Just so you know shocks will not help lift the rear of your vehicle at all. They only dampen the movement up and down. If you have air bags those should level out the rear. Changing the shocks won't give you any added capacity or anything. Just seems like you might think that?

 

Speaking of shocks.
Which shocks are recommended for 03 Ram 1500 2wd with 2" frt drop (spindle) and a 5" rear drop. Using a spindle to drop the frt to my thinking should maintain the stock shock lenght. How should I calculate the proper lenght for the rear?
Thanks,

 

True enough, the air bags level, but can lift if I want to put more air into them. They are working with the stock shocks just fine now.

I'm adding shocks because the back end isn't dampening enough. The truck "bounces" too many times after big bumps, and I get a little bit of porpoising on the hwy at times.

 

Decided to take the truck into the dealer to pay them $88 to install the two rear shocks. Then after a couple of hours goes by the call and say they can't do it!!

Apparently the 1200lb popup truck camper on it made it "impossible" for them to balance it while on the lift...

I'm bummed. I've found a shop that feels they can do it, but am waiting for my front shocks to get here to have all four done at once.

 

I wont lie, that's kinda funny, but not surprising. I wouldn't want a truck flipping over backwards on me either.

Something to note though is that the new shocks will not have any 'spring' in them, meaning they won't want to open or close by themselves. All the weight of your truck is on your springs, unless the shocks aren't working quite right.

My point is that you could do shocks with the truck sitting on the ground if you wanna just get under it. The old ones will like want to expand open when you loosen the bolts, but just undo the bottom bolts first and it's no problem at all (did mine like that). And the new ones you just pull open as much as you need to install. The rears will take you 30 minutes total to remove/install if you want to do it yourself.

 

Thats a lot of weight on the truck and for a long time.

 

Yep it is. That's why it's got air bags and I'm upgrading the shocks. A rear anti-sway bar is on the list too.

I did make sure that the load was within tolerances by the truck specs and the tires. It's a lot of weight but so far as I know it's safe.

 

I don't blame them for not wanting it to fall over on the lift either. But there are other shops in town that lift full sized RVs and other odd things. It just seemed like they weren't that motivated to get it done.

And that's what I thought, that if it can be in a drive way then there shouldn't have been an issue with weight berring....

At first I was going to just do it myself, but got gun shy because of the lack of tools, and a flat surface.

 

Finally got the rear shocks installed by a local shop. These new bilstiens are AWESOME!! What a difference! We took the truck/camper up into the mountains on a 4x4 road and the new shocks did great. Highly recommended over OEM and doing just the rears so far has made a very positive improvement.

Now if only the fronts would get here. There's a freakin' national backorder problem going on, and supposedly they've been on backorder since March and won't be available until Sept. or Oct.???!!!

Looks like my summer will be over before I can get the fronts done...now that I think about it, I'm going to write bilstein directly and see what they've got to say about this crap!

later,
BZ

 

I called Bilstein today in CA, they say that October is the earliest and it could be December!! WTF!!??

I'm exploring other options now. Like maybe putting a pair of Rancho RS5000 or RS9000XLs on the fronts.

How do you think that would match up with the new rear shocks? I'm sure that the fronts are ready for replacement, that's why I don't want to wait.

What do you guys think?
BZ