. And then you end up developing your stress concentration at the point of contact between where the jam nut and the adjuster sleeve is in that tie rod end. And that’s usually what you’ll end up seeing is a shared tie rod end. So it’ll start off right there at that point. Oh, that’s interesting. I’ve seen that before. Not personally, but it’s never happened to me, but on some of them, and it always confused me as to why in the world it would do that. Yep. That’s interesting. Again, those threads where those threads are machined into that tie rod end create a stress concentration.

 

And then after that bolt stretch goes away, you’re not creating a solid locking point, right? Now you become kind of loose and sloppy right there where that connection point is and that just all concentrates right there and you get a fatigue. So, okay. So I have been eyeballing your products and I spoke to Henderson about it just to make sure I was getting the right stuff. I’m just getting a list together. I’m not ordering right now, but I know why not. But anyway, I’m not ordering right now. And the only complaint that I could find getting the parts for the 21 2021 Jeep, talk to a gladiator is there’s only one of the three things I put on my list that was red. Ah, I know the other two parts. I think it’s the tie rod and the drag link. Uh, yeah, the track bar is red, at least the, the one I was looking at the pro series and the other two were black. Why the hell can’t you get all red components? People love red, even when they lied to me and say, no, I hate red.

 

Let me put it this way. It’s something that we’re heavily exploring the possibility of offering at this moment in time. That would be great.

 

People are going, people go, what do you care? What color it is? I think it looks neat. If you buy something brand new and this is a place where you can show off this stuff. There’s a lot of things that you do to your Jeep that nobody knows that are there, you know, you can stick an Atlas in it and you’re just so happy and giddy about it. And unless you point out the two handles and the home there, you know what that is? That’s an Atlas. And then people go, what’s an Atlas? I would go get the hell out of the Jeep. We got some cool ideas that, uh, we’re kind of working through right now to allow you to, to make them a little more customizable.

 

We’ll see how it pans out. Undefinitive at the moment, but definitely, uh, some things that we’re working on. Oh, cool. That’s really cool. I figured you were just placating me by my, my, my bitching. Uh, so, and also too, I’ll mention this, this is a great marketing thing. If they are all red with just some easy vinyl white tape for Christmas time, you can make candy canes underneath your sheep. Yeah, absolutely. Good. I don’t hear wreath on the rear tire. Uh, all right. So I know that there’s people out there that they either, they don’t go off off road. They don’t think they’re going to go off road and they’re thinking to themselves, why in the world would I want this? We’ve already mentioned the better steering, which I think is a good reason on its own, but you can damage the factory OEM stuff with the right size pothole. Can’t you? We could, you absolutely could. Um, the other thing too, if you go back to the actual sockets, the actual, uh, tie rod end socket, when you look at the factory one, and actually I think we just launched a video, uh, just recently, uh, we’re doing a series of why steer smarts, what are the steer smarts differences? Um, and we kind of cut open one of the factory tie rods and we cut open one of ours and we kind of go through and thoroughly explain the differences internally. Cause that’s something you can’t see.

 

Uh, and it’s funny because a lot of the aftermarket traditionally errors on the side of more like the factory style. Uh, what that is is the internals usually are like a plastic bearing, uh, that the, that steel ball stud rides on. Um, what happens with that plastic, it’s really good for pass cars. And that’s really why the always started to introduce that into, into the market. Um, it really started really in the nineties, right? Late nineties.

 

What that plastic bearing set inside of those joints are, it’s a low friction joint. It allows you to, uh, reduce the amount of lubricants you need inside that joint and still have really good return to center on something like a rack and pinion. Well, as guys get moved around internally at these organizations, you got guys working on things like say Ford Taurus or, uh, you know, working on the Chrysler 300 program. And then naturally those guys get shifted around and find themselves working on, say like a Jeep or a F two 50 or something.

 

A lot of times that’s what those guys know. So they carry it over. Uh, traditionally again, back to the frequencies, uh, and the characteristics of cross-steer.

 

Traditionally those systems like a little more friction in the joints. Why? Well, friction reduces the amount of frequencies. That’s a lot of times because it’s a counter force.

