MC VIDEO: Inside the RockSport BLACK | Full Breakdown of MetalCloak’s Game-Changing Shock

This video features Doug Powell, one of the engineers at MetalCloak, providing a detailed teardown and explanation of the RockSport BLACK shock. From unboxing to the internal components, Doug walks through the engineering choices, materials, and unique features that make this shock stand out. Highlights include the induction-hardened 7/8-inch shaft, true 2.5-inch body with thick walls, hard anodized finishes, a unique parabolic valving system, triple-seal redundancy, an eight-position digital compression adjustment, and a modular reservoir valving unit. The video also covers the ease of disassembly and tuning, custom vehicle-specific mounting options, and the durability-focused design elements engineered for off-road performance.

Complete Transcript with Time Stamps

0:00 My name is Doug Powell. I'm one of the engineers, at Metalcloak. I'm gonna spend a little time today trying to show you the different features and benefits of our Roxport Black Shock. We're very proud of the shock, and we're proud of the features that we came up with. So we'd like to try to start from opening the box, going through all the features, and, try to tell you all the goodies that we put into this product.

0:24 And so we even start out with the box. We try to make sure that our box is set up in such a way that we get no damage to our shock during shipment. When you get it, you can remove the different foam pieces. Each of them, again, designed to protect your shock during shipment so you don't get any surprises. And this is our Rock Sport black.

0:44 So as I disassemble this unit, we'll try to go through each one of the features. The first thing you'll notice, besides it just being a great looking shock, is that we have a seven eight inches hard chrome, shaft. It's induction hardened to about fifty thousandths deep. We try to run it about the sixty Rockwell, which is very hard on that exterior, and the fact that it is a seven eight shaft in thickness, we can keep the internal portion of it soft and malleable, and yet we can keep the exterior extremely hard so that we can deal with rocks and debris that hit the shock without actually affecting the surface of the shaft, therefore not affecting the sealing.

1:19 And you can see on the calipers that we have an h seven five or a seven eight shaft. And then in addition, we have a true two and a half inch body. So our two point five is a real two point five. We have a great matte black finish, but it's important to note that our black finish is hard anodized. There's different anodizes used in our industry. And anytime that you see a colored anodized, meaning it's blue, for example, or a yellow or a gold, those are not hard anodized because hard anodized comes in two colors. It comes in a deep black, or it comes in a clear that looks like a gray.

1:55 So if you see anything outside of those two colors, you know that you do not have hard anodized black. We've got a great system here that we do the surface finishing that makes a satin finish, uses hard anodize. And what's interesting to see is you can also tell hard anodize because when you click it with something that has a high pitched click, that high pitched click will tell you right off the bat whether or not you have a soft aluminum, soft anodized part, or whether you have a hard anodized.

2:19 We chose hard anodized. It's much more expensive, but it's much more durable. And it also has a higher depth into the material for scratching. I'm gonna start out by going through and disassembling this unit so we can show you each of the features as we disassemble. So we tried to build this as simple as possible for the individual that wants to disassemble, modify their shocks, clean them up, self tune, do all of those type of things. But it's as simple as we could possibly imagine making it.

2:48 Before I start taking this apart and looking at the features, is you always wanna bleed your air, or you bleed your gas pressure. So you on a Schrader fitting, on a reservoir right here, you're gonna wanna pull that off, off, push on the Schrader like that, and make sure there's no air. In this case, because we're doing this assembly, we don't have any pressure in there.

3:08 There's a set screw on our wiper cap that you just loosen up, which locked it in place. Most of the time, once you do that, you will be able to loosen it by hand at that point. If you can't, there are two holes at the top for a spanner wrench like this that we can put in and you can loosen it. Most of the time you won't need that. I'd be surprised if you do.

3:28 So now we've separated the wiper cap. This is just a portion of the shock that allows a wiper to go in, keeps the seal chamber and the wiper separate in case you do get any type of dirt buildup in the field. The next thing we have is if you look down on the inside of this unit, we have our seal head. Our seal head is removed by pressing down. So you move the seal head against and away from our wire ring, and we can remove the wire ring. By removing the wire ring, you can now pull out the shaft assembly as a whole.

