Air Lift Air Springs QuickShot Compressor System Installation - 2017 GMC Sierra 2500

Products Featured in this Video

Air Lift QuickShot Compressor System for Air Springs - Support Line and Reserve Tank - Dual Path

28 reviews

Code: AL25572

Retail: $1,236.88

Price:  $663.95

• Air Suspension Compressor Kit
• Wired Control
• Dual Path

• Analog Display
• Air Lift

Ideal for off-road vehicles, QuickShot lets you monitor and adjust your air springs with an in-cab controller. The dual-path system allows for front-to-back and side-to-side leveling. And an auxiliary air line provides instant air for tires and toys.

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How to Install the Air Lift Air Springs QuickShot Compressor System on a 2017 GMC Sierra 2500

Hey everybody, Ryan here at etrailer. Today on our 2017 GMC Sierra 2500, we're gonna be showing you how to install the Air Lift QuickShot Compressor System with the reserve tank. But before we do that, why don't we check it out and make sure that this is something that's gonna work for you. So what this compressor system is gonna do is a couple of things, really. It's going to allow you to adjust the amount of pressure in your airbags. And by having that reserve tank, it's gonna give us onboard air as well.

That way we can hook up an airline to the back of our truck and fill up tires or do whatever it is we're trying to do with that air pressure. To be honest with you, I usually don't recommend analog type deals like this one here. This one's actually pretty well built though. And I say that because in these newer trucks, it's really hard to find a spot to mount these. And this is a perfect example.

These units aren't small by any means. There's a lot going on here. And these newer trucks, the dash is just so busy. You just really can't find a spot for them. And this is a perfect example of that.

We ended up putting this underneath the back seat. Our customer really wasn't too concerned about making super quick on the go adjustments. He really wanted to use that reserve tank feature. We talked to him and said, hey, what are you trying to do here 'Cause there may be a better option with the wireless type ones. I'm a big fan of 'cause you just use a remote.