 

Uh, so that counter force of having a little bit more friction in the joints is counter intuitive to what they do with these low friction joints, the plastic or the nylon joint, the balls, uh, bearings inside, uh, with the ball sockets in there. Also that plastic has a tendency to wear out premature because impact barrier inside that joint, uh, is literally, you got to think you hit a pothole, the weight of that tie rod is going to be pressing up into that assembly. There’s nowhere for it to go. So what is it going to do? It’s going to start to displace the softer material, which is that nylon or plastic. And instead of it being spherical, it’s now starts to wear in more of like an oblong oval type shape, which is going to give you additional slop in there. Uh, the other problem too, factory joints are not greaseable. You can’t apply any grease or fill those things. So what’s going to happen there, there’s nothing to compact inside of there and fill any of that void.

 

So again, we make sure ours are greased. We do a steel bearing set inside of that with a steel ball. Again it creates a little bit of positive friction in there, which is in our world, not a bad thing. We want that more positive feel.

 

Zerk fitting allows it to purge properly. So it, you know, fully greaseable. It’s, it’s serviceable from that standpoint. We also spring load that joint. So on the backside of that, it allows that bearing to actually move up in an impact scenario

 

and then reseed itself with that preload spring. So it doesn’t just self destruct and impact itself.

 

It allows actual slight movement in there, which is actually a benefit to have that compliance.

 

So we do a lot of things intentionally when we develop these things that the other thing, why would you want to do it? Factory stuff. Yeah, you can go, like I said, you can go 50, 60,000 miles and the perception is that they’re fine because of the mask of things like this, the stabilizer, which creates preload factor and it creates a drag on that system.

 

Our joints, if you ran our joints without a stabilizer, I would, you’d probably be pretty close to a hundred thousand miles or more out of a set of joints with any, any real major wear or noticeable wear.

 

Even if you’re really wearing these things hard and a lot of that goes back down to, I mean, how do we, how do we go that ultimate life cycle test and, and get these things running, you know, over a million cycles on something like that?

 

That’s really what, what it comes down to is, you know, we test it, we engineer around, you know, the parameters. We make sure that we, we don’t, we don’t stop either. We don’t say, oh, that’s good enough. We’ll just stop there.

 

We have been, we knew, you know, new ways to do it and into the joints itself. So yeah, it’s been a long, you know, long process to get where we’re at now.

 

Granted, because we can tap the bigger organization, we got a hundred plus years of knowledge behind them all the way back to Model T, right? Making cross steer components and Pivot Arms and things like that. Yeah. You guys keep that in mind when you’re looking at the steering components. I want to hit this really quickly. Tell us about the Griffin, because it sounds like a lot of the things you’re describing. The Griffin is also part of what helps the situation. Yeah. So the Griffin’s an interesting one. So that’s, it’s a product we came up with. We invented that. It’s an attenuator. We call it. What that is, is it’s not truly a damper. It’s more like a filter.

 

So what it does is it induces a level of compliance into the drag link. Sounds counterintuitive, right? I want movement into a drag link. That sounds dumb. It is weird. When you first look at this, you go, that is strange. So people ask, they’re like, oh, well, you just put the steering stabilizer and incorporated it into the drag link. No, because again, the steering stabilizer, and this is the misconception too. This one is interesting. And it’s again, a marketing point. The steering stabilizer does nothing but induces drag into the steering system.

 

So it’s basically inducing a counteracting force to any of the positive force that you’re putting as a driver into the system. So it’s creating the opposite force, which is drag. You’re putting input into it and it’s creating drag on that input.

 

Just by when you have an ATS, a Fox ATS or some of the Falcon shocks that you can tune up, right? You tune it up to 20. It makes it real firm.

 

It makes it really hard to steer. It feels more like, oh man, I’m driving like a performance car, right? A Mustang or a Challenger that’s got real heavy steering on it. No, it’s just inducing a bunch more drag. It’s creating like a bunch of weight on it that you’re trying to force through is what it’s doing.

 

The opposite is happening with this Griffin.

 

So what the Griffin is doing is it’s actually absorbing and filtering out the inputs that are negative. So imagine you’re driving down the street, that big pothole you’re talking about. You hit that pothole and you get that big jolt in the steering wheel, right? It’s like, bam, that jolts it in your steering wheel.

