Firestone Ride-Rite Air Helper Springs - Double Convoluted - Rear Axle

Video Transcript for Firestone Ride-Rite Air Helper Springs Installation - 2017 Chevrolet Silverado 1500

Speaker 1: Today on our 2017 Chevrolet Silverado 1500, we're gonna take a look at, and also show you how to install, the Firestone Ride-Rite Double Convoluted Air Helper Springs for the Rear Axle, part number is: F2430.Here's a look at the air bag from underneath the vehicle. As you can see, as we talked about, we have our frame connection point here, and our axle connection point here. A few other features that are nice is that with the double convoluted-design: we don't need a great deal of space for our airbags to work, and not have to worry about them getting damaged by rubbing up against something. We only really need about a half inch of space all the way around our bag. Another interesting feature of the air bag is gonna be the way they designed their roll crimp here at the top. With this kind of spirals around the rubber, and this will actually allow you to temporarily hang your axle for general maintenance, oil changes, fluid flushes, things like that.

Now, with that roll crimp design, that allows us to let the axle hang on the back of the vehicle. Your oil changes, tire rotations, things like that, we can allow that axle to hang, and that's gonna be unlike a lot of other air bags out there on the market. Typically, with their crimp design, if you let the axle hang you're gonna damage that air bag.Now, to attach the air bag to the vehicle, we're gonna have a custom set of brackets, so there's no modifications or fabrication required. We've got our upper bracket here, and you can see our lower bracket here. Designed to work with what's on the truck already, it just fits around everything.

And this is a heavy-duty steel. You can see, it's a nice thick steel, has the black powder-coat finish so it should stand up for a long time to come, to any of the road elements that we might encounter. The dual inflation valves are gonna allow us to air each bag up independently from one another. So, what that means is that if you have an off-center load like maybe an in-bed camper, some kind of a storage tank or something if, let's say, the left side of the truck hangs down more than the right side, you can just add a little bit more air on that left side to get it back level. Now, they're not designed to aid a poor working suspension system.

If you've overloaded your truck, and one side or the other is weaker, this isn't really the way you want to go. You want to fix that suspension and just use this for the off-center in-bed truck loads.Now, if this is what your Silverado looks like from time to time, air bags are probably gonna be a pretty good option for you. Basically, what we have here is what they call "vehicle sag". The rear suspension is being pushed down, whether it's from maybe an in-bed camper, maybe you've got a 5th wheel or gooseneck, or even a bumper-tow style trailer. Any time we're putting a load in the back or on that trailer, the rear of the truck comes down.

