Video Transcript for Beginner’s Guide to Installing the Hellwig Pro Series Helper Springs on a 2018 Ford F-150

Hey guys, it's Jake here with etrailer. Today we have a 2018 Ford F-150. And we're gonna be taking a look at, and I'm gonna show you how to install the Hellwig Pro Series Helper Springs. This kit is going to essentially consist of two leaf springs that you're going to add to the top of your leaf pack. And essentially what they're designed to do is to help keep the back end of your truck up, when normally your truck would be sagging. The biggest issue with the newer trucks that are coming out, especially the half-ton trucks, is because they want to make the suspension soft enough to where it's comfortable to drive when it's unloaded, but they have to put a little bit of strength into it so that you can still tow a trailer and the truck doesn't sag to the ground.

More and more, they're coming out with softer and softer suspension because a lot of people don't use their trucks to tow. They just use them for the contents in the bed of the truck. And a lot of times that's really not anything of a significant amount of weight. So the suspension, because it's softer for a better ride quality, you're gonna have a lot of sagging in the rear of this truck. Now if you peek inside the wheel well you can see our Hellwig spring attached to the top of our leaf pack.

And what they're designed to do is it is a progressive spring. So as your factory springs start to compress, these springs will be pulled in the center and the ends of them are bolted down with the U-bolts that you can see, and they will hold the ends in place while the center of the springs are being flexed, giving you more support. These springs are gonna be made out of a heavy-duty spring steel. They're gonna have a really, really nice paint job. So they're not only going to look really good, but they're gonna hold up for a long time.

It's gonna be a silver vein hammered textured paint, which with our experience is a very, very tough paint job. Instead of it just being a gloss powder coat, or a powder coat of any sorts, this paint's gonna last for a really long time, which to me, is important, because you can still see it on the inside of your wheel well, you wouldn't want an accessory to just go rusting to pieces right after you put it on. The other thing about this kit is it's gonna be rated for 2,500 pounds. You shouldn't have to be worried about that because the back end of this truck is not rated for 2,500 pounds. So you should be more than safe when using this kit.

