Tuesday, Dec 17, 2013 at 23:07
Where did you get that information from? 30 to 40 psi is more than enough pressure to cause major problems. In your case though, if you are driving a Troopy, the support given to the chassis by the body, may prevent it from bending. You will still be slamming the chassis down onto the hardening bags and sending higher shock loads into the chassis, diff housing, wheel studs and bearings. I have seen cracked chassis, broken diff housings on Landcruisers and plenty of broken wheel studs. Heavier springs are also good at cracking spring hangers.
I have studied all the information that I have been able to find on air bags ever since I bought a cab/chassis 4wd ute seven years ago and became aware of the chassis bending problem. I have saved a few photos off the net of bent chassis cars that clearly show they don't have air bags but I have also noticed that the vast majority of bent chassis cars do have them. When you look at the type of spring they are and how they work, it is easy to see why.
Have a look at the four links below. Read the last post on the thread on the first link. It gives you a good idea of how an air bag works.
The second link lists the qualifications of the man who wrote it. It is hard to argue that he does not know how a spring works.
The third link is an article that he wrote for Caravan and Motorhome magazine. Part of it gives you a brief insight into how complex car suspensions can be. It is not a bad idea to find out exactly how yours works and what you are doing to it before you start changing the design.
The
forth link shows a DVD that I bought earlier this year. Stop the short sample DVD on the site at the 15 second point. You will see that the extra cab with the camper has a bent chassis. The car looked ok at the start of their trip along the Gunbarrel Hwy from
Giles weather station. The owner added a little more air to its air bags a few hundred ks later. The chassis soon started bending. They removed the
camping body and wheels somewhere up near the top of the
Gary Hwy. The chassis was kinked badly right at the rear edge of the air bag mounting point. They removed the bags then had to unload a lot of the heavier items in the camper onto a Cruiser ute in the convoy. They were lucky it was only about half loaded. They then drove the car back to
Warburton..
I was told later by the people who made that DVD that the camper was left at
Warburton and the car was taken back to Qld for repairs. The car was then sold and replaced by a larger ute which was then driven back to
Warburton to pick up the camper. That all adds up to a lot of inconvenience and expense then you have the added cost of altering the
suspension design in the first place..
This is just another example of buying the wrong car and trying to make it do something that it was not designed to do.
My ute has been driven over a lot of Outback roads, including the Gunbarrel, in stock standard form without any problems at all. I have never had it up to maximum weight let alone overloaded. If I wanted to carry more gear, I would build a little trailer that was no bigger than it had to be.
http://www.caravanersforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=44107http://www.caravanandmotorhomebooks.com/about_the_author.htmlhttp://www.caravanandmotorhomebooks.com/pdf/vehicle_dynamics_complete.pdfhttp://www.lifestylevideos.com.au/Desert_Highways-dvd.html
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