Suspension problem, issue with Ram 1500 truck 2 inch leveling spacer. Bilstein 6112 adjustable strut up grade.
Okay hi everybody and welcome to my channel uh today i want to show you uh a couple of things that i’ve had with my suspension some of the issues that i’ve had and some of you may be doing this too and purchasing these leveling kits for your pickup and thinking that they’re a good idea and that’s what i thought it was about six years ago and now that i’m taking
This apart i’m seeing some of the issues and why i was having the problems for the past couple of years so some of the issues that i’ve had is that it’s made a lot of squeaking noise um it’s kind of had a vibration in the front of the truck even though the tires are balanced and now that i take this strut apart i can see why i had those problems so if you come in
A little closer here so this is a spacer that you can purchase to level your vehicle out and this gave the front end of this ram about a two inch lift and the reason why this isn’t a good idea is because one it over travels your control arms so it puts more pressure on the ball joints a two inch lift isn’t that big of a deal but if you go over three inches then
You’re gonna have some major problems with the the ball joints so i figured this would be okay but now i’ll show you why this isn’t so if you come in here so after i take my spacer off of there this is the top hat of the strut and there’s a rubber bushing right here and i can actually remove that which i really shouldn’t be able to remove that like that and you
Can see how beat up it is you can see how there’s metal showing on the side and you can see all the grime and dirt that’s down inside there but also what i want to show you is on the spacer you can see all this wear right here where it’s been rubbing and this isn’t really set up correctly whoever makes these spacers never really should have made the hole quite
This big because this should actually be sandwiched down in here the original factory plate in here if you want to come on over so where the strut attaches right here there’s a hole in it and that hole is about half the size of what this is and because this is so large let’s go back over and i’ll show you on the rubber boot that hole is smaller than the top of
This and it’s designed to sandwich this down in there and support this well when you put these spacers on there this hole is so big that this rubber boot can actually push itself up into this hole much farther than what it would factory and so you end up with probably about an inch of suspension that isn’t even being controlled by the actual shock absorber so it’s
Actually just being bounced by the spring and you can see because of that it’s a lot of wear this is all torn up and this causes a lot of vibration with this type of a setup so really to do this the correct way i know this is the cheaper way but to do this the correct way oh one other thing i want to show you is if i pull the top hat off this is supposed to be a
Round hole and you can see that it is all ovaled out and you can actually see when i remove the spring getting a little closer here with you you can see all the wear on the shaft right here and that was wearing right up against here and so all the squeaking that i was getting is coming from this riding on that piece of metal and also uh up into that aluminum
Spacer so in order to do this correctly you really should get a different shock absorber that’s made for a two inch lift and so if we take a look so this is a new shock absorber or strut because it has the coil on it but this is actually extended a little bit longer than the factory probably about an inch longer than the factory uh strut is so that will give you
Some ride height and also you have these collars on it so this gives you adjustability to pre-load the spring the two-inch uh lift and then this will just come down under like that so the proper way to do it is to do this eliminate that spacer so this can ride back into its original place and should give you a much better ride quality
Transcribed from video
Don’t use leveling spacers for your Ram 1500 Truck, get a lifted strut instead. By Stanley Townsdin
