suspension failure

[dnlfuller]

We have a 2015 Bighorn 3585RL, and recently spent $1500 having the rear spring hangers reinstalled. They broke off due to poor workmanship (welds did not penetrate) and poor design.

Just to clarify, the worst conditions the 5W was on, was California roads.

Long story. The weld on the front and back of the hangers did not penetrate the I beam. This left the inside and outside welds the only ones holding the hangers on. And they were welded at the extreme outside edge of the I beam. There is a cosset at this location, but it only reached half the I beam flange. This allowed a flexing of the flange of the I beam. Since the front and back welds were no good, the hangers would rock back and forth until they broke off. They even took part of the I beam flange with them. To make things worse, the flexing of the I beam caused cross beam at that location, to crack the I beam.

All in all, not good. We do know of another Bighorn owner that had to have their suspension reworks as well.

Question is, how common is this?

 

[SLO]

I realized it was common enough a few years ago that I had MorRyde IS installed on my 2016 Bighorn in 2018.


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[pjones1969]

Not a Bighorn but a Cyclone, ours did not break the same as yours but they broke, I have seen numerous posts about this over the years so I periodically inspected ours, no sign of anything so I thought..... "we must have got a good one" .............. well, it happened ............. as we pulled into Elkhart for unrelated repairs at the Heartland Service Center, literally the 2nd to last turn from entering the facility, best place it could have happened for sure. The rear spring hangers broke on each side, the upper part was still attached to the frame

Lippert was brought in and made the repairs, they also performed what is known as an "axle-retro" where they weld reinforcement steel and gussets around the axle area, this is confined into the underbelly, there is also a Dexter Recommended Reinforcement for Spring Hangers which is outside of the underbelly, I've attached both for you

 

[danemayer]

Lippert manufactures frames like yours for thousands of trailers every year - maybe tens of thousands. The failure obviously isn't pervasive, or we would be seeing hundreds, or thousands of similar reports. But it does seem that they have had some welding problems.

I also had MorRyde IS installed, along with disc brakes at the same time. In my case, it wasn't about hangar welds. I didn't want to deal with axles or electric/magnetic brakes any longer. Well worth it.

 

[david-steph2018]

We broke an outside weld on the rear spring hangar on our Road Warrior at Elkhart County Fairgrounds June 2020. We were making a turn in the fairgrounds and I heard a pop. When we went to repack wheel bearings we found a broken weld. We had it repaired and went to MorRyde and scheduled a IS system install. It was installed in October 30, 2020.

 

[LBR]

We have a 2015 Bighorn 3585RL, and recently spent $1500 having the rear spring hangers reinstalled. They broke off due to poor workmanship (welds did not penetrate) and poor design.

Just to clarify, the worst conditions the 5W was on, was California roads.

Long story. The weld on the front and back of the hangers did not penetrate the I beam. This left the inside and outside welds the only ones holding the hangers on. And they were welded at the extreme outside edge of the I beam. There is a cosset at this location, but it only reached half the I beam flange. This allowed a flexing of the flange of the I beam. Since the front and back welds were no good, the hangers would rock back and forth until they broke off. They even took part of the I beam flange with them. To make things worse, the flexing of the I beam caused cross beam at that location, to crack the I beam.

All in all, not good. We do know of another Bighorn owner that had to have their suspension reworks as well.

Question is, how common is this?

This does happen to a lot of trailers, but as Dan mentioned...it is not a wide spread issue percentage-wise, or we would hear a lot more stories about it.

Our tri-axle CY busted a rear hanger also....called a mobile welder and off-running in 2 hours. Usually welds do not bust as they are stronger than the metal itself, and ours broke next to the weld where the inherite weak point of welding develops.

Depending on your overall decision, you may look into the X-Factor cross-brace for at least your rear support, if not the front also. I installed ours and is a simple bolt-in to keep those frame rails from flexing which contribute to broken hangers. The hangers and rails take a lot of stress when turning sharp on solid surfaces.

We had complete new components installed with new beefier rear hangers welded on, 8K axles, slipper springs with boxes, disc brakes, etc....was well worth it prior to installing the X-Factors for more support.