Air Lift Load Controller II Compressor System for Air Helper Springs - Single Path

Video Transcript for Air Lift Ride Control Air Helper Springs Installation - 2013 Ram 1500

Today on our 2013 Ram 1500 we're going to be taking a look at and installing the Air Lift Load Controller II Compressor System for Air Helper Springs, part number AL25592. Here's what it looks like once it's installed. You can see you've got your nice gauge here that's going to let you know the amount of air pressure that's going to be in your air bags. When we have our key on you'll be able to adjust your air pressure by simply pushing up on the button. That's going to run up your pressure. If you want to lower it down to get it fine tuned. Now with the pressure regulators get 00:00:40 into to our line here, it's got to maintain a constant 5 pounds of air pressure in there.

Low air pressure is one of the chief reasons that air springs will fail over time, because there's not any air in there, therefore they're not being inflated properly and allowing them to fail. This is going to be for light to medium duty applications, for recreational towing, for your weekender. Make you not have to stop at the gas station and air up your air bags when you're ready to tow something. You can just simply get in, turn on the key, and you can run up your pressure to tow your load. When you're done you can just let it back out and you're going to let it all the way back down. It'll stop at 5 pounds, therefore keeping the proper amount of air in the bag when they're not in use. It comes pre-assembled; a lot of the lines and wiring are pre-taped together.

That's going to be a plug and play as far as that goes. It's going to be a nice addition to a set of air lifter 5,000 bags. Now, you can use this with other manufacturer's air bag systems as well that use 1/4 inch line and the regulator that comes installed is adjustable if you're using it with a system that requires more than 5 pounds of air in the bag at all times you can adjust that with a simple Allen screw. Many of our customers are impressed with how easy this is to install and how well it works. It's a relatively quiet compressor compared to some of those out in the market. Now let's go ahead and show you how to install it.

Here's what your kit's going to consist of. We're going to have our compressor that's all enclosed in one sleek package. Our gauge and switch operation that's going to run your air up and down. Our low pressure sensor, the tubing that's with our wiring, it's already pre-assembled. Some extra tubing that's going to go to our air bags in the back of the vehicle.

Some extra wiring to run the power. Some zip ties, some T connectors, and miscellaneous hardware. Our first thing we're going to go ahead and do is find a location for our compressor. We're going to mount it using the provided self-tapping screws. You can mount it to your frame rail if you decide you want to drill holes in your frame rail. We're going to mount it to the underside of the body on the outboard side of the frame on the driver side. You want to try to pick a flat location that's close enough to the front of the vehicle to run your wiring and harness. We'll just go ahead and use our self-tapping screws. You always want to make sure you know what's behind there. On this application there's just an air pocket in between there, so we're going to be safe drilling into that. Bada bing, bada boom. Now the next thing we're going to go ahead and attach our ground wire with the provided ring loop connector that's already on there. They recommend in your instructions that it's grounded off to one of the bolts that holds our compressor on, but we're going to go ahead and mount it securely to the metal with an extra self-tapping screw that we picked up. Want to make sure we have a nice, good ground connection. That's going to ensure that we have a good operation for years to come. Now the next thing we're going to have to do is attach this pre-assembled line with the wire on it. It's got a short piece and a T. This short part is going to fit onto the barb on the end of our compressor. In order to get it on there and make it more pliable we're going to take a little bit of hot water, we'll soak it in there for a little bit, and that'll make it a little easier to slide on. Then we'll just let that cool off and we'll know it will stay there for a long time. Now that it's cooled off we have a nice secure connection. We're going to plug in our power wire that's attached to the air line harness that's going to run to the center at the front of the cab. We'll just push these 2 together. Then we're going to wrap it up with some electrical tape, just to protect our fitting. This is just going to ensure that we keep the corrosion and dirt out of our connections. From this T we're going to connect the air line tubing that's going to go to the rear of the vehicle to tie into our air bags. Now, depending on the length of your vehicle, you might need to pick up a little extra tubing. We have some available on our website, part number F9153, and that's going to come in a 30 foot length to give you plenty to work with. We'll take our nice, flush cut end, going to push it up