Cognito Motorsports OE Replacement Camber Adjustable Lower A-Arms
Story By: Kyle Callen
Photos by: Brandon Bunch
There are many great UTVs on the market nowadays. Whether you need speed, comfort, or utility, there is a quality built machine that will fit the bill. But no matter how good a car is from the factory, we push them to the limits and try to find the weak point. For us, the 2019 Polaris RZR Turbo S Velocity has been the platform we have tested and pushed the hardest, and we’ve found the achilles heel of the machine. From the factory, the front lower control arms have a good size kink in it. This is the fuse that will bend long before it rips the arm out of the chassis… Replacing a lower arm is a lot easier and cheaper than trying to fix the frame.
The downfall is that we think they bend a little too easily. After folding a few up ourselves, we started doing the research to see who builds a quality product that’s cost effective, and that would withstand the abuse this car sees. The more we looked, the more good results we came up with, but eventually we landed on a set of stock replacement lower arms from Cognito Motorsports. A few things kept me coming back to the parts from Cognito. The simplistic design swaps the weak ball joint out for a stout uniball. They also designed the new arm to be able to make fine camber adjustments. This feature will let us dial in the alignment and fix the camber issues the Turbo S comes with from the factory.
Cognito Motorsports thought a lot about this design and it really shows in the product. The installation is pretty straight forward and with the help of their very thorough instructions, which made it a breeze to do in about an hour. Jacking the car up and pulling the tires off, you can pull the brake caliper, hub assembly and finally, the knuckle. The one downfall of these arms is they aren’t a direct bolt in part—the square edge of the knuckle where the ball joint goes in needs to be rounded using a grinder, mill or even a hand file. This will ensure that during full suspension travel, the new large uniball cup will not bind or hit the knuckle.
Once you have the knuckles tuned up, remove the old lower arm. As you are removing parts, make sure you inspect each bolt that comes off the car. We found a few with damaged or bent threads, which will have to be replaced. Again following the instructions, Cognito recommends that you start with no alignment shims for our 2 seater, so this is what we did. Reassembly is the exact opposite of disassembly. I do like to spend some time and clean up all the hardware before adding threadlock and going back together. The instructions are so good from Cognito, they even give you torque specs of all the hardware that you need to take out. For guys like me, this makes life very easy so I don’t have to reference my memory, or dig through the Polaris manual to find it. Really the hardest part of this install is loosening the axle nut and retightening it. 180ft lbs is recommended, but if the cotter pin holes don’t line up, I keep tightening until they do. It’s generally not much over the recommended torque.
Now that the knuckles and hubs are back on, all hardware is thread-locked and properly torqued, you can put your wheels/tires back on and proceed with the alignment. We like to run the car to the local alignment shop and use their alignment rack to make adjustments fast and precise. Once again, the instructions will give you a baseline for your alignment measurements and you can fine tune from there. Pending the alignment, this project is wrapped up, and it’s on to the next. This car has a long way to go before it’s ready to go play next weekend…