Friday, Feb 03, 2017 at 23:23
I know they have been around for a very long time and they certainly work
well when they are part of the original equipment it whatever they are being used in. Race cars would be one of the many examples.
We see them today in new cars but each design has millions of dollars of research and development behind it by car manufacturer's chassis design engineers. That is totally different to buying a few hundred dollars worth of them and installing them in another multi dollar chassis/
suspension design that has not been designed to have them added to it.
It is hard to blame car owners who have damaged their cars with them when there are small companies selling them and praising their benefits as
well as an endless number of people on net forums telling others that it is alright to use them and they do a great job.
So far on the net I have only seen one person who does know how they work say they can be useful in one particular situation. That was Collyn Rivers about four years ago when he said they can be useful for softening the ride on an empty ute but then stressed they should not be used to lift sagging suspensions or carry higher loads.
The pressures required for high loads and the exponential compression characteristics of air bags is like sitting the chassis directly on oversize bump rubbers. Those rubbers have to bring a fast falling chassis to a very rapid but slightly cushioned stop. It is either that or it slams into the axle housing with a hell of a metal to metal bang.
Bags become
the springs in cases like this and, given enough pressure, they can easily be like rocks by the time they are around 70% compressed. When that happens, the chassis stops instantly on top of the bags while the rest of it behind the bags keeps going down without anything on its far end to support it. No wonder so many have bent.
You always see bent chassis cars with the bend right on the top of the bags while those without them bend further forward near the front spring hangers. You also see a lot more bent air bag equipped cars than those with just heavier springs.
As long as we have companies telling customers their standard suspensions are rubbish and their springs or air bags can lift the the car and enable it to carry heavier loads in the bush of
all places, we will continue to see many broken cars.
You can't always blame the owners for it.
You also have another issue with leaf spring utes. When they are fully loaded with the load correctly distributed, the rear springs are supposed to be flat or very close to it. The front eye will be down at axle level or lower while the rear shackles will be up much higher.
When the car leans into a corner, the spring will compress even further on the outside of the corner while the other one will have weight taken off it. That changes the angle of the axle in relation to the centre line of the car and assists in cornering stability but that is another story for another day.
If you have the thing jacked up with aftermarket springs or air bags, that vital stability assisting feature will be stuffed up.
That does not help one little bit when you have a 3000 kg caravan on the back.
The trick is don't play around with car
suspension designs unless you know exactly how they work and what gains and losses your alterations are going to give you.
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