Would new shocks (non long travel) increase my wheel travel?

[LCdad]

I was thinking about getting Dobinsons MRR or IMS. I assume these aftermarket shocks are usually slightly longer than factory. They do come in 2 lengths which specify for 0-2” of lift and 2.5+” of lift, but I haven’t found the shock length specifications anywhere or even the OEM Toyota shocks lengths to compare.

Question is, what normally limits down wheel travel on a stock vehicle? The UCA? The shock length?

Will getting a Dobinsons shock and spring set at 2” lift give me more travel than say a preload spacer lift of 2”?

 

[D-mac]

I've noticed ICON claims that all of their coilover suspension kits which include their (aftermarket) upper control arms and front differential drop kit will increase front wheel travel. It looks like a combination of components is needed to effectively lift the body, increase travel, and minimize damage to CV joints.

 

[CaptBlondeBeard]

I called King and they claim that Toyota uses the full length of travel of the LOWER control arm for the IFS on all the new platforms already and changing the coilovers and even UCAs does nothing (regardless of manufacturer), which is why they don't offer an extended version.

So according to the guy I spoke with, the only way to get more down travel (because you lift it, so ideally if you lift +2", you'd want to get back that 2" of down travel somehow so you don't top out the suspension every 10 seconds) is to swap out the lower control arms and basically go with a full blown long travel kit.

I'm a little skeptical to be honest. I plan to pull out the coilovers at some point the I get the time and measure it out. If anyone has done this already then let me know!

 

[Mtn40]

When I had my shock/spring out of the front to add some spacers I made, I measured extended length.

24.25" from center of lower shock bushing to mounting surface of strut top.

 

[CaptBlondeBeard]

When I had my shock/spring out of the front to add some spacers I made, I measured extended length.

24.25" from center of lower shock bushing to mounting surface of strut top.

Nice, did you notice if there was any additional droop after pulling the coilover out?

 

[Mtn40]

Nice, did you notice if there was any additional droop after pulling the coilover out?

Because of where the control arm bushings are clamped and have to twist, the suspension actually springs upward some when the strut is out. I'm not sure whether you can loosen the control arm bolts without the alignment bolts moving, so I didn't want to try that.

There must be extra down travel in the suspension though, because people are putting on big front lift/leveling spacers that push the suspension down (droop) farther than stock and I haven't heard of anything breaking yet.

If anyone wants to try this, it's super easy to pull out a front strut*. Put both front tires in the air, or just the one you're working on with the swaybar disconnected. It's just the lower strut bolt and 4 nuts on top, then you can kind of cork-screw the strut out of the bottom of the suspension without disconnecting or disassembling anything else. Then you could loosen the control arm bushing bolts and see how far the suspension falls.
I would be tempted to try this again just for fun, but I put loctite on the bolts when I put it back together and I don't want to deal with that again until I install a real suspension later.

* don't do this unless you know what you're doing and know what you'd do if anything goes wrong. At your own risk, etc.

 

[CaptBlondeBeard]

There must be extra down travel in the suspension though, because people are putting on big front lift/leveling spacers that push the suspension down (droop) farther than stock and I haven't heard of anything breaking yet.

You'd think... a lot of people just don't notice or care.

If the strut is the limiting factor and you put a collar lift on, you might gain 2" lift but it all comes out of your down travel. So if you only start with 3" down travel/droop, you're left with only 1" remaining. Thats why collar lifts ride like shit. The strut is usually the limiting factor in most stock suspension. You won't break anything, you just top out more easily over bumps.
On the old Toyota platforms the UCAs were the next limiter after the strut, so you just replace em with aftermarket and would get a lot of your travel back.

The guy at King was claiming that the LCA is the limiter for all the trucks on the new TNGA-F platform, and that you can't get more travel by simply throwing on longer struts and UCAs. This definitely concerns me as I don't want to roll around with only 1" (or whatever it is) left of down travel after getting $3,000+ suspension

 

[Mtn40]

Yeah, if I spend a few grand on new suspension, it better increase overall travel.

You're right for a collar spring-preload lift like Wescott. The strut is still the limiting factor for down travel and it didn't change from factory (but is reduced relative to ride height). And you lose the same amount of down-travel (from ride height) as you gained in lift. Probably lose some up-travel too if the springs now bind before hitting the bump stop.