 

Well, that’s because that’s a solid connection from the wheels and the knuckles all the way through to the steering gear, which it’s jarring that pivot arm in that gear. And then that’s translating up to your steering wheel. And that’s where it’s feeling like it wants to rip it out of your hands.

 

The level of compliance that the Griffin is putting in there now allows that thing to move and absorb roughly about a millimeter in. And then it returns back to the state that it was in traditionally.

 

What that’s doing is now taking that big, huge, pardon me about that, that big, huge jolt in your steering wheel where you get that big hammer effect. It’s just onto a little bit of a nibble. You just feel a little bit of a bump in there. And it’s because that compliance, that compliancy that that created just basically filters it out by the time it gets to the steering gear side, the pivot arm side.

 

So it’s still there through your tie rod, still there through the knuckles. But by the time it hits the Griffin, which is in the middle of your drag link, the other side filters out and it delays that input into there to where it’s not non-existent. It just reduces it down. It’s probably about a 70% reduction in what that impact is.

 

And the way that unit works is there’s two compliance springs inside of that canister. And then it’s all under a really heavy preload. So this thing is assembled in a manner that gets compressed, spun closed, all under a huge preload. So if you were to just try to disassemble this thing, it’d shoot across the room.

 

So it’s under a heavy preload.

 

That preload’s rated for about a 40-inch tire. Anything over a 40-inch tire, again, that unsprung weight starts to play against the preload that’s in that unit.

 

And it just doesn’t, it’s not optimal for it. And it wants to start to pull opposite directions and stuff. Anything under a 40-inch tire with that type of unit, it works exactly like it’s intended. You drive it down the street normally, you never know it’s there. But as you hit an impact into the steering system, it absorbs it and you don’t feel it into the actual wheel itself.

 

And again, the big thing with that reduces that snap oversteer scenario.

 

If you’re trying to correct and miss a pothole and you hit that pothole and you’re overcorrecting now because you’re trying to pull it back into line, solid connection there is going to make you want to overcorrect like crazy. Who knows what’s going to happen in that scenario?

 

With the attenuator, since it filters down a lot of that stuff, it’s going to feel a lot more positive. You’re definitely not going to overcorrect.

 

Because again, that impact is going to feel like a little jolt, make that pothole feel 70% less as big as it did. So would you think this would be a good thing or a bad thing for off-roading? Because I kind of like the idea of being able to feel the stuff. Oh, again, off-roading, it’s going to be perfectly fine. You’re not going to notice it until you hit an impact. So say you’re on an off-camber type obstacle.

 

One of those obstacles where maybe your passenger side is kind of up on a rock, you slide down, you wedge the driver, tire up against another boulder or something. So that sliding effect, you’ve got that entire weight of the vehicle, just, bam, impact down on that driver tire.

 

What it’s going to do in that scenario, it’s not going to make you feel any different in the steering wheel. I mean, it will, but that’s really not the point of it in that scenario. The point of it is it’s going to reduce that dead blow effect that’s going to translate through those rods and go right to your steering gear. So you’ve got to figure that steering gear is just, it’s going to act like you have a big hammer, 3,000 pound hammer, and you’re just, bam, whack at that thing.

 

So it’s going to filter that down by 60, 70% in that scenario. So it’s still going to be a blow. It’s just not going to feel like a 3,000 pound blow. So obviously, you’ve already stated this, you’re not going to feel it in the steering wheel, but are there other components like the steering wheel, the steering gear that you mentioned, that’s going to help protect it and maybe increase its longevity? It will, absolutely. Okay, good. So it does, it doesn’t put that, you will notice it in the steering wheel. Again, it’s not going to be as harsh of a jolt in the steering wheel. That Griffin does filter out all that stuff into the steering wheel when you’re driving on the street. You definitely don’t feel potholes like you do normally. If you do dirt roads, washboard roads, things like that, gravel roads, where you constantly get that oscillation in the steering wheel, left to right, left to right, it’s going to tone that down substantially.

 

So it’s going to filter a lot of those impacts out because it’s going to allow that drag link to absorb some of that, filter it out by the time it hits your pitman arm.

