How to Install an Angle Kit (Shopping Cart Angle)

Hi guys! ChrisFix here, and today I'll show you how to

install

an

angle

kit on your car. Now, an

angle

kit consists of cut knuckles, and you can actually see where they cut and welded where the tie rod attaches. And it also consists of modified control arms, you can see where they notched the control arm here to make more room for your tires because you will get a lot more steering angle with the angle kit. Now I'm also

install

ing a shock steering kit, some new wheel bearings and stiffer springs, all support mods that go along with the angle kit so we can have a solid setup.

Now angle kits are used in drift cars so you can drive and control the car when you are completely sideways. And some of these drift cars, the steering angle is so crazy that the car can almost turn completely sideways! Now, back to my Mustang, using my homemade angle finder, the stock steering angle is about 30 degrees. And if you remember, I made a video on how to get a little more angle by removing the steering rack limiters and that gave me an extra 9 degrees. But I need more angle to drift on the track. Right now when I drift I have very little room for error and it's very easy to run out of angle and spin.

So to fix that, we're going to go to the full

shopping

cart

with the steering angle of the DriftStang, even more angle than that. And we're going to set this car up as a proper drift car. And for this, here is everything we need. So how does an angle kit actually work? To help you visualize the difference, here is an original knuckle and here is the cut knuckle. If you look at where the tie rod attaches to each knuckle, you can see that the original tie rod bracket is about 5.5 inches long, while the cut one is about 3.5 inches long.

So it's 2.5 inches shorter. And to show you how that affects how much each knuckle rotates, I have two equal length straps that I'm going to place on each knuckle. And when I push both straps exactly the same amount, you can see how much more angle the cut knuckle has compared to the original knuckle. And all we changed was the length of the tie rod connection. So by simply cutting and moving the tie rod connection point inward, the same amount of input rotates the knuckle much more than the original. And that's how a knuckle cut works. And the second part of an angle kit is the custom control arms.

This is the original control arm on my Mustang. And this is a custom control arm. It's original, but they cut a notch in the control arm right here and welded in a piece of metal for structural support. Now look at the difference side by side. All this metal here is cut. And what that allows is for the tire to come in here and not make contact with the control arm. The thing is we have to cut the sway bar bracket so we can't get the sway bar to work. So with all this extra space, plus the cut knuckles, we're going to have a ton of angles in this car.

And this is quite easy to do! We'll use all the common hand tools, and with the car safely supported by jack stands and the rear tires chocked, let's start by removing the wheel! So, with the wheel off, just to give you an idea, we go from this... ...to this. So we're going to eliminate basically everything, so let's start with the brakes. But before we can remove the brakes, we have to remove the wheel spacer. And if we try to remove the nuts, it just spins. So one trick is to take a screwdriver and slide it into the brake rotor cooling vanes.

Now when you remove the lug nuts holding the wheel adapter on, it does not rotate and you can remove all five lug nuts. Once the lug nuts are removed, use that screwdriver and help remove the wheel adapter. Good. Next, I'll grab the suspension and turn it to give myself more room to get to the two bolts holding the brake caliper. So let's start by removing the top one. Good. And then the one below. And once the bottom bolt is removed, the brake caliper is free. So take a bungee cord or something similar and connect it to the brake caliper.

And now we can take the caliper off the rotor and I'll hang it from the frame of the car so it's out of the way. And now we can remove the brake rotor. So with the brakes off, next let's remove the tie rod end. Now we are going to install an impact steering kit. I'll explain how this works when we install it. But you are going to replace the tie rod end. So first we need to loosen the locknut to remove the tie rod. So get a 21mm wrench and hit it with a hammer because these locknuts might be tight here.

Sometimes, they are so tight that you need to use heat to remove them. Okay, and with the locknut finger loose, you don't want to loosen this locknut any more than necessary. Hold it against the end of the tie rod because that will maintain our alignment. Now we are going to remove the knuckle strap. So bend the cotter pin and pull it out. Okay, and unscrew that castellated nut all the way. And once you remove the nut, flip it over and screw it back on until it's flush with the bolt. And what that does is it allows us to take a hammer and get the bolt out of the knuckle without it forming a fungus.

