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When she's fully loaded (with 23 ft travel trailer, motorbike in bed and boat on top) she rides just fine.
When empty, she's got the suspension of a hay-wagon....I can run over a dime and tell you if it's heads or tails...
Not really. These are pickup trucks that are meant to tow/be loaded down. The suspensions are stiff by design.
You can lower your tire pressures when empty, that helps a lot of people with their ride quality...but make sure you air them back up when you get ready to load up.
You can chase shocks and springs looking for a lighter, softer ride, and eventually achieve it...at the expense of your towing/hauling capabilities. You can add in air bags to recover that, but you've always got to leave a little air in them or they could get damaged, and you have to remember to air them back up when you load up/hitch up.
Overall, it is what it is, there's not really a happy medium.
There is a way to have a good ride loaded and unloaded,,, but its not cheap.
Obviously leaf springs can't change their spring rate on demand (they're just a piece of metal after all) , but airbags can. Some of the newer trucks use a very light spring and an airbag to maintain load carry capacity. If doing a setup like this with leaf springs, you'd also need some sort of anti-wrap bar as light leaf springs will twist under acceleration. Adjustable valving shocks would also be needed to take full advantage of the variable spring rate air suspension offers and of course you'd need some form of onboard air to adjust the pressure in the bags with.
So if you want to eat your cake and have it too, you can,,, its just gonna cost you a few thousand dollars worth of suspension modifications. Up to you to determine if the benefit is worth the cost.
...
The easiest, fastest, and most effective way to improve ride quality in an empty pickup... is also the cheapest.
No drilling, cutting, or welding is required.
Just put weight in the bed.
It's that simple.
This isn't intended to "sandbag" any of the cool sounding aftermarket suspension products suggested... but it kind of does anyway... because Ford suspension engineers have told me directly that they designed the suspension (and driveline pinion angles) to be optimal with the truck at XX% of GVWR (I have since forgotten the exact percentage number, but it was nowhere near empty tare weight, and it wasn't 100% loaded either.)
In different trucks over the years, I have used a steel plate as a bed mat, tractor plates, an auxiliary fuel tank (added 800 lbs), gravel bags, and sand bags for ballast weight when not towing or hauling.
Obviously, with tractor weights, you will want a way to retain such plates to keep them from flying forward when the truck itself is suddenly stopped by head on collision, but sand bags which are readily removeable are an easier and safer solution.
One can even put the bags in a truck bed mounted tool box to further contain them. Wouldn't that be a humorous surprise for the parking lot thieves at Home Depot? Set up a third brake light camera to capture their reaction after breaking in to the tool box, and throw the clip up on YouTube for some clicks.
I have driven bare F-550 cab chassis trucks, with much stiffer 11 leaf suspension than an F-250, across several states with sand bags strapped to the frame, aft of axle, to provide good ride quality and traction.