And when it comes to suspension enhancements, a lot of times, we get questions about, "How's it gonna affect my factory ride" Well, this kit is going to affect your factory ride only as much as you let it. This kit, when you install it, you're going to have to put some preload on it. You can put very little preload, which is just tightening the U-bolts enough to where the spring just barely moves. That's essentially just to keep the hardware from moving when you're going down the road. You can do what we're going to do, which is put about an inch of preload on and you can go all the way up to two inches. If you loaded it down with two inches of preload, you're probably gonna see a different, you're gonna feel a different ride in the back end of your truck. But that all depends on if you need that support in the rear end. Right now, with this trailer, we've got this truck's hitch maxed out at 500 pounds of tongue weight. So, and you'll see here when we do the comparison, before and after, that we we're able to gain about 33% back with these springs. So we're happy with that. The truck rides just like it did with factory by just putting that one inch of preload on. Now these springs are not going to perform like a set of airbags would, or air helper springs, or a set of Timbrens, or a set of SumoSprings. All of those are going to perform a little bit better because they're all gonna have a higher load-carrying capacity because they go between the axle and the frame of the vehicle. It's a much more rigid option than just adding these two leaf springs. Now we'll show you a quick before and after we installed the Hellwig leaf springs to show you the difference that they're gonna make when you have 'em installed. Now what we're gonna do is we're gonna hook our trailer up to our truck. The hitch on this truck is rated for 500 pounds max tongue weight. So we've got enough water in a water tank on the inside, so that we're measuring about 500 pounds on the tongue. So when we drop this trailer down, it's just, we're using this to simulate the max capacity that this hitch is designed to carry. But before we hook our trailer up, we'll give you a before measurement. From the ground to the top inside of our wheel well, is about 38 and three-quarters of an inch. So we'll get the trailer hooked up and see what the after measurement is and then we can go put our springs on and see how much our springs are actually gonna help us. (machinery whirring) (machinery whirring continues) Now after we've got our trailer loaded down, you can obviously see we've got a significant difference because of that sag from the ground to the top inside, is about 37 inches. So we dropped an inch and three-quarters. And you can see, if you look, compared to from the back to the front, you can see how big a difference there is in the space. So you can imagine how uncomfortable this is to tow with and we're not even moving. So we'll go ahead and take the truck inside, get those springs put on and come right back out and show you the difference in the springs. Now with our new system added on, we'll go ahead and take another measurement just to be sure that it didn't change our factory ride height. Center, yep, we're still reading 38 and three-quarters. So now we'll go ahead and lower the trailer down, get that 500 pounds of tongue weight on and see how our suspension helps. (machinery whirring) Now we'll take another measurement with our truck all loaded down and now we're measuring about 37 and a half. So our suspension helped us out with about a half-inch, but in the grand scheme of things, with no help, we only dropped an inch and three-quarter. So we saved about 33% of that sag. Now the biggest difference here is that we really didn't put that much preload on it. If you put more preload on, up to that two-inch mark, we added about half the preload. So if you put more on, you're gonna get more and more support out of the springs, the more they flex. But with our truck here, we didn't wanna put too much preload on because we didn't want to change the factory ride height of the truck. And we wanted it to be a lot more comfortable ride when you're driving down the road. If you're gonna be using these springs a lot more for the support, then you might wanna put some more preload on so that they engage a little bit sooner. Now that we've gone over some of the details, and we've show you the before and after of the difference that they'll make, we'll show you how easy they are to get installed. Now to begin our installation, we're gonna take our top spring and our bottom spring. The top spring is going to be significantly longer on both ends, but on our bottom spring, you'll notice that one end is longer than the other. Same with our top. You'll take that spring, stack it on top like this, you'll want it to look just like this. And then the long part of both of 'em are going to be facing the rear. So what you need to do is slide it up and over your spring pack. And you don't need a lift for this. We're just doing it for ease and video. But you want to set 'em up on there and kind of get 'em centered over top of your U-bolts that are holding your springs in place now. Set 'em up, forward to backwards. We'll grab some hardware. Now the hardware we're gonna be using to attach the center of our new leaf springs are going to be the shorter U-bolts that come in your kit. You'll use two of them. One for each side of the axle. And you'll have these brackets that will eventually go underneath. So we're gonna take that U-bolt, slide it up over top. You'll find the sweet spot where it slopes down in both directions, and that's where you're gonna want to bolt it. So we'll take this bracket here, slide it up on the bottom, and we'll take a flat washer, followed by a nut. And we're gonna do the same thing for our front U-bolt. Now before we go to tighten these brackets down, what I like to do is again, make sure that your leaf spring is still centered in your leaf pack and also, you can put a hand on either side, and kind of peek around each side of your original leaf spring and make sure that your spring is sitting square on top of the other ones. Now we'll take a 19-millimeter socket and snug up these nuts. (power tool whirring) When you're tightening U-bolt nuts, you wanna be sure to go back and forth, 'cause we are gonna come back and tighten these down and torque 'em to the specifications in the instructions. (power tool whirring) A good sign that you're tightening it evenly is you can look at the amount of threads sticking out on the bottom and you just want 'em to be equal. And when you're torquing these down, you wanna also torque them down evenly on both sides. Now we're gonna take our longer U-bolt bracket, still being straight. There's gonna be two of them that are in your kit that have a little curve to 'em. Those are for the back. But we'll take the little rubber pad that comes with your kit, slide our U-bolt through it, go over the top, into this little perch on the front. Then we'll take our other spacer that comes in our kit. These are just to keep the noise down so that when your suspension is dropping and releasing, you want to keep it quiet. So that's what these are designed to do. Then we'll just follow it up with a flat washer and a nut. Now when you tighten down these nuts and the nuts on the rear spring, because you're on, or the rear of the spring, because you're on the end of the spring now, it's just gonna keep pulling the spring down the more and more you tighten these. You can tighten them up to two inches of preload. We're just gonna tighten them to about an inch of preload 'cause that's about how much we're gonna need to be able to get the jam nut on. So we'll go ahead, run these down. And you can see the spring is starting to come down and we know that we're getting an inch of preload by having an inch between the nut being on here and then coming down. (power tool whirring) Now we'll take measurement. You can see that we've got about an inch of preload on there. So we'll take our jam nuts and thread them on. And these, you're just gonna want to run up till they're tight against this top nut. Now because this is still gonna move a little bit because it's just holding the top of the spring, you wanna put a wrench on the top and a wrench on the bottom nut and that's how you get your jam nut tight. Now for the rear U-bolt, it's gonna be almost exactly the same as the front, except you're gonna use the longer U-bolt with this little curvature in it. And you want this portion, this top portion to be facing the rear of the vehicle. So you wanna put it on just like this. We'll put that same rubber bracket on, or the pad on, slide it over, and up through the top perch up there. And we will take our bottom bracket just like we did on the other one. You're gonna have some larger washers in your kit that are designed for these larger U-bolts and some larger nuts too. And what you may have to do for this back one, this is what we've run into here, is get your washer started there and then what we're gonna do is pull down on the spring to compress it so we have enough threads to thread on our nut. Now once you get these torqued down to the specification in the instructions, we're going to put a jam nut on the bottom and we'll just need to tighten 'em up against the nut we just torqued down. Now once you get your preload set on the rear of your spring, we're gonna repeat that same process on the passenger side of the vehicle. Well guys, hopefully this video helped you decide whether or not the Hellwig Pro Series Helper Springs are right for you and your 2018 Ford F-150.