 

On the big blows, like if you’re rock crawling and you slide down and you hit obstacles like that, you’re still going to get a jolt. You’re not going to notice it as much because of the impact to the overall vehicle. It’s going to be pretty harsh, right? So it’s going to be jarring regardless. Well, that’s the way I was always looking at it. A lot of people complain about the rough ride on a Jeep and I tell them, “Go get a Cadillac if you want something that’s a smooth ride. This isn’t that type of vehicle.” And when I saw the Griffin, and I think Greg actually, Henderson actually told me what it does, I’m thinking, “I don’t want a Cadillac Escalade.” So this is one of the reasons why I was asking, “What’s the point on this other than just making it feel good while you’re driving?” You don’t want to lose control. I mean, it’s not actually a loss of control, but you don’t want to lose the feel that you get because, I mean, a lot of us, and I think most everybody drives from the way the vehicle feels, whether it’s off camber or the steering and so on and so forth. And I don’t want to lose that. And so I’m glad you answered that because now I don’t feel so bad about using a Griffin. Nope. You’re not going to lose that feel. You’re only going to lose the negative input. So when you get that impact, it’s going to reduce that impact down.

 

That’s the part that you’re talking about. I’m with you. I want to feel the inputs. As the inputs are confidence, the inputs allow you to make corrective maneuvers.

 

That’s what you want, but you don’t want the negative of that. You don’t want it to be rattling your teeth. You don’t want it to be jerking the wheels out of your hands because if the wheels out of your hands, you can’t correct any.

 

Well, as long as you don’t lose the control, the feel, and it runs better. I mean, it’s like taking a 1944 Willis off-road.

 

It’s fun and it’s definitely historically accurate, but now you can take something that is engineered a lot further down the road, so to speak, enjoy the off-road riding in AC comfort if you want to, or have the top off and do all that stuff. So you can have your, you kind of have your cake and eat it too. And adding the Steersmart, it sounds like it just makes that much better. I wanted to talk about that over the knuckle thing, but we have right out of time. But this is good news because we have to have you back to talk more about this because I don’t think we’ve scratched the surface on this thing. And by the way, just you talked about Henderson earlier about it being a well of knowledge. My God, you just, you explain this stuff so well. I’m glad we got you on here. And I think that this is all to be something that you consider, the listener out there consider when you’re buying stuff because customer service, I think at Steersmart is going to be more likely to be able to tell you what’s going on. If this guy’s any indicator.

 

We do a lot. We try to help everybody out. Even if you’re not buying our products, we still want to try to help you enjoy your GPN experience. It’s our background.

 

Well, you got a lot of irons in the fire. And I mean, everybody likes selling stuff and making money, but you guys are making money from all over. So you guys are doing all right. And I certainly appreciate you guys helping out and being on the show to help our listeners hopefully make a better decision for their upgrading, their steering components. And I’m serious, man. If you’re not planning on going off road, there’s still a good reason just to have better feeling steering. And if you don’t appreciate it, even though I think secretly you will, your wife is going to appreciate it. And I know there’s some lady jeepers out there and their husband drives their Jeep from time to time. But guys, you know how you know what I’m talking about. You do not want to give the wife. You want her to appreciate what the Jeep lets you do even on the street. All right, Jay. So you know how the kids love the social media these days. They love looking at pictures and I say they, it’s me too. I like looking at pictures. So where can they find Steersmarts on the social media stuff? Yeah, we’re on Facebook, Instagram. It’s always at Steersmarts.

 

So Facebook at Steersmarts, Instagram at Steersmarts, YouTube at Steersmarts. Yeah, I was going to say you have some YouTube videos up. So go over and look at YouTube. And I would assume you guys have some stuff on there that is educational and informative about how the testing and stuff is done. Something along those lines. Yeah, absolutely do. And we got we got a lot more of that educational content coming down the way to you. Like I said, we started our why Steersmarts kind of segments. We’re going to be doing that. We have some Steersmarts garage segments where we kind of highlight some of the stuff back in our little garage studio where we do installs and partner builds and show vehicles and things like Freezy. And we’ve got some more of that stuff coming down the line. We’re working on some new builds here that’s going to probably be happening here in the next month. That’ll be pretty cool. Take us in towards SEMA.

