So I've spent the past week and untold hours trying to figure out the "do it right once" suspension. Here are my conclusions:
- You can do an OME kit for $1K with nitros for shocks and one of their front coils with a dakar in the rear. For a heavy load you can add an additional leaf to the dakar. This could serve you well, seems to serve a lot of people well. This, however, doesn't have any room for adjustment - pretty much take it or leave it. The components are roughly designed to work with each other so it is probably an OK turnkey solution for self install with few configuration options.
- You can spend hours and hours and hours reading about people's opinions on everything else. Icon, Fox, King coil overs and shocks. All sorts of add a leafs or leaf packs. You will read lots of strong opinions. In 99% of the cases the people giving these opinions will never mention their axle weights nor what they drive on or at what speed. They could be daily drivers, mall crawlers, mudders, rock crawlers, desert racers or who knows what. A rock crawler and a desert racer want completely different suspensions with drastically different suspension frequencies (roughly spring rates) and different shock valving (progressive vs. digressive). Nonetheless you will see people shout at each other about this or that suspension without ever mentioning what they actually do with the suspension.
- You will find the vast, vast, vast majority of people going off road run with weights far less than an overland truck. Hence essentially everything you read about suspensions online will be useless. A stiff suspension to someone running with an empty bed will be a wallowing bottoming out mess with an overland load.
- Amazingly it seems most people who drop $3K on a suspension stick with the default stock valving. Hence when you read peoples opinions about say icon vs. fox they really aren't telling you anything more than their opinion on the default valving used by each manufacturer (hint, icon is digressive and fox is progressive). Of course you could revalve either of those shocks to act pretty much like the other. It seems 99% of people posting on forums don't realize this...
So a nice OME kit for $1K is pretty much unadjustable but could be just fine. It is designed to be decent across a wide range of applications. That said, if you say run desert washboard roads at 30 mph you are going to be much, much happier with a monotube shock (nitros are twin tube) possibly with a remote reservoir to handle the heat of a long washboard run and you will be far more comfortable with something valved digressive (the nitros are progressive).
Past that I honestly think you need to get someone else involved. If you drop 2-3K on an suspension most competent vendors will be happy to, and in fact will want to, revalve the shocks appropriately. Along the same lines, I haven't priced it yet but my understanding is a custom leaf pack from Alcan is not much worse price wise than a dakar or allpro expedition especially considering the leaf may be just a fraction of the cost of your whole suspension if you are going "do it right".
So after spending a week learning all I could about suspensions I've concluded the best way to do it right is to talk to a good vendor and have them help you. If you can give them estimated axle loads for front and rear and describe what you will be running on (sounds like you will have a lot of highway to go along with your off roading) they will point you right.
Personally my plan is to plan on having Alcan do a custom leaf pack and go with either icon or fox coilovers and rear shocks. Probably going to have Down South Motorsports (located in San Diego) help me spec out the suspension. This will all have to wait until I've actually got my truck all configured as I want it. Then off to a truck scale to weight the front and rear so DSM and Alcan will be able to tune appropriately. My big remaining question which I'll be asking DSM when the time comes is just how useful are the dial tunable shocks. Sounds like a great concept for good highway and off road handling but only available on the priciest shocks with remote reservoirs and I'd only spend the $$$ if it really works for my application.
Good luck!
