Down Travel Notes.

February 10, 2016

A forum member asked me about the front down travel with my suspension setup. When I got home after work earlier today I pulled the floor jack and measuring tape out and took some measurements, I was interested myself to see how much extended travel my custom King Off-Road Front Coilovers gave me:

First, the baseline – with the truck on a flat surface (important to note that my sway bar is removed here) I measured the gap between the center-top of the tire to the center (highest point) of the front fender.

Fender gap to tire, at rest.
Actual gap measurement.

So the “static” fender gap came out to 6-7/8”. Next I put the floor jack under the frame right behind the front-left wheel and jacked the truck up until the front-left tire was suspended (I could spin the wheel freely in the air):

After dropping the wheel to maximum extension.
Actual measurement.

The gap went up to 8-1/2”, which after some simple math told me that my down travel is exactly 1-5/8” at the wheel. While here I noticed that my Total Chaos UCAs were resting on the bump stops, and the bump stops were resting on top of the coil bucket. So that got me thinking: it looks like I could squeeze some more travel if I remove the bump stops so I unbolted them from the UCAs and then raised the front end again to see what happened:

You can see the bump stop I removed, sitting on the tire.

Hey now – the gap went up to 9-1/2”, meaning just by removing the bump stops I gained another inch of wheel “droop”, so now I had 2-5/8” down travel at the wheel. I checked some important areas for any contact, and this is what I found:

No coil bucket contact at full droop.

First (photo above), at full droop the Total Chaos UCA bump stop plate was NOT touching the coil bucket. This told me that it was the King shocks that were limiting the down travel, which if fine because that means no coil bucket contact if I drop a wheel into a deep rut or something. Also note in the photo above that the UCA’s uniball area has ample clearance from the coil bucket lip.

Just enough lower spring seat clearance.

Second (photo above), at full droop the King shocks were the correct length to ensure that the lower spring seat did not contact the front drive shafts. So I don’t have to worry about notching the driveshaft like I’ve seen some others experience with other shocks.

Tie rod has ample room for movement before any binding happens.

And third (photo above) – I looked at the steering tie rod ball end, and it’s fine; it isn’t maxed out on angle, and there’s still a lot of room for tie rod rotation available even at the ride height I have my truck at. So with the bump stops I have 1-5/8” of down travel available, and that jumps up an extra inch to 2-5/8” of down travel when the bump stops are removed.