into the T. Going to push it all the way in until it bottoms out. We'll give it a tug so you know it's secure. Then we're going to run this air line to the rear of the vehicle and tie into our air bags. We came out of our T, went up over top side of our frame rail, making sure to zip tie it all along our brake lines here. We just followed our brake lines up to the top of the axle. Then we went over the top of our frame rail in the back here keeping it away from our exhaust, we want to stay away from anything that's going to be a heat source or anything sharp that could poke a hole in our line. Up over the top side of our back frame rail here, keeping away from our spare tire. Now we're going to need to put a couple of Ts in the lines here. We're going to put a T in this line and a T in this line. We'll loop those 2 together and we'll add the one from our compressor that will feed the both bags. We're going to use a tubing cutter to cut our lines, make sure we keep them nice and straight. Available on our website, part number AL10530. Go ahead and cut this line first, coming out of our left side bag. Take one of our supplied Ts, we're going to push it in, give it a tug. We'll do the same thing over here to the right side bag. Now we're going to take a short piece of hose and we're going to create a little loop in the line here that's going to tie these 2 together. Once we have a nice, tight connection there we're going to splice in another T that's going to come from our compressor and it's going to tie all these together. Now we're going to go ahead and cut this line as well. Cut our line from our compressor. Then we'll secure everything up 00:08:06 with some zip ties. Your kit does come with some plastic loom clamps. If you'd like to go ahead and mount up a couple of them up in here, just to help everything stay out of the way. This is going to help keep our lines tucked out of the way. Now we're going to need to route our air tubing with the wiring attached to it to the front of the vehicle. It's going to end up underneath the dash. I went ahead and put another one of our supplied plastic loom clamps to hold this in a nice arch out of our compressor and I'm going to run the line towards the front of the vehicle coming up under the hood on the driver side. We're just going to feed it behind the frame rail here. Once we have it run across where we like it we're going to put a couple more zip ties to hold it up out of the way. You just want to keep it from bouncing around and keep it secure and away from any kind of heat sources. We'll run it up through the fender well and we're going to come out up by the master cylinder. Now that we have our wire run up behind the master cylinder we're going to tie it off, making sure to keep it away from the steering linkages. Now that we have it all zip tied up we're going to make sure we have a nice large radius so we don't pinch our line. Then we're going to go ahead and drill a 1/2 inch hole in this clutch filler plate. It's just a plastic plate that fills it in when you drill a little hole in that, run our lines through there and then we can silicone the hole up. Then we're going to go ahead and press our wire and our air tube onto the inside of the vehicle. We want to make sure we make a nice sweeping arch, as to not pinch our tubing. Now we're going to take a Philips screwdriver and we're going to remove this lower dash panel so we can see where we're going to tie into coming out of our fire wall. Just go ahead and lay it down to the bottom. Now you can see right there our line and our wire came right through the fire wall. We're going to end up plugging the tubing from underneath the vehicle on our compressor, it's going to plug into this low pressure sensor so you'll always keep 5 pounds of air in there. Once it gets down to below 5 pounds it'll actually go ahead and turn it on and pump itself back up. From that we're going to have our 12 volt power wire that's going to run out and need to be tied into the fuse box. This half will plug into the back side of our switch and gauge. We're going to have 2 that plug into the back of our switch here. We're also going to have a ground and a power that's going to come either from your vehicle's interior lights, or in this case we're just going to go ahead and wire it to the 12 volt power on our pump so whenever the key is on the light will be on. If you want yours to be off during the daytime you can go ahead and wire it into your dash lighting. Some of these newer vehicles, it's kind of hard to access a port where you can tie into that. We're going to be mounting our switch panel to the bottom side of our dash. We'll still have use of our pocket that's in the dash here. Now behind here we're going to have to cut a hole to run our tubing and our wiring out. When you have your tubing coming out of the back in here you don't want to bend it and possibly put a kink in the line or cause pressure on the back side here and cause a leak. You want to keep this as straight as possible off the back side of your switch. Now, depending on your application you may want to go ahead and custom mount these by taking the gauge and the switch and the release out, and you can actually