If you got lift from a spacer on top of the strut, then the suspension can move down more than factory the same amount as the lift gained. But you lose up-travel because now the shock bottoms out before hitting the stock bump stops.
So if there are 1.5+" strut-top spacers being used out there, and we haven't heard of them causing many problems yet, then we know the suspension as a whole can droop that much extra relative to factory.

The factory limit to droop is the fully extended strut.
The next things that would limit droop are the upper or lower ball joints binding, the axle joints binding, or the UCA hitting the spring.
Maybe the guy from King means the ball joints binding when he said LCA is the limiting factor?

I think the guy from Exit Offroad (not sure whether he's on this forum) was going to measure Dobinsons shocks extended and compressed lengths when he had some in stock. Time to go dig up that thread on mud and see.

 

[LCdad]

When I had my shock/spring out of the front to add some spacers I made, I measured extended length.

24.25" from center of lower shock bushing to mounting surface of strut top.

Thank you. Super useful. Now just need some measurements for aftermarket shocks !

 

[jay3253]

I was thinking of using the 4runner Trailhunter springs and shocks. They may have better feel and 2in lift. Also, the Tacoma TRD Pro has a high angle CV and they can be interchanged as well. Their half shafts are much beefier than the LC.

 

[CaptBlondeBeard]

I think the guy from Exit Offroad (not sure whether he's on this forum) was going to measure Dobinsons shocks extended and compressed lengths when he had some in stock. Time to go dig up that thread on mud and see.

Now just need some measurements for aftermarket shocks !

Here is the info I was able to gather directly from Dobinson and King (sorry for all the numbers, welcome back to math class haha)

King
24.5” extended, 18.1” compressed
6.4” total stroke
(For comparison, in mm that is 622mm extended, 460mm compressed)

Dobinson MRR
Standard 0-2" (MRA59-A660): 632 mm extended, 457 mm compressed
Extended travel 2.5-3" (MRA59-A440): 624mm extended, 453mm compressed

You'll notice that the extended travel version from Dobinson (MRA59-A440) is shorter than the standard travel version. The guy I spoke at Dobinson USA with got in touch with Australia and they said that the A660 is going to supersede A440 and will handle the full lift from 0-3". The guy at Dobinson USA said any new A660 orders from their website should have these measurements.


@Mtn40 measured 24.25" from center of lower shock bushing to mounting surface of strut top with the coilover removed. Since he said that it did not droop any more after removing the coilover I'm going to assume that this is the length of the extended stock strut. So to finally answer the original question... unless we get more down travel from UCAs, there will be no additional travel from new coilovers.
If you get new UCAs and the guy at King is wrong and we can squeeze more droop out, you'll get an additional 1/4" out of the Kings at the strut. With a 2:3 motion ratio (ratio of how much the strut moves to how much the wheel moves), that would be an extra 3/8" down travel at the wheel.
Dobinson would get you +0.632" additional down travel at the strut and 0.948" at the wheel.

With 2" lift, you eat into that down travel so Kings you would have 1.625" less down travel than stock, Dobinson you would have 1.05" less than stock. Both should get you a fair amount more up travel, but I don't know what the limit is stock to compare it to.

 

[Mtn40]

You've made me want to take a strut out again to verify some of this and take more measurements. It won't be until this weekend though.

I'm sure the suspension can droop more than what the stock strut allows. It just doesn't fall on it's own because the rubber LCA bushings want to hold the LCA where it was when the bolts were tightened.

 

[CaptBlondeBeard]

Update:

I called the boys over at Accutune and they said they've done extensive testing on the new Tacoma (TNGA-F platform) and backed up what the guy at King said. Basically Toyota actually did a great job engineering the suspension on these platforms and got a lot more wheel travel stock, but the UCA, strut, and LCA all limit around the same point just a touch above CV bind. Replacing UCA only really gets you back into alignment specs, LCAs or aftermarket bushings might get you more droop but you'd probably get CV bind.

So we're probably not getting any more up/down travel without a full blown long travel kit.

If anyone hears anything different let me know! Based on this I've now decided to go with Kings and stick to only 2" lift.

 

[damenjacobs]

Is it worth lifting the LC250 to clear 35"'s if we are losing 2" of up/down travel? Would it be better to just fit the biggest tire stock lift that doesn't rub?

 

[jay3253]

Is it worth lifting the LC250 to clear 35"'s if we are losing 2" of up/down travel? Would it be better to just fit the biggest tire stock lift that doesn't rub?

