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When building the pre-runner or race vehicle the suspension is one of the biggest factors of how your vehicle will handle and how fast you can go. With the right springs and shocks you will be faster and more reliable.

This month you may learn about springs and basic suspension set up for the off-roader.

• What is the purpose of the vehicle? Pre-Runner, Daily Driver, Race Car, or the ever loved "my wife’s truck"

• What type of driving will the vehicle be used for 80% of the time?

• Get the vehicle weight. Make sure to get the front wheel weight and the rear wheel weight separate. Anyone making your springs will want to know this.

• How much time will the vehicle spend airborne in its natural lifetime (before a total rebuild of all the stuff you broke)?

• What type of balance do you want the vehicle to have? Ride height and wheel travel.

Now if you take the first question and answer it without lying to yourself or wife you will be much happier. No one will be scored on this section of the test. If you plan on having a daily driver you should make this your primary concern and be sure to tell your spring builder that you plan to drive it on the street allot..... You will be much happier if you do this, than if you convince yourself of the famed "I really want a race car so I will make my daily driver ride like crap to make up for it".

I would never put a race series spring on my wife’s truck or the truck I drive all the time to work. The spring rate that I like on the race truck is way to stiff for the everyday. In every case you will want to choose a spring rate based on the weight of the vehicle. This relationship is very important.

If you call National Spring for your set up Ron Norton will ask you what the weight is before he will begin on your project. The same goes if you call Jeff over at Deaver Spring. Both of these guys build quality leaf springs and I have run them on our race vehicles in the past.

The next question was what type of driving will you do. This whole thing will blend together as you can see. The type of driving is similar to what is the purpose of the vehicle but not exactly the same. Some people will build a pre-runner and never take it to Barstow and count the number of minutes it spent in the air. Other people will take the same truck and see how long it takes to break a spindle. So if you plan on spending 80% of the time on light dirt roads in Mexico then set the vehicle up for it. If you plan on doing some flight training in your truck than you had better plan for that and get a stiffer set up. This is where the next thing comes into place.

Now you have written down what you want to do with the vehicle ( did I mention to get a note pad to make plans on, well I should have) Next comes the weight of your truck or whatever. Obviously a full size F-150 will weigh more than a normal Ranger will. Nothing will weigh more than our new F-250 so don’t worry. With that in mind it makes sense that you will need a heavier rate of spring for the bigger heavier vehicle. Again since so much of this is user preference you will have to learn some of this through trial and error. On our Ranger we went through about four sets of rear springs before we got the right set up. Like I mentioned before if you plan on installing an altimeter in your truck and spending allot of time in the air you will want heavier springs in the long run. The drawback from this is the heavier the spring rate the harder it is on other components.

Shackles and bushings take abuse much faster from a heavier spring. Things like coil towers on Rangers and F-150’s will eventually show ware in long term abuse with heavy spring rates. You can beef up some of these components when building the vehicle and in our racing program we beefed up everything the rules would allow us to. Additional support on areas that the spring mounts to will prove to be your best bet.

The last thing on my list was the "Balance" this to me is the trade off where you choose how much up-travel and droop you want the vehicle to have. Many people have different opinions of this. I think it works best if you have more droop than up travel. This goes against the grain for most of the lift guys.

The thing to remember is the higher the truck sits on the springs then the feel of tipping over also gets greater. We had our truck set up for about 2/3 droop and about 1/3 up-travel at ride height. Some of the more stock vehicles are harder to get this balance and you will have to look more for a 50/50 split. Most pre-runners and daily drivers will love the 50/50 split program.

The reason you want more droop is simple in concept. When you are traveling across the rough terrain most of the roughness comes from holes not bumps. Bumps are just the high side of a hole. Most bumps start off as a hole when you hit it. So what you want is for the wheel to be able to drop down into part of the hole and absorb some of the bump without the whole vehicle dropping into the hole with the wheel. When the whole vehicle drops in the hole it transfers more weight into the suspension and bounces back harder on the other side.

You will also feel less comfortable each time the whole car reacts to a hole or bump instead of just the wheel. Look at the guys that go fast the tires are flying around like crazy and the body of the truck is smooth.

Now for the part you read this for; When we first set up our race truck we started out with a rear spring rate of about 80 pounds per inch in spring rate. This was way too soft for abuse. It felt really nice when we were on the dirt roads and less rough areas, but as soon as we got into the rough stuff the truck would bottom out even with the shocks completely closed down.

So we went up in spring rate on the rear several times until we ended up about 105 pounds per inch in spring rate. With this rate on the truck we could then adjust our shocks up or down for fine tuning and make it handle great. Our truck also was a Super Cab Ranger and it weighed 4300 pounds in race trim. This if you don’t know is pretty heavy for a Ranger.

On the front end of the truck we went through similar changes. We started out with a superlift coil spring for a four inch lift kit. This spring was terrible. The spring would loose ride height or settle about two or three inches in a single run.

This spring proved to be too soft as well, so we went to National Spring for some new coils. Ron set us up with a coil that was just as long as we needed for the wheel travel we had in the front but a much more consistent spring rate. The spring that we got from National did not settle like the others ( hence quality ).

The spring we started with from Ron was about a 500 lb/in rate coil spring. This was not bad but as the truck got faster and the rear springs got better we upped the rate to about a 620 in the end. With that spring rate we could adjust the shocks up or down and tune it in so the front and rear worked together.

In closing I will mention that I like my springs a little on the heavy side. Most people don’t use them as heavy as we did. The other thing to take in to consideration is you can do so much of the control with the shocks now that you may only have to get the spring rate close and then get a good shock and adjust the shock until you get it right. On our truck we had only one shock per wheel, granted it was a three inch by-pass shock but still only one per wheel. If we can make one per wheel work so can you.

If you can afford it get a large body by-pass shock. This will make the set up so much easier for the average guy. In our shop when ever we help set up a truck, we always go out with the owner of the vehicle and help to set the shocks. We have found that with some help it goes so much faster and the customer is happier in the long run.

Don’t even try to skimp on the springs. The add-a-leaf kits are ok but you will be happier if you spend the money and get a set built. Leaf springs start at about $500.00 for a set and go up from there if you add goodies to your setup.

Coils are a bit cheaper and you can get the good ones for only a little more than the crappy lift coils that come in the kits. Don’t be a tight ass spend some money on the springs, if you do you will only have to do it once in most cases. Buy the cheap ones and you can bet on buying them again one day.

Confucius say "man who buy good spring once may have less money today, but will not pay for same crap twice"