mount them into the plastic of your dash if you have a location you'd like to do that in. For this application we're just going to go ahead and screw it to the bottom side of our dash panel here. Take a hole saw and we'll cut through here at the bottom part of our dash panel, and we can run our lines. We're going to need to go ahead and shorten up this line that came from our compressor. We'll take our tubing cutter, we're going to cut that off. We're going to put this low pressure switch up under our dash here and we'll secure it with some zip ties. Then we'll take our tubing cutter, cut that back. Take our low pressure switch, slide it in, push it in until it bottoms out and give it a tug. Now there's also a wire that we had on our line coming from the compressor, it does come with a couple extra spade fittings so we're going to go ahead and cut that shorter. We're going to strip it back about a 1/4 inch. We'll take one of our supplied spade connectors and we're going to crimp it into place. That's going to fit on the other half of this connection here on our low pressure switch. We'll plug that in. We're going to go ahead and secure up our low pressure switch underneath our dash with a couple of zip ties. We're going to route this across the bottom side and tie it on this side as well with a zip tie. Now you want to keep in mind if your vehicle has power pedals that you route this far enough out of the way where it's not going to come into contact with your power pedals and possibly get pinched or bind something up. In this case we don't have to worry about that. Now we're going to need to route our hose and wiring back behind here and we're going to drill our hole for our access. We're going to go ahead and remove this lower panel on the bottom of the dash so you can actually see where we're going to run our wires and tubing. We'll just pull out on it. We'll set this aside. We're going to need to get this tubing with the 2 wiring connectors that came out of our low pressure switch tucked in behind. We're going to come out through this point right here in between this brace and this duct work. I'm going to take a small piece of the air line tubing we had left over to fish our wires. We're going to fish our tubing up, coming out the back side here. We're going to take some tape and tape all of our stuff together in a nice neat little package so we can fish it through the dashboard. I'm going to fold one of these back onto itself and put some tape around it as well so we're only having to tie it to one wire. We're just going to kind of fish this through the dash, coming out the bottom side here. We can go ahead and remove all of our electrical tape. Now we're going to have our 2 wires that are going to plug into our switch, and we're also going to tie our power wire and this one that has the 2 wires going into the yellow connector, we're going to cut that, make a short jumper from our light to access power for our light. Then we're just going to need to run a ground down. There's a bolt right there that goes into the body, we can use that as our grounding point with a couple of ring connectors. Then I'll ground our light and give it some power. On the other side we have this fuse holder that was coming out of this little harness here. That's what's going to run outside and go to our fuse panel on the vehicle, tying into an ignition fuse so our system's only going to be able to operate when our key is in the on position and it won't operate when the vehicle's not running, therefore saving your battery life. Then we're going to go ahead and take a short piece of the extra wire that came with our kit. That can be a piece of black and a piece of red, and we're going to make our ground. It's going to go up in the back of our light to the bottom of the dash here. We went ahead and got a ring loop connector. That's not supplied with your kit, but you can pick those up at the local store, or if you're going to need a bunch of them actually do sell them on our website. We'll take one of the spade connectors as provided with our kit and we're going to crimp that into place. Give it a tug on both sides. We're going to put that through one side of this light bulb on the back of our gauge. Now, it doesn't matter which one, either one will work. I went ahead and took a small piece of the red wire that came with our kit as well, we're going to strip it back and put another one of our spade connectors on, and we'll strip back the other side. We're going to tie into the wiring that comes out of our fuse. Now one half of our yellow connector with 2 wires coming out is going to be our power wire. Go ahead and cut that in half. We're going to strip both sides back. After that we're going to twist that small jumper we just made. We'll take a yellow butt connector. Now, if you don't have any extra wiring connectors we have a wide variety available on our website. Give that a tug, we'll put a little bit of electrical tape around it to help protect it. Now our wire with the double wires in it we just spliced into, that'll go to the lower half of our switch, so we're going to slide that onto the back side of our switch, and this jumper wire we put on is going to go on the top