Firestone Ride-Rite Red Label Air Helper Springs Installation - 2020 Chevrolet Silverado 3500

Products Featured in this Video

Firestone Ride-Rite Red Label Extreme Duty Air Helper Springs - Rear Axle

456 reviews

Code: F2709

Price:  $578.08

• Vehicle Suspension
• Rear Axle Suspension Enhancement
• Air Springs

• Extra Heavy Duty
• Firestone

7,500-lb Capacity. Heavy duty air springs support rear suspension for safety and stability when hauling your heaviest loads. Springs reduce strain on your rear axle, keep your vehicle level, and adjust to load size for a consistently smooth ride.

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How to Install the Firestone Ride-Rite Red Label Air Helper Springs on a 2020 Chevrolet Silverado 3

Shane: Hey, guys. Shane here with etrailer.com. Today I have a 2020 Chevrolet Silverado 3500. And I want to walk you through how to install Firestone's Red Label Air Helper Springs for the rear axle. Adding air springs is going to serve a lot of purposes. If you didn't have them installed, what happened is the back of your truck sags when you add weight on it.

What that does is it puts unnecessary wear and tear on your rear suspension. It's going to raise the front end. It's going to affect your steering, affect your braking, affect your tire wear. You're going to have to white knuckle because you're going to feel a lot of pressure with the front of that truck being up in the air. But it's also going to do, it's going to allow the truck or it's going to create a lot of sway and a lot of body roll in the truck.

Adding the springs is going to reduce all of that. Be able to get your truck back up to normal ride height. So you're reducing a lot of that body roll and sway. And it's going to make your ride much more safer.Let's talk a little bit more about body roll and sway. If you didn't have airbags and you have a trailer like this on.

Say you're on a little bit of uneven terrain. What happens is if your truck's going this way and your trailer goes this way, it caused your truck to lean like this. That gets very uncomfortable because when it goes like this, it also affects your steering. It'll pull your steering wheel one way or the other.Sway. What happens with sway is if your trailer moves to one side or the other.

