Installed Bilsteins....what a difference !

[damon]

I don't know if all Ram's have rolled out of the factory with as terrible of shocks as mine, but I would have sworn that the rebound damping valves were not installed in the front shocks on my truck. I knew by day 2 that shocks were the first thing to come, and boy was it worth it.

I got the HD Bilsteins from ORW at the TDR price and they were on my doorstep 2 days later. I had my 10 year old son help me install them right after the hour that we spent on the Westin nerfbars (another solid product), and I figured I'd share how it went.

We started with the back shocks, since they are, or should be the easiest. Drivers side shock was done in 10 minutes, peice of cake. But the passenger side was a little more difficult. First, I had to drop the 4 nuts on the bottom of the sway bar, easy enough then to get the bottom bolt out. But on the top of the shock, right were I would have put the extension and socket on my 1/2" air gun, the installer who did my 5er hitch had welded a 4" wide bracket to the outside of the frame - which blocked my access to the bolt. You can't work from the inside nut, because they are tabbed, so I had no choice but to use the breaker bar and ratchet between the top of the frame and the bed, which allowed 1 click per effort type of removal - about 35 minutes just to get that darn bolt out. So the back shocks took over an hour, but should have been 15 minutes.

The front shocks were far less eventful. I used a bottle jack to lift the truck by the frame (you don't want to fight these Bilsteins compression) and removed the bottom bolt, then top nut, then the towers, and put back in reverse. The only gotcha was that the bottom shock eyelets are too wide, so I grinded off a little on each one to the point that I could just barely wedge the eyelet into the bracket, then lined it up with a drift pin. You don't need to grind much, only about 1mm if I was to guess. Front shocks took about 1 hour to install, all of this work being done with 3/8 drive air ratchet and 1/2 impact.

Now, the result.......night and day. I was able to test the shocks just yards from my house. The local speed bumps are the variety that are about 8" tall, and 3' wide. Just perfect to throw that heavy Cummins upward and bottom the front suspension on the trip back down - with the stock shocks at approx 20 mph. With the Bilsteins - no way, nice smooth control. I don't think that half of the travel was used now that the springs are controlled with good dampening. And everything else I've encountered is handled with equal finesse, from the hard turns to the washboard freeways here in So Cal, the truck simply handles and rides better everywhere.

This has got to be the best $250 you can spend on our trucks, but of course that will be arguable.