Sunsetter

excuse my ignorance but if i setup the ride height at half the travel wouldnt it have 6.75" up and 6.75" of downtravel. and how would it not have flex that way

Sunsetter

and it wont be too wide for the trails i will take it on.

buster096

So this is where I'm a little confused on how suspension works so don't quote me on this. But it's to my understanding that the only way to get up travel is to add preload to your coilovers to lift the truck up higher. But here's the catch that I found out, so to raise the truck say 2in you only have a 1.25in leveling kit or something like that because that's how the suspension works. So in essence your gaining 1.25in of up travel and .75 of droop travel. I think. So I think the max up travel you can get would be around 4in. So if ou go take a look at a raptor you will see that it has only about 3in of up travel when it's travel number is 12in. I'm not a 100% sure on this but I do know that LT is always mostly droop travel.

buster096

You can go look at your stock suspension as an example too. We have 7in of travel on our trucks and I can see about 1.5in of up travel before I hit the bump stop. It's pretty pitiful really but when your going fast you want that droop travel to keep your tires on the ground and to soak up the next obstacle that you come across.

Sunsetter

That all makes sense. But I don't understand why you don't think this would be good for my kind of riding

buster096

Well when I go trail riding in the mountains I find my truck is too wide to fit through most trails and especially to wide to make a lot of the turns. Now when I'm in the desert, then I can open up and fit through the trails with ease because people before me keep digging out the sides and making them larger. But LT suspension is designed so that when your going fast through the dessert your suspension drops for the whoops and stuff and then your utilizing that full suspension travel for the upcoming whoop in your way. If your crawling through a trail, the suspension will droop but it gives your truck enough time to catch up with your suspension and the truck droops too, eliminating all that travel it had. That's why a solid axle is king in that domain because it has half of it flex down and the other half flex up keeping your truck more in the same position. I don't know if that made sense or not lol.

Sunsetter

That makes sense but I do believe a straight axle swap is out of my price range. Especially if its a big setup

buster096

Ehhh after you would be done with LT, what was your prediction of spending? I think it could be done for 10k pretty easily. But LT will give better performance on the trails, just not as much as a solid axle will.

Sunsetter

So with a sas could I use newer superduty axles or what would be the best route

buster096

Yeah that would be the easiest route that I can think of. I wouldn't change out your rear axle tho because the 9.75 rear is a pretty stout axle to begin with. There's been a bunch of threads on this so try a search and you should be able to fun a bunch of info on it.