Beautiful. Once the tie rod comes loose, unscrew the nut and the tie rod should come off. Now, we can unscrew the outer tie rod from the inner tie rod. And we don't need that anymore! But we're still using the inner tie rod, so make sure you keep the locknut where it is. With the tie rod end removed, we are now going to remove our threaded shock absorber. So let's start with these two screws down here. So grab your wrench and use it to keep the bolt from turning while we loosen the nut. And once we release it, like that, we can loosen it the rest of the way.

And I really like these extendable ratchets for leverage. That's the top nut, let's remove the bottom one. And there we go, that's the bottom nut. Now we can get the screws out of there, which might require a little movement to get loose. And finally, we can remove the shock absorber knuckle, like this. Now with the bottom bolts removed we can reach to the top, grab our wrenches, one goes to the nut and the other holds the bolt in place while we try to loosen it. And once it's loose, you need to loosen the rest by hand, like this.

And then we can dive back in and completely remove the shock absorber. And with that shock absorber removed, we're almost done taking everything apart. All we have left is this lower control arm. To get to that and get it out, we need to remove this sway bar. So place a wrench on the flat end of the N link to prevent it from rotating, place a deep socket on the nut and unscrew the nut. Once it's loose, you can unscrew it completely by hand, remove the top bushing, and push the control arm down to disconnect it from the sway bar.

Next we need to remove the sway bar body bracket so we can remove the sway bar completely, because it's going to get in the way of the tire with all this extra angle we're going to have. Then unscrew both nuts. And with both removed, I've already removed the bracket on the other side so we can slide the sway bar out. And with that sway bar completely removed, the last thing we need to do is remove this control arm. There's a bolt there, and a bolt there, and this will come out. So grab a wrench and let's remove the left bolt first.

Put that ratchet in there and release the bolt. Good. To give myself more room to move the ratchet, I'm going to hold the control arm down with my foot. And here we go, let's take that bolt off! Ugh, you're kidding, right? So we ran into a little problem removing that bolt. It's something that shouldn't even happen, but it did, so let me show you what's happening. As you can see, we can't remove the bolt because the tie rod boot is in the way. So hopefully removing the trunk would be enough. No! And would you look at that?

This is in contact with the top of the steering rack and the side of the steering rack right there! That's bad design! All I want to do is remove this bolt and I have to remove the steering rack to do that. So, let's remove the steering rack bolt by unscrewing this nut. Okay, remove the washer too. And then the bolt slides out. Finally, let's get the bushing out of there. Now I want to try something, so instead of removing the entire rack, I think if I lift the rack up enough... Just a little bit more... Perfect!

That gives us enough room to remove the bolt. And we don't have to completely remove the steering rack. Alright, with our beam out, that's what I call bad engineering. This bolt should come out without having to move the power steering rack. But it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be, so let's move on to the next beam. And loosen this bolt, like this. And now I hope this one comes out without a problem. *giggle* You're not going to believe this. So this bolt should come out, right? No! It's going to hit the K member bolt.

So now we need to remove this bolt and hopefully it clears. Good. And beautiful! The control arm bolt is out and we can finally remove the lower control arm. Alright, with our lower control arm removed, we have completely destroyed our front suspension; Everything is out of here. And while it may seem intimidating, it's actually not that bad. It's just a couple of nuts and bolts. And that gives us room to install our angle kit and support pieces. And while this is a kit made specifically for my generation Mustang, just speaking from experience, whenever you make modifications or customizations like this, be prepared because you may have to make small adjustments to make sure everything works together.