 

So yeah, lots of lots of good stuff here in the next 90 days. Yeah. And we didn’t even talk about the Bronco either. I want to talk about that. We’ll talk about that when you come back. But so right now, I mean, obviously people can go to Steersmarts.com and see what products and what Jeeps that they support. But just looking here real quick, Jeep JK, Jeep JL, and Gladiator, or the Jeep that you guys are selling products for, where’s the best place to purchase Steersmarts products? Is it through third party vendors or straight from this website?

 

Yeah, like all of the above. So we sell, we have products available on our website. We also have a great dealer network with people all around the country. We actually have a dealer locator on our website. You can find dealers locally to you. That always helps. And those guys are great installation facilities. I was just going to ask, some of those may be installers as well, which I know a lot of people will enjoy that route.

 

So yeah, so any of the above is a good option to get our products. We want to make it as accessible and easy to get as possible. We definitely don’t want there to be any barrier of entry. Anything that you buy directly to us or through dealers that get dropshipped out, or a lot of dealers stock it as well. We try to get it in people’s hands within two to three days. So we’re pretty quick. Nothing, we don’t, since we control manufacturing, we always are able to ramp up and keep healthy stock with everything pretty quickly. So no boats from China or anything like that. Yeah. So I’ll just say if you have an older Jeep, a JK maybe with a hundred thousand miles under or 90,000 or 150, you might want to consider getting Steersmart. So your Jeep can steer like new. And then I think about that and I’m going to say better than new again. How nice would that be to have an old Jeep and just feel confident driving through, driving around. I got a JK with 120,000 miles on it and it drives better than new. Yeah. Yeah. I could have well imagined. Jay, thank you so much for being on here. Very, very interesting conversation. I’m glad we finally got you on here. I don’t know how much or if any of how much Henderson had to pester you to get on here. But I’m glad. Chris and I have been talking for a while. I know. I’m trying to find time, man. It’s been busy. Yeah. Thank you so much. And I’m serious. We definitely want to get you on again. So start planning your calendar. Yeah, absolutely. I’ll lock it down. We’ll get it. We’ll get it in the books. All right. Great. Thanks again. Take care. Hey, thanks again to Jay of Steersmart’s. Visit their website right now, steersmart.com. Now I promised you an interesting and informative interview, wasn’t it? I mean, it’s great. So, uh, yep. And Jay and I spoke after the interview, he wants me to have some Steersmart products for the 2021 Jeep talk show, glad eater. I normally say no, but man, I’ve been wanting the Steersmart’s for a while. This is a great opportunity. And Jay says it’s going to help them out me talking about it on the show. So happy to do it. Look forward to telling you a lot of stuff, a lot of the good stuff about the Steersmart’s. Hey, it may be bad. I don’t think so, but I want to tell you one way or another. So there’s no agreement here to do good reviews on products. It’s going to be reviews, whatever, however it comes up.

 

All right. I’m really excited about this interview. So coming up next week, Chris, and now Chris is the owner and driver of the Snazzberry colored glad eater. I’ll just call it maroon that was hit during a high speed police chase. You remember that SUV at the Rorano? I keep mispronouncing it. You guys know I can’t pronounce anything. But the Marano came and hit the rear passenger tire on the gladiator and went up in the air airborne completely. I mean, all four tires off the ground, probably a good two feet in the air and rolled. I call it a barrel roll and, you know, aeronautical terms and landed on the ground. So literally passed the Chris’s gladiator in the air. We’ve been talking a lot about it on the show. I just find it fascinating, especially from the standpoint of you have your Jeep in really any vehicle that you take time and pride in modifying. And there’s always, at least for me, that fear that something out of my control is going to happen to it. And all that hard work that I’ve done is going to be lost. Well, you’re going to hear what happened to Chris’s gladiator. He and his wife were the only occupants of the gladiator. It was a 2022, still is.

 

And it’s just a really interesting story. There’s a lot more to it than just being in the right place at the wrong time.

 

All right. So I don’t know if you guys know or not. I like to share a little back information.

