[HO455]

I rolled out this morning to do more tuning of the front suspension. Earlier I had trimmed the cups to get more air pressure at ride height to make the ride better. It helped but it wasn't enough. After I pulled the driver's side cup out I marked the centering ring height and how deep the cup was on a piece of metal. (Photos #1&2) Then I measured the difference to be removed. (Photo #3) The ring I had welded in the control arm to keep the bag centered was just under 7/8", so I made the cup depth 15/16".

In addition to this I wanted to cut the bump stops down a bit. Currently when you hit a deep pot hole the wheel drops and then before the shock can catch the weight the bump stop slams into the crossmember and the whole truck is jarred. Photo #4 shows the bump stop bottomed out. (Ignore the green circle) As you can see there is not much room and that short bumper doesn't have much in the way of cushioning. I should have engineered it better from the beginning.

Once the driver's side cup was reinstalled I removed the bump stop and the jacked the truck up on the control arm to see how much of the metal base I could remove and still have the bumper stop the arms before the airbag became the bump stop. Something all the air bag manufacturers say is to be avoided. I used a drill bit to determine that the gap was now 7/64" (Photo # 5)

Once numerous measurements were taken I decided that I could safely remove 1/4" of the bumper mount. I am hoping that this 1/4" and a higher psi at ride height will reduce the tendency to bottom out on everything but the worst bumps.

During all of the up and down with the bags the driver's side front valve started not shutting and allowing the bag to keep inflating. I have had this happen before and I had to tear down the valve and replace the O-rings. It will take about 2 to 3 hours to replace the bad O-ring and get everything back on line. Well that's going to be a job for another day as it now is working correctly and I need to get the rest of this done.