And with that being said, let's grab our lower control arm and start installing everything! Remember those little tweaks I was talking about that you might have to make to make things work? Well, here's the first one. This spring position here gets in the way of the tire. And it actually completely makes up for the tire rub here. That's why they have this rounded edge instead of sharp so as not to damage the tire if it flexes and rubs. And when I'm skidding, you can hear the tires scraping when you turn the wheel all the way. Listen to this.

Now the friction slows you down and unbalances the car, which can cause you to spin. And if you can't tell, it gets frustrating. So right now, even if we install the angle kit, we can't get more angle than the original because it gets in the way. And I talked to a couple of friends of mine who drift Mustangs, and they all trimmed this down to the frame. And in my situation, I don't use the spring anymore, so it's okay to trim this spring hanger. Enough talking, let's draw the line where we're going to cut this flush with the frame for maximum clearance.

And as always, safety is important, so be sure to wear a dust mask and eye protection. So we're using an electric cutting wheel, and I'm working from the top down. Now it's almost completely off. And here we go! Now I'm going to deburr and smooth the edge with a flat wheel so that it is rounded and not sharp. So there's the first little modification we had to make, cutting off this little piece of metal. so we can put the tire in here and it doesn't rub. Now I'm going to clean this and don't forget to paint it so it doesn't rust.

Ok, with the paint dry, we are now going to install the control arm and attach the suspension. Remember, we have to lift the power steering rack to get room to install the bolt. It's that simple. Good. Now we can lower the steering rack and put that bushing in there. Add the bolt, then the washer, then a medium strength threadlocker which will prevent vibrations from loosening the nut. And this comes down to 40 foot-pounds. Perfect! Finally, push the sleeve all the way back and reinstall the vent tube like this. Now we can add the other bolt to the control arm.

Use a medium strength threadlocker on each bolt and hand tighten the nut on each bolt. Now, every time you tighten the control arm bolts, this metal here pinches and jams that bushing. Therefore, you want to set the control arm so that it is level with where the car will be while driving. And once you do that, slide something like a jack underneath so it doesn't move. Each control arm is now set to 150 ft-lbs. That's one. And that's the other one. And we can't forget about this K-member bolt, which I added some medium-strength threadlocker to, and it torques to 65 foot-pounds.

Now when we remove the jack, you can see it stays where it is because these bushings are tight. So you don't want it to be too low and then when you put the tire on and lift everything up, the bushings spin and potentially break.Now with the control arm bolted on, we're going to install our knuckle, which connects to the lower ball joint. Then we can put the nut in there and tighten it. This is torqued to 130 foot-pounds. Good. With the knuckle in, we can now install the coilover. But before we do that, since we're removing the sway bar permanently, we need to add a stiffer spring to the coil-over shock.

This is easy to do, simply remove the top spring hat, take out the old spring, and install the new spring. Piece of cake! So the old spring is a 225 lb spring and the new spring is a 600 lb spring. That's a big difference, it will make the front end stiffer. It will also compensate for the sway bar we removed. So let's install this shock absorber! Now the top of the threaded shock goes through the hole in the tilt wheel plate like that. Then add some threadlocker to this, screw the nut on and we're going to tighten this nut with these two wrenches as much as we can since we can't use a torque wrench here.

Okay, and with the top of the threaded shock tightened onto the camber wheel plates, let's get back under the car. And I'm going to use a breaker bar to help me keep the control arm down while I align the knuckle so it can slide right into the threaded shock. Then let's put the top bolt on that's going to hold this in place, and then the bottom bolt, let's add some threadlocker to the threads and thread those nuts on there so we can torque each one to 150 foot-pounds. That's the top. And that's the bottom line. Oh man, we're so close to being done, so now let's install our tie rod.

This is the factory tie rod and does not have an adjustment for shock steering. So instead, we're going to install our adjustable tie rod. What makes it adjustable for impact steering are these washers found here. Right now we have it on the lowest setting. But if we remove the washers and install it like this, now we have it in the highest position. So we could move it down or move it up, and that adjustability will help us get the steering geometry right. Now I can make a full video on rough steering, how to correct it, where to put the spacers, how to measure the suspension and get the correct steering geometry.