 

All of the hosts here have a tendency to think I’ve spoke about it once. I don’t need to repeat myself, but we always are getting new listeners. So this may be new information to you. And if not, maybe you forgot. Maybe you didn’t hear it the first time or the first 10 times I said it. So way back in 2011 or 2012, Josh had joined me on the show.

 

If you don’t know who Josh is, let’s go back to the earlier episodes. He’s been with us for a very, very long time and he’s been on a break doing extra jobs so that he can make a living. So I had to leave the show, but hopefully he’ll be coming back. Anyway, Josh joined probably 2011, 2012 and we used an online streaming service called Ustream to broadcast our weekly episode live. We also recorded the audio only and put that out as well, but we were doing video on Ustream. So we weren’t overly happy with Ustream, but that was the only service that at the time that was available and free. There may have been other services or other ways of doing streaming video, but it would have cost us money and I didn’t have any money to spend on that. So YouTube came out with their own streaming service and it was a bit better than Ustream. Obviously it’s improved vastly since then, but we switched over to YouTube for streaming. So we would record the show, audio, and then the video that we recorded through streaming on YouTube was available online.

 

Actually it may still be. I have to go and look at that because I think that was XJ Talk Show, a YouTube channel that had those on there. I might need to pull some of those over to our Patreon just for friends. I think you guys would enjoy those. Anyway, getting on the sidetrack here, I hadn’t thought about that prior to the recording here.

 

Now, we actually did some kind of cool stuff back then. I bought a product called Vmix and we were able to do green screens, you know, real time. So Josh had a green screen up in his studio. I had a green screen up in my studio, which means spare room or office.

 

And we would use the Vmix to put a background up. I mean, this is cutting edge, you know, way back then. And so the cool thing was when Josh was doing reading the news, we would get some images. Actually Josh would look up still images that went along with his news story. And in a picture in a picture over to his side, there would be the image of the picture. So I was doing the producing stuff for the images while he was doing the news. And then I was still on the show and being a host on the show as well. So I was doing multiple things at once and things how it happened, especially on the live stream.

 

So now this wasn’t perfect, especially back then, but it was pretty damn impressive for the non corporate based and non corporate funded show.

 

So I didn’t see a lot of people watching our videos either live or later watching the recorded versions. So the effort that we were putting in, I thought was just too great for a show that really was more suited to listing. And I still feel that way. I don’t understand why anybody would watch a talking head video that’s an hour, but you know, you guys do, you love the YouTube.

 

So our focus continues to be on audio, but you can find our videos on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn. We’re doing every episode for the last 50, I need to find out exactly what the count is, but I’m thinking it’s 50 or 70 videos. I’m sorry, episodes. We’ve been doing videos full live, not still images.

 

And so if you want to watch the show, literally watch the show, you can do that on YouTube and do me a favor. If you, if you go over there, give us a like, smash that like button and subscribe to the show.

 

We’re, we’re not switching to YouTube. We’re just using it as a, another way to get to you guys and let you watch it the way you want to watch.

 

So yeah, I mean, it really is important to us to have you have multiple ways for you to consume our product.

 

Hope you’re enjoying it while you’re here. So that’s a good sign.

 

And that’s a wrap for today’s episode of the Jeep talk show. I want to give a big thank you to our special guest for joining us today and sharing their knowledge and experience with the Jeep community. Remember, we have five episodes a week, Chick chat, flagship, round table, flagship two, and our interview episode. You can always find us on your favorite podcast platform or on our website, or of course, YouTube with over 1000 episodes. There is plenty of Jeep talk show to entertain you while driving to your destination, working out at the gym or mowing the grass. Oh, working in the garage. You get a TV with a fire stick or any streaming internet connected streaming thing. You can, you can watch us in your garage while you’re working on your Jeep improve your day by listening to more Jeep talk show. Hey, join the Jeep talk show community and be part of our round table. Join our, our discord server, email, voice bill. We want to hear from you. Make sure you visit our website at Jeep talk show.com slash contact to find out how to connect with us. So until next time, keep on Jeepin and we’ll see you on the trails. Hey, remember Fridays are red. Remember everyone deployed. Broadcasting since 2010.

 

You’re my friend. You’re my new friend.