What it does is it pulls down on the back corner of the truck if it's going that way. Pulls down on the back corner of the truck. And by the time your suspension reacts and pushes the trailer back up, it's pushing it back over to the other side. And that's what creates the back and forth movement or the sway in the trailer. Adding airbags with your suspension that you already have greatly reduces how much downward pressure you're getting on that rear axle or on that back corner. So it keeps your trailer up straight and behind you. And keeps your truck level while you're going down the road.Another great thing that the bags do. If you didn't have airbags on and you have weight of a trailer like this and you go over a bump. What happens is the back of your truck feels like it's bottoming out. The bags are going to dampen that. So you're not feeling that hard hit when you go over that bump. Before we start our installation, we want to make sure we get measurements of factory ride height of our vehicle. This was before we add any weight to the truck and before we install the bags. What we needed to do. We're going to do this on the back wheel and the front wheel. We're going to measure right down the center to this bottom edge here on our wheel-well. We're at 41 and a half. Here in the front we're at 40 and a half.Now let's add the weight on and see what it does to the truck. You can see the size of the trailer. It's very large. This is a 3500. It's more than capable of handling this size trailer, but you can see with the weight of this trailer, before the bags are installed, how much it made the back of this truck squat.Now we're going to go ahead and measure it again now that we've added the weight of our trailer to show you difference between our factory ride height and what the weight of the trailer has done. We're going to do the same thing right at the center of the wheel. We're almost at 39 and a quarter. So we've dropped over two and a quarter inches. Go ahead and take another measurement here in the front. Just like we did in the back. We've actually brought our front end up a quarter of an inch, which isn't bad. But essentially what we're trying to do when we add our bags is to get our truck back up to normal ride height when we're carrying a heavy load.Now we've got our airbags installed and we've got about 30 PSI in each bag. We've gone ahead and loaded our trailer back up. As you can see, we're back up to normal ride height, which is going to make our ride much more comfortable and much more safe. Not only for us, but anybody else on the road.This is what our bags are going to look like when they're installed. It's going to come with all the mounting hardware and the brackets. There's not going to meet any drilling or welding required. Our brackets are going to be steel construction, black powder coat finish. Really going to hold up well against any rust or corrosion. Our bags are going to have rolled end caps. This bag is actually going to roll up inside of there. And that helps keep that bag secured to prevent any leaking at the top of the bag.Our bags are inaudible 00:04:13. They're going to be double convoluted. And what that means if you compare it to a single bag, a single bag is not going to have this center section. The single bag when it deflates is actually going to overlap itself. When it overlaps, it creates a crease and it eventually wears a spot in there and can wear out very quickly. With these this is actually going to be a single bag, but it's going to have a steel band in the center. Basically with having the steel band in here, it's going to allow the bag to last a lot longer than just a single bag that overlaps itself.The bags are going to have a total weight carrying capacity of 7,500 pounds. You just want to make sure you check the owner's manual of the vehicle. Make sure you're not exceeding the amount on the vehicle. Keep in mind that's not giving you an extra 7,500 pounds. Again, make sure you're not exceeding the truck's highest tow rating.Each bag is going to hold anywhere from five PSI up to 150 PSI. What I do recommend is keep at least five PSI in the bags to keep pressure on them. Once you're unloaded, I also recommend dropping the air out of the bags down to that lowest pressure. That way it doesn't make the ride real hard and uncomfortable.Another nice feature I like about this. It's going to give me two fittings at the back and allows you to air up your bags individually for all inaudible 00:05:28 loads. If you're wanting something a little bit more convenient, where you don't have to get out and air up your bags from the back here, there are wireless compressors, or there are compressors that you can get, that'll line up directly with these bags. They have dual zone and single zone depending on the load that you carry. You can find those here etrailer.com.The installation process on these are very simple. They're going to mount between your axle and your frame. Now that we've gone over some of the features, let's walk you through how to get them installed.Starter installation is a good idea to lower your spare tire and also remove your heat shield for your spare tire that's on your passenger side. We're going to take this bracket and these two brackets. We're going to take these flathead bolts. We're going to go up through the bracket like this in each one of these slots. I'm going to take each one of these brackets. Set them over the bolts. We're going to put on a flange nut. We're not going to tighten these down. We're going to leave them loose. We're going to take these bolts. We're going to slide them through our brackets. And we're going to put on a flange nut. These flange nuts we want to just barely. We want to get them on there just enough where they're grabbing onto the bolt. Just like that.Bring our clamp with us. Then we're going to come over to our jounce bumper and we're going to pop it off. You may need a flathead screwdriver or a pry bar. Sometimes you can just take them and just pop them off just like that. We're going to take this bracket. This is going to clamp around that cup. Which you may have to take one of these off if you can't get it spread out enough. And then, we're going to tighten these two down. So that this bracket tightens around that cup. I want to make sure that we tighten these evenly. I'm going to make sure that this bracket is not twisted. I want to make sure it's flat up against that part there. inaudible 00:07:50 socket and wrench. We're going to tighten our bolts down. Again, we want to make sure we're switching sides so it tightens down evenly.We're going to take our spring. We're going to flip it over to the hole in the bottom. And have our bracket like this. And going to make sure that these flanges are facing away from the bag. We're going to have a black bolt like this. Put it in the center. We're not going to tighten this down just yet. Try to loosely install it. And then, we're going to dry fit our bag.All right. Bag put in place. What you're wanting that tab to go into that center hole. I'm going to make