Suspension Upgrade

This was our 3^rd maintenance day in a row.  Unlike the first two spent fixing things broken while on the road, today was spent upgrading our RV.  We decided to upgrade our suspension with the Lippert Center Point airbag system.  It has an airbag that takes some of the shocks out of the suspension as you go down the road.  After all the damage we have sustained on our first two road trips, we had to do something!  We had a drawer slide out and break off its slides, we had pans fly out of cabinets and block slides that broke trim when we tried to put the slides out.  We had the refrigerator’s wheels push divots into the floor and start leaning back that had to be releveled.

We hope this new system will dampen the road bumps and protect our rig.  We had an RV tech come over to lead the installation.  The first step was to remove the existing CRE 3000 and prepare the springs with new bushings. 

The system doesn’t come with any installation instructions.  We followed an etrailer installation video but had to make some modifications.  We had to pull the springs off the axles which allowed us to more easily maneuver the springs into the new shackles and made it easy to clear out the old brass bushings that were in very bad shape.  We wound up having to drill out two of them that were in such bad shape that they were basically welded into the springs.  The other major modifications we had to make was notching the top of the two new Center Point “equalizers” since the hangers on my rig came from the manufacturer with a “V” shaped piece of metal at the top that provided the hanger with additional stability.  This piece of metal interfered with the placement of the new equalizers.  We had to grind about ¼ inch off the middle of the new parts so that we could lift them into position and get the bolt in place. 

For some reason, Lippert didn’t provide nearly enough air line to reach the front pass-thru storage which was the most natural place on my rig to put the gauge and filler port.  We were about 4 feet short.  Instead of patching in a short section, I decided to keep the number of connections to the absolute minimum so bought a piece long enough to reach the wheels from the gauge.  The final thing is that the manufacturer supplied air valve is very short.  In my rig, the wall that is most convenient for the gauge and valve placement is about ¾ inch thick and the valve doesn’t clear it on the other side.  We had to buy some additional parts to make it work and notch the wood to allow the push in connections to be made.

As for the rest of the installation, the etrailer video is pretty good except for the above items not discussed.  Etrailer video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dY3vx_5BWks

After we put some miles on the new suspension I'll post a review of the Lippert Center Point system under our reviews tab.