I need some help from my fellow toyota owners. I am re-doing the suspension on my truck and I can't decide how I am going to have the truck sit. See before, when I was setting up my truck for the desert, I mainly wanted it to perform well in the whoops. Naturally I had the front sit an inch or two higher than the rear. What I didn't realize at that time was that I dialed in the truck with the fuel cell empty. Now, since the fuel tank is mounted far back to off set engine wieght, I find my truck sitting way to high in the front. I guess the weight of 32 gallons of gas makes quite the difference :/ So in order to balance things out, I was thinking about just lowering the coilovers in the front, but then I stumbled across another problem......at what point do I make it level? Should I level it out with the tank full, or half full? If I do it when the tank is full, I am worried that the back may sit too high, cause the difference between tail weight at full tank and half tank is huge. So I need your guy's opinion oh how I should go about leveling my truck.

 

32 gallon gas tank? what do you have? a p/u or a runner or what? You should probably level it out with the tank full. On most trucks the rear end is designed to sit up higher when unloaded, so that when its loaded the truck isnt pointing nose up into the air.

 

Oh sorry for the lack of clarification, it is a 92 extra cab pickup. Oh haha I didn't realize I butchered the world fuel cell...... I'll fix it sorry. Thanks for the advice, but I was wondering if it would dramatically alter the suspension performance of my truck, or am I jsut paranoid?

 

You should be ok. Its more an issue of seeing where you're going. Im pretty sure you dont have A 32 gallon tank unless you swapped something in. I think the extended cabs maxed out at like 18 gals.

 

No it does have a 32 gallon tank, but like you said it isn't stock:

 

And that is the main reason for me trying to lower the front, I simply can't see where the hell I am going, especially when I am accelerating with full gear and a full tank.

 

adjust the coilovers, i really dont see another way unless you do diff. leaves, is your shackle frame through? you also might be able to get the TC shackle or something of the sort.

and uh....we want more pics

 

More picks eh?

 

Well, the easy fix if you're several inches off would be to do a SOA conversion on the back then pull out a few leafs. That wouldn't cost you anything and would provide plenty of lift.

A few more pictures would be appreciated still though. Show us the whole truck. It looks nice and I'd like to see the angle we're talking about here as well.



edit. At second glance, those shackles look scary as hell! Personally I'd do a SOA on it and then just run a smaller shackle after looking at it again. Shackles that tall are gonna give you a headache someday.

 

Can we get a full pic of the truck?

 

Check out Pinnacle's ride, he just did a long travel rear to go with his TC front. He may have some suggestions for you. I don't think you want to do a spring over if you are going to be bombing around the dunes and such.

 

I was avoiding the spring over axle swap because I heard it may give me more axle wrap, especially when flying through the desert. I don't have any pictures of it fully loaded, the only ones I have are of it with like barely any gas and two spares-no gear. So I mean the angle doesn't look too bad in the picture, but trust me it is--especially when everything is in it.

 

Oh yeah and about the shackles, they are long travel shackles. They were custom made by ATS and Inland trucks, so I trust em Total chaos does the same thing with their chromoly shackles. I believe their version comes in 9" and 12" lengths. Thanks for the concern though