That puts a lot of unnecessary stress on this rear suspension system. It can cause premature wear and fatigue, and basically shorten the life of that suspension. Now, when we have sag like this, we're putting unnecessary wear and tear on the suspension itself. The leaf springs are gonna build up friction, and eventually they're gonna fail sooner than they should.Just for reference, the rear of the truck is sitting at about 36-1/2". Before we loaded our tank it was at 39-1/4", so we've had a pretty significant drop here in the back of the vehicle. If we look at the front of the truck, we've also had a change here. It started off at about 36-1/4, and it's now up to about 36-3/4. So we've removed some of the weight off of the front end. That gives us some less than desirable side effects in our handling, our braking, and just the overall driving characteristics of our truck. Also, when we take the weight off the front end it does a couple things. It's gonna take the weight off of these tires, so it changes the suspension geometry, so you'll typically get uneven tire wear on the outer edge, and your headlight angle, instead of being nice and flat, and pointed where we're going, it also tilts up a little bit. That makes it harder to see where we're heading.With the Firestone air bags installed, you can see what a difference it's gonna make. Same load in the back of the truck, but we have absolutely zero squat on the rear end. Now, with that being the case, that's gonna alleviate all of those symptoms we talked about before: our rear suspension is now not gonna be taking too much work, not gonna wear out too soon, our headlights are gonna be pointing the right way, our suspension is gonna be back where it was, and we're gonna return our handling and our braking characteristics.Now, this load is being supported with just 50 psi in each air bag. These offer a range anywhere from 5 that's the minimum you always want to keep in your air bag up to 100. You do want to keep in mind, these aren't designed to increase the load handling capability of your truck. They're simply there to take a lot of the work and the stress off of that rear suspension. And make sure that when we do haul what our truck is capable of, we do it safely.Another thing I like about Firestone air bags are, the customer reviews that we get are all very positive; everybody enjoys them. They don't think it makes their ride rougher, like you get out of some other suspension enhancement products. And also, the ride quality improves in your truck even when it's unloaded, and you've got the minimum amount of air in your bags. You're gonna feel a softer, smoother ride. And that it also gonna transfer into whatever you're hauling. There's several reviews mentioning that the items inside of their 5th wheel camper maybe their dishes, and the stuff that they have stored are always in really good shape when they get where they're going because those air bags are softening up the ride.Now let's take a look at some before and after footage from underneath the truck, with our load in the bed. You'll see, before we installed the air bags, as we do the side to side, there's a lot of body roll in the truck. You can see how much our jounce bumper is moving up and down there. Now we'll go into the wider sweeping turns. You can see our truck rolls over again quite a bit each way. Now, as we go through the bumps course, you'll see how much movement that we have, again, between the axle and the frame. And from inside of the cab you can definitely feel, it's a very rough ride. Now, after we have our air bags installed, we'll do the same kind of motions. You'll see as we do the slalom side to side, we're not gonna have near as much body roll. The same can be said when we enter our larger sweeping corners. As we go through the bumps course, it's much smoother. We don't have quite the jarring that we had before installing our air bags. From the driver's seat, you can definitely tell there's been a vast improvement to the suspension on our truck. It feels much smoother, and it definitely feels like you have more control.To begin our installation, we're gonna be removing the jounce stop on both sides of the vehicle. You can see here, I've removed the tire. We usually come in from this direction to do it, but this is something you can very easily do on the ground just by reaching in over your tire. You'll want a 10mm socket. We're gonna have a nut right up in here that goes into the frame. We'll get that removed. Once you've got that out, just kind of pull on that jounce bumper and it'll come out. Now, where that jounce bumper came out of, we're gonna be putting our upper bracket on. It's gonna go right up on the frame, just like that. See the oblong hole in the bottom here Flathead bolt goes up through that. Then on top you're gonna use the little collar spacer that goes right over that bolt. Now we'll bring our bracket up to the frame. We want to make sure it goes squarely up against the frame rail. Then we'll thread our flathead bolt right up into the hole that the jounce bumper bolt came out of. Then we can use our 6mm hex bit, and we'll get that snugged down. Now we'll torque our bolt down. You want to do this according to the instructions.Now we're gonna pre-assemble our lower bracket and our air spring. You can see the elongated hole in the upper bracket. We want that to match up with the hole in the bottom of the air bag. Then we can take our hex bolt, you can see it's got locktite on there, and get that threaded right in. We need to be able to move this, so we still need this adjustment, so tighten it down just enough so you still have that. Then we'll place our spring up in position. This is our combo stud, that's gonna go through this larger hole. Then our alignment tab is here, that'll be positioned either in that hole, or that hole, just depending on how it fits in