anybody done this or thought about it? after riding in my buddies F550 with the air ride its soo much nicer of a ride and it makes it easier to hitch up the trailer and then no buying $1500 electric jack for the trailer. I was looking at the kelderman but its not a full air and it wont work with the body i have on the truck now...

 

Ahh yes, air ride.
Springs
Sure wish I could afford them.

 

thats why i was looking at building it. it was $3000 for the kit on my buddies truck.

its like $400 in parts.....

 

I am going to put four link suspension with air bags on my superduty, but it is going to be huge 35+ inches of lift and 54 inch tires, It would be easy to airide your truck just build the links with the truck on the leafs then pull the springs out and install the airbags. I say do it

 

Sounds like a great idea! Let us know how it goes.

 

I have been thinking about it. I was thinking I would build a set of trailing arms out of 3x2x1/4 use a stock spring eye bushing at the front and extend the rear past the rear end tube and mount the bag to the rear and go with some real over kill on the bags 7 or 10 thousand pound bag and set up a york a/c pump as a compresor like this http://chrisb.users.superford.org/Projects/York_Compressor_Modification.html

THen there are the 3 air pressure gaugesleft, right and tank 4 vavles left and right fill and blow off .some kind of a tank ,a presure switch for the clutch on the compresor so I guess I have put a little thought into it

 

im gonna stayat basically the same hieght. getting ideas from keldermans website. gotta find out which bags i need is the biggest thing right now. I figure the cost of the electric jack alone will offset alot of the cost. i haul soo much i get tired of cranking the dumb jack. hoping to possibly do it at the same time i do the dana 60 this month. going to texas making 2 round trips hoping to have it done by then, even thinking about air in the front. might go air in the front later might be too much project right now.

 

im gonna use 2" 1.20 wall dom tubing. and have a ladder bar setup with a track bar. use the 1500lb tapered bag that is capable of 10" of travel. optimum hieght is 12" max is 15" min is 5" so i can put it where the existing leafs are no problem. im just going to use polyurethane on all the joints. i was thinking of using Jonny joints the polyurethane cusioned hiems made by currie enterprizes, i put them on my land crusier when i built the coil over suspension on that. but there $50 a piece x 8.......poly will be just fine....dont need that much articulation out of it. was thinking about using firestone's leveling system, but i dont know what thats going to cost so probably just do it the simple way. you can buy the valve sets from firestone and have them switch controlled and like lager said need 3 gauges so you can go back to settings you had before when the trailer was on, off, loaded, unloaded. Mcmaster-carr and grainger also have the valve sets that would work and they run about $100 for a valve body that would work for this application. Lager do you have more info on the YORK setup? i would have to get my intercooler in before doing it to make sure but theres still plenty of room in the OBS trucks.

 

On my l8000 ford truck it has a valve that controls the ride height and the side to side lean of the truck, the valve mounts on a cross member and has one link on each side of the axle when the truck is loaded and sags the valve automaticly airs up the bags, if the truck is loaded heavy to one side it adds air to that side, when I put the outriggers down and the axle droops it lets air out .It is adjustable by lengthing or shortning the links, You could probably get one from a salvage yard for cheap, then when you hook on a trailer the bags would automaticly air up to your preset ride height and to dump the air to hook on to a trailer you just need a tag axle control for a (spring up) tag they cost around $100 new.

 

nice im gonna look for that, would be less than the full computer system from firestone. im gonna look for that and ask the guys at the big rig shop monday, thanks jesse

 

There is a guy on the RV.net site that has built two air ride systems from scratch , you may want to do a search on that site for imput .

 

bare back here is some more info http://www.onboardair.com/ on the york compressor i think this a good way to go for full air ride. Also check these rod ends http://www.speedwaymotors.com/xq/asp...qx/product.htm are they what you are talking about they are less than $50 each steven

 

I built a 3-link ladder bar setup for my '73 2x four months ago. I used 10 feet of 1.5" .120 DOM tubing ($135) and the Firestone ride-rite airbag setup($185). I used Polyurethane bushings throughout (Energy Suspension KIT for the truck $36) The ladder bars attach directly to the factory front leaf spring hangers and the airbag brackets that come with the RideRite kit work perfectly to suspend the rear end. I incorporated a used front track bar off of a Super Duty also (FREE). I guess the reason I'm just using 'helper springs' to suspend the rear is because I don't need much height from the airbags and the bags and brackets are rated for 5000 lbs. and the entire truck doesn't weigh that much.

Granted, with this setup, there is not much room for height adjustment. But the benefits are MANY. This is a lowered pickup that still gets used to haul my motorcycle , so either with no load or 600 lbs. in the box, I can have it sit level and that is a plus. The poly. bushings for the original leaf springs fit perfectly in the tubing and the whole system cost about the same as a new set of custom leaf springs. It's entirely bolt-on and doesn't require any permanent modifications to install.....I'm thinking of making a couple setups and selling them. It took an entire day and a half to build the brackets and whatnot, but it was well worth the time....AIRBAGS ROCK.

If it didn't take so much time and money to do it to a lifted truck, I'd use bags on the monster truck.

Cody

 

lagerhead,

too bad your on the other coast could just take a weekend and build both trucks at once...thoose hiems will work great. the jonny joints are rebuildable but for the price of thoose that will work great.

im thinkin i should have enough travel out of the existing bag thats in there. it has to be able to handle the amount of travel the truck has now. the amound of travel is going to stay the same also. if the bag gets normally run in the 60% hieght range and just say i have 10" travel that puts normal at 6" so when i let all the air out of the bag it should drop 6" and that should be plenty to get under the trailer and lift it back up.

i never got out to look where i cuold cram that york in the rain never stopped yesterday and i didnt want to take a muddy truck into the garage. i think if i moved my alternator to the lower position then i would mount the york up high.

cleatus you have any pics of the airride on your 73??

 

jake , have you thought about selling the truck and building an arc ?? I like the idea of moving the alternator to the lower mounting ..... That should give you enough room for a compresor .