sure our bag is going straight up and down between our two brackets. We're going to take a marker and we're going mark the bottom plate on our bag and the bracket. We're going to pull our bag back out. We're going to line up those two marks. We're going to take a 7/30" Allen wrench and we're going to tighten this bolt down.Now they're going to tell you to tighten these down. What I found is that this hole, where your airbag fitting goes up inside there, the large nut that's going to go on the top is so close to the jounce bumper cup that you can't get the nut to turn. So what we're going to do is we're going to get our bag on. We're going to put the nut on and get it snug so that our pin goes up inside of this hole. And then, we'll come back with an Allen wrench and we'll have enough room between our bag and here to tighten this bolt down. And then, we'll come back and we'll tighten all four of them.Air bag put up in place. We're going to take the large nut and star washer. Star washer first and then the nut. And we'll take a 9/16th wrench and we'll tighten these down. We're going to have some hooks that look like this. You can see this plate right here. It's going to hook underneath. About like that. We're going to have a carriage bolt that's going to drop down from the top. And then, we'll put a flange nut on it. We're going to have one of these hooks for each side of the axle. And we'll have two for the other side of the vehicle.You'll notice that we can't get this lined up because of this end right here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a cutting wheel or a grinder. I'm going to grind just the end of it off just enough where I can get this to slide over and line up with the hole. I'm actually going to use a rotary tool with a cutting wheel. I'm just going to cut this tip off.Once you get the other one installed, take a 9/16th socket or wrench. And we're going to tighten these down. You want to make sure, again, you go back and forth and tighten them down evenly. So this plate is sitting flat against your bump stop plate. And we're going to take our air fitting. You'll notice that there's thread lock on it. You want to make sure you get that seated to where you almost cover all of that thread lock. It's going to go right in the top of the large bolt that was coming out of the top of the bag. And then, a 9/16th socket or wrench. And we'll tighten this down.Once you get the rest of your hardware tight, you're going to take an inch and an eighth wrench or socket. And you're going to tighten this nut down. Once you get one side done, you're going to repeat the process on the other. The only difference between driver and passenger side is there was a heat shield. And the heat shield needs to go between the top bracket and the top roll plate on the bag.Then we're going to install our airline tube. You're going to get one roll. You're going to take the two ends, put them together, unroll it, find a center, and cut that in half. That's going to be airline tube for each side. Once you do that, make sure your ends are cut even. We're going to take our tube. We're going to insert it into the fitting, push down on it, and then give it a little tug. Make sure it's in place. And then, we're going to route this to the back of the vehicle. The only difference between this side and the in the passenger side is before you insert it into this fitting, there's going to be a little sleeve. You're going to slide it on the airline tube and then insert it into the fitting. And that's just a heat shield for your airline tube from your exhaust.So on our driver's side what I actually did is where I initially put it in, I was coming outside of this bracket. But I didn't like the angle. And I didn't like it sitting up against there. So what I did is I pulled it out. And it was very easy to pull out. If you pull up on the line, you'll notice right here at the top of this, that moves. Pull up on the line. Take a wrench and push that down. And it'll release this and you'll be able to pull the line back out.So you can see what I did is I ran it over the top of this bracket instead of through here. I just filed it back. Zip tied it to the factory wiring. This is where my spare tire goes. So I went over the top of all of it. Came back to here. And rather than cutting off the extra, all I did was looped it up and zip tie it up here where it's not going to get hit. That way if we have any problem on the ends of our lines, we can always cut it off and we have plenty of extra. We can re-secure it or reattach our lines.For our passenger side. We don't have a bracket up here so we can go straight into the top of the fitting. This is going to be your heat sleeve that I mentioned to put on. And I ran this line through my frame rail here. Came back to here and came out. And went over top of my spare tire bracket. Came back here. And again, zip tied it right up here at the top to some factory wiring.You're going to get a bracket like this and two air fittings. You're going to take the top and then the nut off the air fitting. You're going to put on the flat washer. You're going to go up through the bracket. Put on another flat washer. Put on the nut. And then, you're going to tighten it down with a half inch wrench. You're going to get two very large zip ties. And these are to attach this bracket to your hitch.And I'm going to put mine right about there. Take your bracket, run the zip tie through the little slots. Zip tie secured. Straightened up. And then, we'll tighten these down. And then, we can cut off our ends and clean it up. Now.We're going to take the end of our airline tube and make sure we got the right one going to the right side. We're going to cut the end off and insert it into the back of the fitting. One thing I do suggest is keep in mind your spare tire goes up so you don't want this line hanging out like this. Again, make sure you cut the line flush. You want to make sure there's no kinks or bends. Insert it in and then we can take this. We'll zip it tied up like that. And we'll do the same thing on our driver's side bag.If you don't have an airline tube cutter, you can find them here at etrailer. It makes your lines when you cut them much cleaner than just using a regular knife. Make sure you don't use a pair of scissors or a pair of pliers or anything like that to cut them because it will pinch that in and you can potentially have an air leak.Now we're going to add about 70 pounds or 70 PSI in each bag. And then, we're going to check for air leaks. So to check for air leaks, what we're going to do is we're going to take some soapy water. We're going to spray it anywhere that our airline tube is going into a fitting. What we're looking for is we're looking for a bunch of bubbles starting to build up. Once you've checked for any leaks, you determined you don't have any, you go ahead and reinstall your spare tire, your heat shield, and you're ready to go.That's going to do it for a look at and installation on the Firestone Red Label Air Helper Springs for the rear axle on our 2020 Chevrolet Silverado 3500.