My 2016 F250 has 35K miles.
I noticed when towing through the mountains a couple of weeks ago that on corners, especially off-camber corners, the truck would lean to the side and kind of stay there. That feeling when pulling a tall 5er is very un-nerving and makes you kind of pucker. I thought about this coming back from Wyoming and finally decided to replace the FX4 Rancho branded shocks with my old standby Bilstein 5100's that I have put on every truck I've owned for years. I went into this thinking that it is likely I was just wasting $300 taking off shocks that are basically new. So yesterday I took off the 35K factory Ranchos, I could compress them very easily with one hand and they took a couple of minutes to rebound even with no load. I see plenty of trucks with 200K that have never had shocks put on and so it was quite a surprise how far gone they were with that low mileage.
Anyway, towing really does find every weakness in your setup and I was reminded the importance of not ignoring the subtle indicators of a problem even when your mind says, "couldn't be".
Night and day difference that even my wife noticed as a passenger, so I guess it really was time to replace them.
I noticed when towing through the mountains a couple of weeks ago that on corners, especially off-camber corners, the truck would lean to the side and kind of stay there. That feeling when pulling a tall 5er is very un-nerving and makes you kind of pucker. I thought about this coming back from Wyoming and finally decided to replace the FX4 Rancho branded shocks with my old standby Bilstein 5100's that I have put on every truck I've owned for years. I went into this thinking that it is likely I was just wasting $300 taking off shocks that are basically new. So yesterday I took off the 35K factory Ranchos, I could compress them very easily with one hand and they took a couple of minutes to rebound even with no load. I see plenty of trucks with 200K that have never had shocks put on and so it was quite a surprise how far gone they were with that low mileage.
Anyway, towing really does find every weakness in your setup and I was reminded the importance of not ignoring the subtle indicators of a problem even when your mind says, "couldn't be".
Night and day difference that even my wife noticed as a passenger, so I guess it really was time to replace them.