4:00 So, earlier I went through that we have a two and a half inch OD, but I also wanted to point out that we have a two hundred thousandths thick wall. That is much thicker than most of our competitors, and makes for a much stronger and more durable and less likely to get dented shock body.

4:18 First thing we want to show once once we've pulled the shaft out, we've created our own valving system at the top and we understand the rest of the industry uses a typical shim stack. And shim stacks are still available. You can use a shim stack if you choose to and we have conversion kits for shim stacks. So those are available.

4:39 However, if you look closely at this washer on top, the underside of this washer is actually has a parabolic shape to it. That parabolic shape is designed specifically to handle the performance characteristics that we want out of this shock for the vehicle that this shock goes into. And it has a single, which you can see here, it has a single shim And that shim is completely controlled by the parabolic nature of the backing washer.

5:02 Identically, this is the rebound side. The compression side is this. And it's much more easy to see on the compression side, the parabolic nature shape of this, washer. And then again, we have a single shim underneath there that the parabolic side of the washer controls all of the performance characteristics of the compression cycle. This one up here controls the rebound cycle.

5:27 Here, after I've I went through that parabolic nature of our of our shim stacks, I'm just gonna pull out the piston here. Our piston is machined aluminum, sixty sixty one, but we also do what I mentioned before, which was a clear, hard anodized surface. It makes the durability of this piston much better. More expensive to do. Most of our competitors don't do it, but we do hard anodize our pistons as well.

5:51 And, we, in our, in the case of us, we use a split wear band. It's a bronze Teflon combined wear band. We also put in a backing o ring on that, and that backing o ring is meant to provide a little bit of spring that helps keep your wear band consistently against the inside surface of your shock body. Easily assembled.

6:08 We have the step connect on this side which prevents any type of seal or or oil blow by. We specifically have nine ports, three ports in rebound, and we have six ports in compression. This is our seal head. Seal head includes a extended bumper for the full extension of the shock under those conditions. An exterior seal for the inside of the body. And we also have two additional seals in there, a primary and a secondary.

6:33 The primary is a cup seal, which is very typical in most shocks. But then we also add an H seal. Seal. That seal is not only a cup, but it's got a wiper built into it. And then we have a secondary wiper that exists down here. And this is on the what you would typically see in most shocks. So we have doubled up. We got a primary built just like a cup seal. A middle one that acts as both a cup and a and a wiper, and then an additional wiper.

6:57 So we have redundancy throughout this. And yes, that does cost us more money to do, we recognize. But it makes a much more consistent seal over the long term for endurance reasons.

7:08 In the case of our, sensing line, we use ORB fittings. The reason we use these ORB fittings is because they have a unique quality that allows us to gently loosen, one of the sealing nuts, and then allows us to rotate while it's still under pressure. We can rotate our reservoir or our shock body to a different location, and then we can snug up at the location that we like.

7:28 That just makes it easy for us to manipulate the reservoir underneath the, or after assembly or after installation on the the Jeep. I'm going to remove it just to make it easy for me to work on the cap, to show you the inside of the cap of the reservoir. We've already bled from our reservoir, obviously, because now we have exposure from the sensing line. But again, what we try to do when we made this entire shock was to make it as simple as possible so that those that want to work on their shocks, they want to tune them, they want to clean them, they want to rebuild them. It's as easy as possible to do in our in our mind.

8:02 So once you get here to a reservoir and you have fully bled, we have what we call a reservoir cap. This is a fully contained assembly, that you can separate from the reservoir. And one of the really cool things is the valving unit in there, it's a module. It comes out as a module. And you can untwist it here. There's a hex located on the top to where our valving unit can come out.

8:27 We have this, butterfly shim on the backside that's made out of Sandvik twenty C. So it acts not only as the check valve portion of this valving unit, but it's also its own spring. And when you look at competitors, you will also see that those competitors have a spring, an internal bearing, some type of a floating shim, and many, many more components that this acts as all of those components, and it's one part.