But that's not what this video is about, so what I'm going to do is install this shock steering kit and let the alignment shop properly adjust the shock steering. Now it is convenient that the original and steering tie rods have the same length. Since we didn't move the locknut at all, we were able to tighten the tie rod all the way to the locknut that way and maintain our current alignment. Next, let's put the end of the tie rod into the knuckle like this, add a washer and nut, and torque it to 40 ft-lbs. Finally, place a wrench on the flat side of the tie rod to hold it in place, and a wrench on the lock nut, and tighten the lock nut against the tie rod so it doesn't come loose.

So with the tie rod ready, we can now install our new wheel bearing. And a little trick so that the wheel bearing can come off easily if it ever needs to be replaced: simply add some anti-seize directly to the axle, so the wheel bearing doesn't rust on the axle. Then, push the new bearing completely against the journal. Add some thread locker to the threads and it's important to use a new spindle nut every time you replace a wheel bearing so it doesn't come loose while driving. Now the spindle nuts are usually large. This is a 35mm.

And it is important that you use a torque wrench to achieve accurate torque. This way the wheel bearing seats properly and does not wear out quickly. And we're going to have to reduce this to 250 foot-pounds, which is a lot! And a little trick is to keep your arms straight and bend from your legs, not from your back. That way, you'll be using your powerful legs to squeeze it and won't hurt your back squeezing it down. With the bearing installed, let's put the brake rotor in there. Next let's slide the caliper over the brake rotor and tighten the two bolts.

These tighten up to 95 foot-pounds. That's one. And that's the other one. And now we need to add a threadlocker to each of these bolts so we can install the wheel spacer. Now let's place a screwdriver on the cooling vane and tighten the star nuts to 100 foot-pounds. And don't forget to remove the screwdriver. Now let's slap the dust cover over the axle nut to seal out water and dirt. And finally, we can put the wheel here, hand-tighten the five lug nuts, lower the car, and finish tightening the star lug nuts to 100 foot-pounds. Now let's see what kind of angle we got using our angle finder.

So slide it under the tire, lower the car to the ground again and turn the wheel to see the angle. Remember, the original steering angle maxed out at 30 degrees. So we've already passed it... And check it out, holy cow! We have a 50 degree angle! That's a big improvement! And that's impressive, the angle kit gave us over 20 degrees of angle compared to the original. That's so much that we're going to have a serious angle for when we drift. Speaking of which, we have to get to the track, but before that, we need to align this car so we can have a perfect alignment.

We're in the alignment shop and the DriftStang is on the alignment rack being serviced. Camber, caster and trailer are being adjusted so the car can be driven on the street, but also drift on the track. And a few minutes later, we're ready to test the new angle kit! So just driving down the street, you can feel a total difference when you turn because now when you turn the wheel a little bit, the car turns a lot more than before. And so you can get a visual difference between our original angle and our new angle, we're at the dead end, and here's a photo of the car with the original steering angle.

The stock turning radius is very wide, approximately 19 feet. That's how wide my truck's turning radius is! Now let's compare that to our new turning radius. And look at this, this is crazy! The new turning radius is less than half of the original turning radius! Oh man. After seeing that difference, I can't wait to take this to the track, so let's go there right now! Alright, now the track is closed for the winter, but I got permission to test the car in the track parking lot. So let's see what he has! What a difference! My God! You're grinding, grinding!

Yeah! Oh man, what a difference that is! My God. That's crazy. I'm like... I'm like shaking because of how good that is. Dude, I have this written down. I've got this under control, baby! Yeah! Yeah! Dude, I'm so happy for you, you have no idea. You have no idea how happy I am right now, like... This is crazy! There you go. Here's how to install an angle kit at home with common hand tools and check out these results! We hope you enjoyed the video and if you're not subscribed, definitely consider subscribing because it just keeps getting better and better!

And as always, all the tools and products I used in this video are linked in the description. Stay tuned!