Stability Plus Stabilizer Helper Springs Installation - 2019 GMC Sierra 2500

How to Install the Stability Plus Stabilizer Helper Springs on a 2019 GMC Sierra 2500

Hey everyone. Shane here with etrailer.com. Today I have a 2019 GMC Sierra 2500, and I'm gonna be installing the Stability Plus Stabilizer. Now before we install our new stabilizers I want to go over a couple of things with you. Our normal ride height in the back was at 43 inches. In the front it was 39 and a half.

And when we add weight onto it, what it does is it drops the back end of the vehicle. So now that we have weight, we're gonna go ahead and measure our back and our front again and see what it did. We have approximately 1200 pounds in the back. We're gonna measure from the ground, straight up the center here. ANd we're actually at 40 and a half, so it actually dropped three inches in the back.

Let's go to the front and measure that and see if it did anything. In the front it looks like it only raised it a quarter of an inch, which is not a whole lot, but if we're putting more weight on the truck, what happens is, as it pulls the back down, it raises the front up. And when it pulls the back down, whatever your springs can't handle your axle's gonna have to make up for it. So it's really putting a lot of stress on your rear end. When it raises the front, what that does, it makes your steering light, it's gonna affect your tire wear and it's gonna affect your headlight aim.

It's also gonna affect your braking, because you don't have as much tire touching the concrete or touching the ground. So it's really unsafe to drive like that. Adding the stabilizers, what that's gonna do, it's gonna bring our vehicle back up when we're carrying weight on the back or hauling a trailer. It's gonna bring our front end back down, aim our headlights normal, give us normal steering, normal braking and normal tire wear. Overall, it's gonna give us a much more comfortable ride.