You don't need a lift to clear 35" tires.

 

[Bad1975]

With the ICON diff drop kit you should be able to obtain more droop, since the diff is lowered and the shocks can be extended travel if ordered that way for your desired shock supplier. Its recommended to do diff drop for anything over 2"

I'm going with Dobinsons again this time in (standard shocks), running their suspension in IMS version on my other land cruiser (FJ40) and love it.

I don't want rebuildable shocks on a daily driver ever again, I've had multiple brands and none last more that about 40k before they begin leaking and require rebuild, if off roading allot that mileage seems to lower even more. The best ones I had for longevity were ProComps but they decided to have a special size from everyone else and stopped making rebuild kits for them so I had to change and the last two sets have got about the same mileage.

So with about 100k in mileage and maybe 10-15k offroad at most (probably less) I had three rebuildable setups on my Tundra.

Also in my experience any coilover lift that requires the adjuster to be maxed out or adjusted allot to achieve the advertised lift removes droop while raising the vehicle (Tinkerers adventure has a great video explaining this).

Doesn't seem like any of the out of the box stuff (reguardless of manufacturer) is designed to achieve the lift while in the middle of the travel of the shock to maintain up and down travel.

 

[Mtn40]

I did get around to doing some more measurements on my stock 250 last weekend, just took a while to get it all organized and write my thesis. You'll think back to school.

TL;DR. Here are the numbers:

If anyone wants to check my math that's fine with me. Everything in the table is in inches. If you want a copy of the spreadsheet let me know.

I removed the shock/spring assembly and measured the suspension travel as best I could.

The suspension does have more down travel than allowed by the stock extended shock. I would have loosened the LCA bolts so gravity could take over, but I only have one 24mm socket and didn't want to chance messing up my alignment (also I wasn't strong enough to break it free with the leverage I had laying under the truck), so I was fighting the twist in the bushings when forcing the suspension lower.

I was able to get it to go to somewhere between 26" and 26.25" (it was hard to get a clear view of the tape while forcing the suspension down). So say 26.125". This is 1.875" (at the shock) more droop than the stock shock allows. That would be about 3" more at the hub. At that point it was still bouncing against the twist in the bushings and I never felt anything hit that felt like ball joints or CV binding. Of course with the shock/spring out, I couldn't tell if the UCA would have hit the spring. I don't think it would, but that's an easy fix if that were the limiting factor.
I wouldn't want the CV or ball joints to live full time at that extended angle, but I think they would be fine to go there as needed while wheeling.

Compressing the suspension was a lot easier. I could just use my floor jack and lift it up.
I compressed the suspension to the point that the bump stop was compressed and stopped just before it started to lift the truck.
This showed that the stock shock has about 4.8" of stroke. I know the front wheels have 8" of travel, so that gives a motion multiplier of 1.662. This multiplier is verified because I have 8mm spacers that I made on the front and they gave me 1/2" of lift. Of course the relationship isn't going to be completely linear. At the limits of travel it will be off.

@CaptBlondeBeard got extended and compressed numbers for King and Dobinson, and I found numbers for the RoughCountry M1R struts, so I've compared those and applied the 1.662 multiplier to get what they would give in wheel travel. The weird thing is the King and Dobinson numbers are not much different in extension, but shorter in compression. So they would allow more up-travel, but not much more down-travel. Up-travel is limited by the bump stop, so it's almost like these would work better with a spacer lift on top to push the available travel down and still get the same up-travel. I'd really love to have one of these aftermarket shocks in my hands to see how this works in real life.

In the Change to Droop and Change to Compression columns, a negative number is additional down-travel and a positive number is more up-travel. The Change to Compression amounts for King and Dobinson would be mostly unused because of the bump stop. That's why it looks like a spacer on top would give more usable travel from those shocks. The other explanation is they're measuring differently than I am.
The Available Add'l Down Travel column is how much more the suspension could go past what the shock would limit it at. Again, that's where it seems like a spacer would let these aftermarket shocks actually use their available travel.

 

[LCOceans]

This may be what this discussion is all about. My brain halfway comprehends.

 

[Area 51]

No.

 

[jay3253]

Has anyone considered doing an OEM lift? The 4Runner Trailhunter has a 2in lift over the regular 4runner. It weighs 500 lbs more than the Land Cruiser so it would give you a little more spring for a bumper and extended range tank.