And he said, no, I want that air tank. So this is the one we ended up going with and I definitely get it. You can, with those wireless type ones, you can use an air tank with it. Just has to be a dual path type compressor. And those get grabbed up really quick nowadays. And not to mention, you have to pick up a separate tank piece together a little bit too, if that makes sense. But honestly, this one actually worked out pretty well. It turned out pretty good on this truck, I would say. I kinda liked this back here. And one of the cool things about it, with it being, with it having a reserve tank, when you go to fill your airbags up, this thing don't play around. It is fast. So for example, right now it looks like we got, maybe a touch over 20 pounds in the bags. And if I hit this, I mean that went up to 50 pretty much right away. You could probably hear the compressor kick on too. I mean that wasn't about a couple of seconds and it put 30 PSI in it. So usually the wireless ones that is the downside that a little bit smaller compressors and they take a little bit of time to fill up. So all that's definitely of the perks when it comes to having a bigger compressor and that reserve tank fill the air. So underneath the truck here, this is a star of the show. This is the air tank here. And this is where it's gonna store all that compressed air and be ready to either go into your bags on demand. Or we can always go plug in our air hose to the chalk and air ups and tires or whatever the case may be. So why don't we go ahead, head back there and then check it out. So at the back of the truck here, here's our air chalk. And I do wanna mention, I did upgrade ours to this style. The one it comes with is like a little schrader valve and has a different connector, but it'll still get the job done regardless. This is just some stuff we had laying around. So I figured why not utilize it. But with that said, it is gonna come with this coiled hose here. And when we plug that in, it's just like having a compressor at a shop or something. So maybe hit those wintertime months and overnight, and you lose some pressure. You can always air up your tires or even if you get a flat and you pull your spare down and your spares flat. You can always air that up. So it's actually pretty convenient to have this onboard air. You're never gonna really have to go without again, or bother to take time out of your bed or out to the gas station or anything like that. So one of the things I did notice about this setup is that the compressor is pretty loud. I mean, I'm definitely raising my voice over this to talk to you guys and that's not just 'cause I'm right next to it. Even when you're inside the truck, you can hear, but the good news is once everything fills up, it does take quite a bit of time to drain that air out if you will and make this turn back on again. So just one of the things you're gonna have to live with. You get the good performance out of it, but you are gonna have to deal with a little bit of noise. So at the end of the day, for me personally, not being too crazy about the analog stuff. And I say that really just on these newer trucks, just because the space constraints. It's actually pretty nice kit. It works really good. In this case, how we have it mounted at everything and went about as smooth as it possibly could. So really not too bad there. If it we're me though, and I was gonna buy one for my truck, I'd definitely consider the wireless one. I liked the Air Lift wireless ones. Had a lot of good luck with them. The thing is, with those though, if you want like say a reserve tank, those are dual path compressors. And so what that means is one of the past, you're gonna have to sacrifice to fill up that reserve tank. So you're not gonna be able to control your airbags independently, so left to right. Most people really don't care about that anyway, but it is something that you have to think about. Honestly myself, if I'm putting air in bags, I usually just inflate them to the same, unless you have some weird off-centered load or something like that. But that's one of the things I think about. With this setup here, you get that reserve tank and you also can still control your airbags independently. So that is something. If that's something that's a must have, definitely something to consider. Now as far as the installation goes, plan on spending a little bit of time on it, for sure. It does eat up quite a bit of your day. It's just a lot of routing and trying to figure things out and where you gonna mount things and everything else. So hopefully what I got going on here, it gets you going in the right direction and at least gives you an idea on how to do things. So hopefully, it'll save you a little bit of time and help you out. But with that said, why don't we go ahead and I'll show you how I put everything together now. To begin our installation, we're gonna be here on the passenger side of our truck just underneath the rear door. And the first thing that we're gonna do is mount up a few of our major components. So first things first, I mounted up the air tank before we actually bolt this to the frame though. It's not a bad idea just to take your fittings and put them in all of the bumps. A lot easier to do when it's on the ground and up here. So a few of them that you do need to put on will be this one here that just accepts a quarter inch airline hose. You have your pet cock here. And then over here, we're gonna have a fitting that you thread in, goes to a T, a quarter inch fitting goes into that one. And then your pressure sensor gets plugged into that T. With all these fittings, you definitely wanna use some pipe dope or pipe thread or thread sealer, whatever you got. That way we don't have to worry about air leaks. But once I have that preassembled, essentially I just bolted the tank to the frame. This will be a little tricky to see. So over here on the side of the tank, there's actually a factory bolt. I was holding a bracket up and I utilize that bolt to secure that side of our tank. That way we didn't have to deal with drilling a new hole or anything like that into the frame rail. On this side, I used a self tapping screw. This does not come in the kit. So you will have to grab one of those separately. And I simply just pre-drilled a hole into the frame and ran the self-tapping screw in there. I didn't bother putting one up top because it's really