So you installed a hydraulic system to customize your vehicle and give it that low rider look with some major bounce. If you also enter your car into car jumping contests, then you may want to look at what it will cost to maintain and repair your hydraulics after a few competitions. Sometimes it is not the hydraulics you need to worry about so much as it is the suspension, the shocks or the tie rods.

Post-Car Jumping Maintenance

If you make it quite far in a car jumping competition, you should be performing hydraulic and wheel maintenance after you clear a couple of stages. The vacuum tubing needs to be greased so that the shafts lift and lower with ease. Make sure you are checking your wiring too, because sometimes operating the remote to lift and drop your vehicle can expose and damage some of the wires connected to the remote. Check your connections between the wheels, the axles and the hydraulic system for signs of wear and tear too. Even if you only clear one or two stages in the competition, you should still do maintenance right away to keep your lowrider/high jumper from breaking something important.

Checking the Suspension, the Tie Rods and the Shocks

Your hydraulic system is a custom job, meaning that the car was not originally designed to handle rocking, lifting, shaking, bouncing, or jumping. All these cool tricks that your car now does have an impact on the tie rods (which keep your wheels on!), the shocks (which keep your car from shoving your hydraulic system through the hood), and the suspension, which generally keeps the steering in shape and the tires connected to the road (although some competitors remove parts of the suspension to get more height). If you plan on driving your vehicle around without turning on your wheel's hydraulic system, then you need to make sure the suspension does its job and the shocks can handle both the jumps and the regular driving.

Because bouncing, jumping, hopping and dropping can break tie rods off, it is important to inspect the tie rods often. You may need to reinforce the tie rods when you install your hydraulics and revisit the tie rods to weld them whenever you start to hear an unpleasant grinding noise while turning the wheel. Without good tie rods, your wheels could pop off during your next competition, and then you would have to drop out.

For information about hydraulic repair, visit Certified Products Co.