MONSTERxbla
NAXJA Forum User
- Location
- Fresno
after seeing some awesome rigs at sierrafest I realized that setting up your suspension on a rock crawler is as important as any other off road vehicle. I watch as some vehicles were totally stable climbing and crawling and others (like mine) seemed a little more unstable. I thought maybe shocks had something to do with it. I had bilstein 5100's and after doing a little research I discovered that these shocks had digressive valving which is suppose to help eliminate body roll by being progressive at slow speeds(less than 3" per second) while at higher speeds the valving stays constant(not progressively firmer) to keep suspension supple. this sound great in theory but I was finding that this was making my xj bounce around quite a bit whenever I would come off a large rock or ledge. I decide to get some fox 2.0's with 30(comp)/90(rebound) valving. I went with 12" shocks in the front and after finding out that 11" shocks would not fit in the rear without going through the floor, I ended up going with 14" shocks in the rear(might as well go all the way)! I put 3/16" plate on the rear cargo floor, stich welded the perimeter and then tied it to the upper shock crossmember. I am going to build a cage this winter and plan on tieing the cage in to the shock towers. I went up and ran a little bit of swamp and went to red lake(in the snow) and I was amazed a what a big difference the shocks made. and it is pretty cool to hear the shocks working inside the vehicle. http://picasaweb.google.com/jaypeesi/Red_mountain#