difficult to get to. And when I had them to in there, I mean, this thing is rock solid. It's not going anywhere. So really shouldn't give us any issues or have anything to worry about as far as that goes. This point, to mount up your compressor, which is this component here is simply just mounting it in front of the tank at a longer frame rail. The same deal, pre-drilled some holes, use some self-tapping screws and this thing is rock solid. With that said, you're gonna have a braided line that's coming off of your compressor. And that simply just connects to a fitting that's included, looks like this. You're gonna connect that onto the braid line. Then take a couple of inch piece of nylon air tube, plug that in and plug those in together. You're also gonna have, it's gonna be a little tricky to see, but a big coil tube like this and this is for your air filter for the compressor. And so that's just gonna plug into fitting on top of the compressor and the air filter. We'll check this out in a second. The air filter is gonna be mounted right back up in here in this area. So here's this air filter and there's a little plastic deal on it. That's already attached and it kind of ease off. And there's actually a factory hole already in this, inside of the rocker panel. And so this literally just snapped right into place and it worked out really well. It's pretty high up and it's in a spot that should stay pretty dry and not get too much weather on it. From there, we're gonna have two wires coming off our compressor, a red one and a black one. I just ran them on over this way. The black ones are ground. So I just drilled a small hole in the frame, secured that ring terminal there to the frame with a self-tapping screw. The other red wire, I simply just plugged onto one side of our pressure switch here that goes up to our air tank. Now you can grab the bundle of red wire. It's a little bit thicker wire that comes with the kit. One end you'll crimp on a spade terminal there. Just strip the wire ends, insert the insulation back, crimp that on. You have plugged that into the pressure switch. And then this wire, we need to hook up to a power source. So in our case, we're going right to the battery. You can also go to the fuse block. The choice is yours. If you go to the fuse box, this only has power when the truck's ignition on. Right to the battery, you can run it without the key and the ignition if you want. And so that's what we did today. But with that said, you just wanna avoid any hot or moving parts. Our red wires gonna just shoot right over this body mount long through here. And then it's gonna be, essentially, you're not gonna be able to see it, but you can just feed that wire underneath this tank. I believe this is the tank and run it on long through here and eventually comes out right through there. And then again, just shoots right over that body mount there. And then it goes just right up along our firewall into the engine compartment. So underneath the engine compartment here on the passenger side of our truck, our wire runs up the firewall here. And once you get to this point, I used a butt connector to attach the included fuse holder here. So you strip the ends of the insulation back, crimp it on. This one was a heat shrink one, so you use a heat gun to seal the ends. Make sure your fuse is not installed when you're doing this. But the other side, you can use a ring terminal and crimp that on, on the positive side of your battery. I loosen up that nut using a 10 millimeter, slide the ring terminal under there, tighten it down. And the fuse, as far as that goes, we're gonna wait to the very end. Once everything else has hooked up, it's the last thing we can do. We can come back here, pop this fuse in and that'll power up our system. Now we can go ahead and mount up our control system here with our gauge and our switches. So this is kind of a custom deal here, I guess you could say. A lot of times, you're not gonna mount this underneath the backseat. The problem is with these newer trucks, the dash is leather. There's so much going on. You really don't have a great spot. You could mount it like under the dash, but it's so low, your feet will kick it and everything else. So this is what we come up with here and it works just fine. You just won't be able to control it as easy as you could from just sitting in your seat. But with that said, we work with what we got here. And our case, I just used some hook and loop and it actually holds up pretty well. But I did that because that way, if you ever wanna pull his mat out or anything, it's a little bit easier too. You're not gonna have like screws and stuff that you need to run out through there and everything else. But that said, we're gonna have three fittings coming off the back. So all this will be pre-attached. You're just gonna have three lines that you need to tie into. So you're gonna have a big bundle of wire or I'm sorry, of airline tubing and split that up into thirds, more or less and cut them. And then what I did was marked the lines. It's a little hard to see here 'cause it kind of rubbed off already. But for installation purposes, so like the left side. So this one here is gonna control the left airbag over the driver's side. I just put some yellow marker on that. The right side, I put some white marker on. And then the one here in the center, this is actually gonna go to the reserve tank and I just left that one black. So that way it gives you an idea of what goes where when you're underneath the truck around this. With that said, right through here, we gotta get these lines to the outside somehow. And so I just used a, maybe a three quarter inch hole saw, something like that, drill down. Be careful though 'cause the fuel tank, in our case is below it. I mean, you got several inches, but you don't wanna get super carried away and drive right through it and hit the tank. So be very deliberate while you're doing this. But I drill that out and then I put a rubber grommet in through there, taped our lines together, plugged them on in here and just started feeding them down to the bottom side of the truck. That way, we could get them routed. Underneath the truck, here's where our hoses dropped down. So one of them is gonna go towards the front little bit. The other two are just gonna run straight back towards our airbags. We'll start with this one. This is the one that's gonna go to our air tank. So