8:50 Then when you go to the backside, we have a shim stack right here. And that shim stack is behind a backing washer that acts as a blow off for any type of massive hit that your shock may hit. This will blow off the any type of restriction that you have in the adjustments. It'll blow off and blow through. And that's meant to protect all of your seals on your shock from blowing out. But it only operates, it's an extremely high blow off pressure. It only operates when you do something extreme to it that just protects the rest of the shock.

9:18 But again, it's a single module, and if you've dealt with anybody else's reservoir heads, it can be very difficult. They may have an o ring seal trying to put it in the top. They may have a c clip on the thing, that holds it into its reservoir. Extra parts. This thing is a self contained unit that you can easily thread in. It has a tapered thread to it, so once it gets snug, you can start to feel it get snug. Then you take your wrench and you can tighten it and snug it down, and it holds it in place as well as seals.

9:48 So I'm going to take this back off because there's some other cool features inside this unit. You can take the cap off through the screw on the top. So after you've taken off the adjustment knob and you're careful to watch for the ball detents that are in there that control our adjustment mechanism, we then have our choke, our digital choke that's on the inside of the, reservoir cap can just be easily removed.

10:11 And it's very easy to understand. It's a valving unit that rotates to different volumes. You can see each one of the volumes, and there are eight of them as you go around it. So our choke, or adjustment choke, which controls the compression, we call it digital. Being it's digital because it has eight positions that are unique. There's no needle valves involved, which are analog and sometimes, challenging to adjust like our competitors use.

10:38 And you can see them. It's very easy to understand. They cross over a port inside our reservoir. And as you rotate it, it moves the different cross sectional areas in front of that port creating the restriction. And that is what creates the different performance on our eight different compression settings.

10:55 Just like we demonstrated on the seal head, we try to provide redundant seals. Our choke also has redundant seals of where the stem goes through the reservoir cap. You can see we have two O rings in this case. Again, it's just to make sure that we don't have leaks.

11:10 One of the features of our adjustment knob is we have a keyway that's offset, and the keyway is offset in such a way that it only allows you to put the adjustment knob in the correct position when you put it back together. You can't put it together incorrectly. So you just turn until it slips into its keyway like that, and then tighten down the screw. Can't be done wrong.

11:32 We can put our valving unit back in, snug that up, and now we have our reservoir cap that's all back together and ready to put back in the into the reservoir. But what you should know about some of our competitors, if they do not burnish the inside of their reservoir chamber, this seal will eventually leak gas past it and into your oil. It's going to happen, guaranteed.

11:55 And we know that many of our competitors do not take the expense to burnish the inside. Burnish creates almost a mirror finish on the inside of a reservoir. It may not be as important to do, a burnishing on the inside of a shock body, and that is because you're just dealing with a wear band that's going up and down on both sides of the piston, and a perfect seal under those conditions is not required.

12:21 But in this case, longevity of your shock and combining of gas and oil is completely dependent on this seal right here and this surface. And this surface should always be burnished.

12:33 Our hose assembly is the size that we chose and the fittings that we chose were specific to allowing the hose to flex properly in such a way that we can place our reservoir anywhere in the jeep or the, in in the vehicles that we attach to. It's important because you need some flexibility because all the setups are a little bit different.

12:53 But if you look at the cross sectional area of our o RB fitting, that's right here, That cross section is identical going through this entire assembly. This is a custom hose that we designed and we built. That area right there is larger than the largest choke hole in our reservoir cap. So no matter what, the restriction does not occur through this hose. The restriction occurs in our reservoir cap at the choke point.

13:18 Our number one setting, which would be the softest setting. So the shock that I pulled out specifically is the JL driver's side shock. And that means that the in connections are either offset or configured for that specific vehicle, which is what we do at Metal Cloak.

13:36 I mean, when you buy our shocks, they are all configured to specifically what you need for that vehicle that is your vehicle. So our black shocks are fully adjustable from that standpoint, and we have many end connections from stems to bushings to, offset bushings to miscellaneous brackets and so forth that allow you to take this black shock, adjust it, ship it, and put it on your rig specific to the location on your rig.