I recently purchased a 2004 Tacoma that has an ARB bumper with Warn 8000 winch and Old Man Emu front coils and OME Dakar "heavy" rear leafs. The total lift is supposedly just over 2 inches. I made the assumption the OME springs would handle an FWC camper.
When I purchased my 2009 FWC Eagle and put it on my Taco, the rear springs sagged 5 inches on drivers side and 3 inches on passenger side! I put Air Lift helpers on it. They seemed to work ok, lifting my truck back to the unloaded height with 55 lbs of air in the driver side and 35 on the passenger. I took it on the maiden journey on a dirt road that had some washboard and potholes. 20 miles into the road, the left airbag blew out. On the way home, the right airbag failed also. The support team at Air Lift shipped me out a couple of replacements. After installing the replacements, I took my truck to 3 local Air Lift installers and had them check out my install to determine why they had failed. They all agreed that the install looked good and suspected that the failure was probably the loosening of a bolt in the spacer (required for the 2" lift springs). I put in new bolts and torqued them up to the bolt rating using loctite blue.
I took a trip to Bryce Canyon with the replacement bags installed and the camper loaded for a couple of days stay. The roads were all pavement. With the same inflation (55/35 psi) the truck was level, but it would bottom out occasionally on service station entries, drainages across paved streets and patched potholes.
A couple of days ago, I put the camper on the truck and headed out for Kolob Plateau. The road there is paved most of the way, but has a few rough patches. I aired up to 65/45 psi in the air bags, hoping to eliminate the bottoming out. I hit one dip in the road that bottomed out the suspension. After that, the truck started driving like it had little or no springs on the left and bottomed out on every little bump. I stopped to check out the problem, and found that once again the drivers side bag has failed. I hadn't even left the pavement!
I'm suspecting that the drivers side spring has sagged under load to the point where the air bag won't handle the load. My camper is only 690 lbs plus the options, gear, propane, and water. I suspect the total weight is still under 1,000 pounds. The truck is rated for 1,300 total, so I should not be having these failures. I've come to the conclusion (as stated in other posts in this thread) that the air lifts will not make up for weak springs. I plan to get custom spring packs that will handle the loaded weight of the camper and just augment them with the air lifts.
The OME front coils and OME nitro shocks seem to work fine. Just the rear springs are the problem.
Gil
meach4x4
2004 Tacoma Extended Cab
2009 FWC Eagle
saggy OME springs