this is the line that's in the middle of our control assembly up there under our seat, if that makes sense. With that said, though, we're just gonna run this airline tube along through here. And since we need to get it over to the other side of our truck, just swing this around, put on a little piece of wire loom there just to help protect it from this metal here, zip tied it, and then I ran it on through this support tube here to the other side of our truck. So on the other side of our truck now, that airline tube comes out through our cross tube there. Runs up, just shot it up a little ways there and it comes down. There's a T here. We'll get to that in just one second, though. But this is gonna go up and get plugged into this fitting there in the tank. Now, as far as this T is concerned, this is where the fitting, so you got on the onboard air tank. So you're gonna have a fitting at the back of the truck or wherever you really wanna put it that you can plug in an air hose and get that air pressure. So that's where that pressure comes from is this T. So we're right here. We might as well take care of this too. With this line, you wanna cut it in half, put this T in, then take another piece of the line. This is maybe eight foot or something. They give you quite a bit of line. So you should be in pretty good shape as long as you plan it accordingly. But plug that in, and then this is gonna go up and run on top of our frame rail. So if you look, you can see it up through there, and it might actually be easier to get on the bottom side of our truck in the center, might get a better look at it. Now under the truck, you can see that airline tube just runs along the top of our frame rail. With anything, be sure to avoid any hot or moving parts, use zip ties along the way to keep everything secure. But right here above our air bag, I actually put the tubing into the hole in the frame rail. And so that way it's gonna continue along actually in our frame rail. So you can see it there, but it's just gonna come out the back. So I have it out right here, come down and get plugged into this fitting. And the fitting I modified a little bit. And with that said, I'll show you what it looks like out here. And then we can come back, I'll tell you what I did to make it a little bit better. So here's what I did. I'm sure you guys are probably familiar with one of these quick connects for like an air compressor. This is something I did separately. The kit comes with schrader valve deal that you can put back here. And then on the other end of the hose, they give you some type of little connector deal. I don't know, it's kinda subpar. So we decided to ditch that and go with something that's a little more familiar and we know that works really well. So this, I just fashioned a little bracket here and same deal on the back side of this. I have fitting where our airline hose plugs into. That way, on the other end of our hose, we can take the appropriate connector for our quick connect there, attach it to the hose and that'll give us a really solid connection point. Back over here on our passenger side, where our airline tube came out of our vehicle. Now we can run our two airlines and go to our airbags. So this is both sides, the right and left. And I just shot them back along through the top of our frame like the other side where it'll just continue right along up through there. You could see it there. And eventually our e-brake cable runs on along through that fuel tank in the frame rail. And so I just followed that path and went to the other side of our truck. Underneath our truck here, you can see there's our two airlines. And these just run along the top of this factory wiring here. It's a little tricky see. Right up along through there. One of them is gonna come out right here and get hooked at T, which we'll get to that in a minute. But the other one's gonna run along through here, somewhere this mass of airline tube with it. It's this one here So you could see my white mark there. That's how I kept track of what sides what. So that's gonna be for our right side or our passenger side. So it comes along through there and here is where our T's in. So where it's teeing in is the manual inflation valve. So originally our airbags just ran up through here and we had our inflation valves going through our license plate. And so that's what that line is that your teeing into. Keep in mind when you're cutting into this line, if you got a bunch of air pressure in there in your bags, I mean, there has to go somewhere. So it's gonna blast out. So probably a good idea to let the air out before you do this. The other airline for the left side or the yellow side, the one that we marked. It was gonna come out right through there and we did the same deal. This is the original line that was for our manual inflation valve or the bags, cut that and teed right in. And doing it this way will allow you to maintain those manual inflation valves and still be able to control your bags using the compressor. So at this point, everything's hooked up. So you want to put the fuse into the fuse holder, your compressor will kick on and it'll start compressing air. It'll run for a few minutes. It's nothing out of the ordinary there, 'cause it has to fill up the tank and the whole system and everything else. So once it stops, probably not a bad idea to throw some air in your bags and just have the whole system pressurized. And what we're gonna do is check for leaks. And there's a couple of ways you can do it. One of them being, you can listen for them. If you have a pretty big leak and you're in a pretty quiet room, not very hard to figure out. And you can also use another method along with that one. Just take some soapy water and actually spray down all the fittings and what you're looking for when you spray it down is for bubbles to start to form and constantly form. It has some bubbles, that's normal. But if you have them just growing and growing and keep coming, then you got a leak. And whenever you have a leak, take the air out of the system, pull the line out of the quick connect or the fitting, recut the line, plug it back in. If you have a screw in tight fitting, maybe tighten it down a little bit more and go through that process again. And that'll finish up our look at and our installation of the Air Lift QuickShot Air Compressor System with the reserve tank on our 2017 GMC Sierra 2500..