side of our bulb. The other wire that came out of there is going to go onto the top side of our switch. I've gone ahead and taken out this 10 millimeter bolt here and put our ground wire behind it and tightened it back up. Our last connection we're going to make here is going to be this air line tubing from our low pressure sensor into the back of our gauge on this barbed fitting. We're going to use the same idea we did earlier with the hot water. We'll heat it up and we'll slip it on there. We can reinstall our trim panel. I think we'll be able to just take our lines and go underneath, giving it a nice even swoop here so we're not going to pinch our lines up. We'll take our hot water, slip our line on our barbed fitting. Now we can reinstall our lower dash panel. Slip it back into place, snap it in. We can tuck our wiring and tubing underneath the dash, and we'll install the 2 screws. We're just going to use 2 of the self-tapping screws that came with our kit. We went ahead and just put a little bend in this so it would follow the contour of the dash a little bit better and help hold our gauge into place. Our last connection is going to be our power wire with the built in 15 amp fuse. We're going to need to lengthen this wire and run it outside to our fuse box and tie onto a ignition sourced fuse. Go ahead and cut this end off. We're going to splice on some of the red wire that came with our kit. We can strip back our wiring. Take our supplied butt connector, slide it on there. Give it a tug and then we're going to wrap that up with electrical tape, and we're going to feed that back through the fire wall in that 1/2 inch hole we drilled earlier before we silicone it up. We want to route this up through following the lines we already have going through the fire wall. We put a couple zip ties on there just to keep it in place. We want to make sure we keep our fuse fairly accessible, so inaudible 00:21:01 have it hanging up here, all we have to do is drop down our bottom of our instrument panel and we have access to our fuse. Now we're just going to pull it up. We're going to tuck it neatly behind. Take off the lid to our fuse box and we're going to tie into a fuse. I'll take a piece of air line tubing that we had leftover, we're going to pull it in behind the battery tray here, kind of keep it neatly tucked out of the way. Put on a couple zip ties. Now we're going to need to locate a fuse that's hot when the ignition is on and not when it's off. We have our ignition off right now. I have this little 10 amp fuse right here I think is going to be the one we're going to use. We'll turn our key on and make sure that it's hot with the key on in the run position. We know that one's going to be good. We're going to go ahead and remove that fuse. Once we have our fuse out we want to determine which leg of the fuse has it's constant power. We'll test both sides. The forward-most one has power all the time. Now we can turn off our ignition. Now there's going to be a couple different options that come with your kit depending on what style fuse your vehicle has. We're going to use the smallest one because we have the small fuses. We're going to slide this over one leg and push it up over top side of the fuse. We're going to make sure we orient that to the forward side of our fuse box and press it down into position. Now we're going to test it and make sure we have power. Once we've determined that we'll turn off the key and just double check that there's no power there when the key is off. Okay. We're going to need to get our wire around to the front side of our fuse box. That piece of wire we cut off before with that connector on it, we're going to go ahead and reattach it to our newly lengthened wire and plug it into the fuse box. Go ahead and shorten up this wire, we can strip it back, and we'll attach our connector. We're going to plug it down onto our fuse tab. That's going to get our power. We'll just lay this inside and reinstall our cover. You may have to cut a little notch in here, you can do that with a pair of side cutters. Just to give a little access for our wire to fit into when the lid's snapped back down into position. Now we can test our system before we reinstall the lower part of our dash. We'll go ahead and put our key in and turn the ignition on. You'll see the light come on in here. We can go ahead and run up our air bags. Let that back into position. Snap it on. I'll replace our 2 Philips screws we removed. Now that we have the bottom of the dash all put back together, last step we're going to have to do is put some silicone around that hole that we drilled previously. Now if you don't have any you can pick up some RTV silicone from our website, part number LT37467. You want to just put a little bit around the outside to help protect it and keep all the moisture out. You can just take a little rubber glove and take your hand, just kind of smear it around. Just so we know we get it pressed into all the seams there and get that sealed up. Once that dries it'll be water tight. That's going to do it for our look at and install of the Air Lift Load Controller II Compressor System for Air Helper Springs, part number AL25592 on our 2013 Ram 1500.