here. And our lower bracket is gonna fit right on top of the axle.You see, the U-bolts that hold the spring to the axle are gonna come right down through that little notch on the back and in the front there. Now we'll take one of our large U-bolts. We want to go around the back side of the spring pack, towards the tire, and then come forward. And both sides of that are gonna go through our lower bracket there. We can take one of our locking flange nuts, thread that on. We're gonna do that on the front and on the back. And then, I like to snug these up, leaving space before they make contact with my bracket. Now, to snug these up you'll want to use a 9/16". Now we can take our carriage bolts, those are gonna go down through the square holes. These are also gonna be in the front and the back so they hang down below our axle. Then we take our axle bracket, place that up on the carriage bolts, and then add locking flange nuts to both sides of that, as well. Now I'm gonna take the slack out of these, again, not letting my bracket make contact with the axle yet.Now we'll snug down our U-bolt here first. Now we can torque these down again. You'll find your specifications in the instructions. Now we can snug down the nuts on our axle brackets and torque those down appropriately. You can see our parking brake cable, it's gonna kind of interfere with the top of the air bag. So they've created a hole right here in the bracket, that's gonna allow us to lift that up, and zip tie it up and out of the way. Now we're gonna raise the rear axle. You won't have to do that if your truck is still sitting on the ground, but if you've lifted it, you want to raise that axle. We want to have the combo stud go right up through the hole we talked about, the larger one. And then we want to rotate it so our alignment tab goes up in one of those two holes.Now we'll take our 3/4" nylon lock nut, and that's gonna thread onto our combo stud. Then we're gonna use a 15/16" socket, and start to tighten that nut down. Then, once we have that snugged down, you want to make sure you get it torqued properly. Now we can place our push-to-connect fitting on top of our air bag. We're gonna us a 1/2" wrench to do that. You see, that thread sealant that's on there, we want to make sure we get that all the way down in the combo stud. Now you want to just make sure your air bag is positioned straight up and down, and we'll use a 9/16" socket to tighten up the bolt on the bottom of the bag. Now, as you tighten, it does want to move around a little bit, so be sure you hold it in position. All right. Now we're ready to head over to the passenger side. We're gonna repeat all of these steps there.You'll notice, here on the passenger side we have used a heat shield. This is gonna be provided with your kit. You just want to position it so it's between the bag and the closest point of the exhaust, which is here. It's gonna offer us some protection. We won't have to worry about any heat getting to it. The next thing we're gonna do is mount our inflation valve. Now, Firestone's provided us a really nice bracket. This is designed to work with just about any type of hitch, whether it's round or square. We're gonna bring it up into position. I'm putting mine on this outside edge because the spare tire kind of goes around in here, and I don't want any interference with my air lines. But once you pick your spot, wherever you want it, you want to bring the two heavy-duty zip ties around the object you're gonna mount it to. Get them started here. Then of course, we want to take out the slack in them. Once you have those nice and tight, you want to trim off the excess.Now, to mount our valves we need to take the nut off. You're gonna place on one of the small provided flat washers, bring that through our bracket, add on another small flat washer, and a nut. And we'll do the same thing for the other one here. Now you'll use a 1/2" socket and a wrench. You want to tighten these down. You don't have to over tighten them, but you do want them to be nice and secure. Now we're gonna start running our air line up towards our air bags. As you do this, be careful not to drag the air line over any kind of sharp edges or anything that causes any gouges in the line. It makes it really tough to seal. We're gonna do our passenger side air bag first. Now, in the kit, there are little sleeves to go around the air line. We'll use those right here around our exhaust just to keep the heat off the line. And those will just slide right up on the airline tubing. Then you want to make sure you have a nice flush cut here on the end of the tube.Now we can put our air line right down into our fitting. You see, it's gonna go until it gets to a stopping point, and then from there we need to push it in just a little bit further, and then we should be able to pull back on it without it moving anywhere. Then we can use some of the provided zip ties to secure our air line. We want to keep this up and out of the way, so it doesn't get hung up on anything. I typically run out of zip ties, so it's a good idea to have some extras on hand. Now we'll make a nice flush cut on this end. We're gonna slide it into our inflation fitting. And then, again, you'll have that little additional portion you'll push down. Now we'll do the same thing on the driver's side, although we're not gonna need those protective sleeves. Make sure we get it zip tied off anywhere we might need to. And at that point, we're ready to fill up the bags with a little bit of air, and test for leaks.Then we'll add some air to each side. We'll give each of our fittings a good spray down. Let them rest here for a few minutes. We just want to make sure we don't have any bubbles forming.now, with no leaks detected, that's gonna complete our look a the Firestone Ride-Rite Air Helper Springs, part number: F2430, on our 2017 Chevrolet Silverado 1500.