Episode Details

Episode 700 is a milestone — and Jimmy and Tyler marked it by getting off their chairs and going on location. They recorded this one inside an airplane hangar at TK1’s facility in the Lincoln, CA, sitting down with Garrett to finally get the full story on a company they’ve been recommending for years.

Most SnailTrail listeners know TK1 for one thing: sway bars. But the real story is wilder than that. TK1’s founder Tony didn’t start in aerospace — he started in off-road racing, building tube chassis under the Rocky Equipment name. After the 2008 crash hit the racing industry hard, the business pivoted. A bush plane owner who’d tried mounting Fox off-road shocks to his aircraft got denied by Fox over liability concerns — so he called Tony. That conversation launched what would become TK1’s aerospace division. Today, TK1 does everything from billet aluminum sway bars to aviation landing gear shocks to titanium components — all machined in-house, all in Sacramento.

Garrett walks Tyler and Jimmy through what actually makes TK1’s sway bars different: every bar is custom-spec’d for your vehicle, your suspension setup, your use case, and your goals. The conversation gets technical — how diameter and arm length affect torsion rate, how sway bars interact with front-end articulation, why a stiffer rear bar can actually free up your front axle, and how TK1’s pneumatic adjustable sway bar concept would let a King of the Hammers racer change stiffness between the desert lap and the rock section. Tyler shares his own hard-won lesson after a spine block came loose on Kermit and he suddenly understood — from behind the wheel — what sway bars actually do.

Jimmy walks Garrett through Samantha’s build specs to start the process of ordering her sway bar. His setup — a custom link rear, T100 axle, and goals still being dialed in — highlights exactly the kind of conversation TK1 has with every customer before they cut metal.

Beyond sway bars: TK1 is developing its own off-road air shocks (still in R&D, watch this space), building an electric single-motor buggy with a Hyper 9 motor in the shop, and partnering with a local high school machining program to pipeline young fabricators directly into their crew. If you need a custom billet part — trailing arm, tie rod, suspension link — they’ll take that call too.

The episode wraps with a standing invitation: get Jimmy and Tyler on a day trip to Loon Lake, and maybe a future R&D deep-dive episode at the TK1 shop.

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