If you own a large truck like this, you probably do a lot of hauling. You've also probably noticed with a load on the back of the truck dips. Well that raises the front end and it makes it unsafe driving conditions. Uneven tire wear, braking is gonna be affected, Steering's gonna be affected and also your headlights are gonna aim up. When pulling a trailer, you've probably noticed that you may get a lot of sway in it. A load in the back, you get a lot of body roll. The stabilizer is going to minimize your body roll, and it's gonna eliminate sway in the trailer. You've probably noticed that a lot of people with these bigger trucks, probably add airbags onto their vehicles, and that's to, again, minimize their body roll and to get the back of their vehicle back up. Keep in mind with airbags, you have to maintain air in them. Also they are gonna be made out of rubber. So over time they can start to deteriorate. Once you're done pulling whatever you're pulling, you're gonna have to let that air out or else it's gonna make for a rough ride. With these, once they're installed, you're really not gonna have to do anything. We're not gonna have to make any adjustments like you do with your airbags. Keep in mind, we're gonna have three adjustments here that you can make if you need to. These are for heavy loads or this hole's for heavy loads. This is for medium loads. This is for light loads, Depending on how you carry your equipment or however you carry your loads, once you get that bolt in, you're not gonna have to move it unless you really want to. So again, once you get it installed, it's gonna be ready to go. Let's kind of go over how your springs work if you didn't have a suspension enhancement. You put a load on here. What happens is the back of the spring flexes. Well, if you notice that our spring, our axle our spring goes behind the axle to in front of the axle. As the back of our spring flexes down when we have a load, what it does is it pulls the front of the spring up. This is what's gonna raise the front of your vehicle. So how the new spring works is when you add weight on the back as the back of the spring, your factory spring, flexes down, it's gonna pull down here. That is gonna cause the stabilizer to react, to keep the back of your truck up and stable. So now let's talk about sway. Without any enhancement, what happens when you get a trailer sway When the trailer is put on the ball, as the trailer moves to the outside of the vehicle, what happens is it pulls on the ball. As it pulls on the ball, what it does is it wants to dip that corner of the truck. By the time your spring reacts to push the back of the truck back up, it's gonna push the trailer back over the other side. That's where you start getting your sway effects. With these, this is going to eliminate the sway, because as the trailer wants to move outside and pull down on the side of the truck, that's when that spring is going to react to keep the side of the truck up. That's gonna keep your trailer tracking straight behind you. Another great thing about having these that I never would have expected is they're gonna eliminate the need for weight distribution. If you don't know what weight distribution is, what it is, is when you put a trailer on the ball of your truck, it's gonna dip the back of your truck. What you want is you want to get the back of your truck back up. So weight distribution, what it does, is it pushes the weight back on the trailer to get the back of your truck up. This is gonna eliminate the need for setting up the weight distribution. Because if you set it up, it usually takes about 20 minutes to get it installed, before you can even take off for your trip. With these, it's gonna eliminate that because as I mentioned, the spring's gonna react depending on your load to keep the back of your truck up. Keeping the back of your truck up is gonna push the weight back on the trailer. And when it comes to hauling fifth wheels or goosenecks, you may have felt the effects of the chucking. What chucking is, is as the trailer hits, it kind of moves the truck a little bit. It kind of makes your ride uncomfortable. Adding these is going to minimize how much chucking you get when hauling that fifth wheel or gooseneck. We're gonna have reinforced steel shackle bolts, which is gonna make the bolts very strong. And you'll notice that they're greasable. So they're really gonna last you, pretty much, as long as you have the truck. Now that we've gone over some of the features, let's take our truck outside and add some weight to it. We've done some previous testing on the suspension without any enhancement. We're gonna use the same weight and test it with our new springs installed. We're gonna go ahead and take our measurements again, to see where we're at. Remember our normal ride height was at 43 inches. When we added the weight before our springs we're installed, we dropped it down to 40 and a half. So it lost three inches. That raised our front end a quarter of an inch. We have these set on the medium because our customer doesn't really do a whole lot of heavy load, or heavy hauling. Again, this is about 1200 pounds. So we're gonna see what this will do. So we'll take our measurement, ground, center of the wheel, behind the wheel well. We're actually at 41 and a half inches. So again, heavier the load, we can change where our shackle bolt goes in to make that spring react quicker. So back up here at the front, normal ride height was 39 and a half. We're at 39 and three quarters. So we're up a quarter of an inch. Now we've got ourselves balanced out a little bit better. Let's go ahead and take it back out on our test course and see how they perform. Now we're here on our test course. We're gonna go over our speed bumps and see how these new springs react. One thing I'm noticing right away is before we had the springs on with the weight in the back, the back of the truck, after you go over a speed bump, what it does, is it kind of bounces a couple times, and it kind of almost feels like it's bottoming out. With these installed, it's not doing the bouncing effect. It bounces once, and that spring is correcting that weight, the push, that weight pushing down on the back of the truck. So it really makes the ride much more comfortable. Now we're gonna head over to our slalom course and see how much body roll we get. Really not getting a whole lot here. Not near as much as we we're before we had them on. Let's see if we can go a little bit faster. A little bit bigger turns. I think these are really, I'm really impressed by them. I think are doing a great job with this amount of weight back here. We're really not getting a whole lot of body roll. Again, which is gonna make the ride much more comfortable. We're not gonna be whitening up on the steering wheel when we're turning corners or hauling stuff. Whether it's a trailer or something in the back of the truck. Now I've taken this out with the springs installed. I've also taken them out and tested it without any weight. 'Cause I was curious about how the it's gonna affect the ride being installed, and honestly, without any weight on, you can't even tell they're on there. So I think they do a great job there also. These stabilizers are gonna work with half ton, three quarter ton and one ton trucks. If you own a dually, I apologize, but these are not gonna work on your vehicle. Installation process, pretty simple, straightforward. You can do it in your garage. Let's go ahead and walk through the installation now. It's gonna make it a little bit easier if we remove the wheel from each side to get your stabilizer installed. Next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna remove this spring clamp right here. We're gonna use a nine sixteenth wrench or socket. And there's a nut on the inside. We'll remove that. Keep in mind everything we do on one side, we're gonna do the same thing on the other. Next thing we need to do is, we need to cut this bracket off. Then we're gonna take and we're gonna grind the rivet head flat. Because when we put our spring on, we want it to be able to roll freely. I'm gonna use a cutting wheel. You can use a die grinder if you have one. Whatever means you have to get that cut off and flattened down. Next we're gonna take our spring, You're gonna have a rubber boot end like this. It's gonna have an allen head bolt in it. We're gonna put it right over this end. Line the bolt up with that hole. Six millimeter allen wrench. And then it gets a lock washer and a nut on the bottom. We'll tighten it into place. Half inch wrench. And again, six millimeter allen wrench. What we're gonna do, we're gonna set our spring in place like this and take the U bolt, go over the top like that. I have a large bracket, looks like this. It's gonna go on the bottom. Put that on, lock washer and flat washer. It is gonna come with an extra flat washer if needed. We're not gonna tighten these down. We're just gonna get it to where it holds it in place. Next we're gonna have two brackets, look like this. You notice there's a single hole on one end, three holes at the other. You want that single hole to be at the top. Bolt with a zerk fitting, two plastic washers and the nut. We're gonna take our bolt, slide it through one of the brackets. Put on the plastic washer. We're gonna slide it through the top. On the opposite side, we're gonna put on a plastic washer, bracket, and then the nylon lug nut. Now we're not gonna be tightening anything down just yet. Next we'll install our bottom one. You're gonna slide your bolt in. You want to make sure your zerk fitting's facing out. Then you're gonna put on your washer. You're gonna have a sleeve, slide it on, followed by a washer. And then the other side we'll add on a nylon lug nut. So what we want is we want this bracket to be as close to a 90 as possible. You want to make sure that you're on the outside edge of this lower flat spring and not in between. You can adjust it one way or the other to get this bracket to move. Now that we've got ours set in place, we can go ahead and start tightening everything down. We're gonna start with these. When we tighten these down, you want to make sure that we're not over tightening them. We want to make sure that this is gonna be able to move, and this sleeve right here is able to roll, because as the spring flattens out, it needs to be able to roll on that. I'm gonna use two wrenches to tighten these down. We're gonna use 15 sixteenths on the nut side, 13 sixteenths on the head side of the bolt. And we'll come back with our 15 sixteenths socket. And we're gonna tighten these down. You want to make sure you're doing these back and forth. Don't just tighten one down and then go to the other. You wanna make sure you're doing them even. You want to make sure you're not over-tightening these. You just want to make sure that that lock washer is flat. Last step in our installation is to make sure you grease your two bolts on each side. What you want to see, is a little bit of grease coming out here like this. That way it's filling this hole inside here and the hole inside of that tube. Once you get your bolts greased, repeat the process on the other side, reinstall your wheel. Don't forget to torque down your wheel bolts and you're ready to go. That's gonna do it for our look at and installation on these Stability Plus Stabilizers on your 2019 GMC Sierra 2500..