Improving Towing Capability with Hellwig and Bilstein Part One

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The Hellwig Big Wig kit comes with this gauge set.  You can read and set the air bag pressures from side to side independently by bleeding excess pressure at a flip of the rocker switches.
The Heavy Duty compressor set comes with this air tank.  The air tank allows you to instantly put pressure to the air bags without having to wait for the pump.  This is a really cool feature that helps you adjust the suspension to your load right away.  Since trucks' loads vary all the time, this is a very handy feature that is not an overkill in our opinion. If the airbag system is easy to use, you will take the time to adjust it correctly and use it more!
In order to control the rear motion of the truck with a heavy trailer, we got Hellwig's rear anti sway bar. The Hellwig bar is a huge 1.125″ in diameter bolting right in.  The truck had no rear sway bar at all previously.  The bar comes with all the right bushings and brackets and more than doubles the rear roll resistance. 
The Hellwig rear bar is also 3 way adjustable so you can fine tune your truck's balance just like a performance car! 
Since we were increasing our effective rear spring rate and for better handling all around we opted for a set of Bilstein heavy duty 5100 series shocks.  The 5100 series shocks feature a monotube high pressure gas system to reduce the possibility of cavitation and fade in hard use.

Nitrogen gas at about 300 psi is kept separate from the shock fluid by a floating piston.  Like in a pressure cooker, fluid under pressure boils at a much higher temperature. Cavitation in a shock's valves is like localized boiling due to the low pressure zone created by the fluid passing through a the valve pack at high speed. Pressurization greatly reduces this.  

Since the gas and fluid are kept separate by the piston, the gas cannot contribute to froth in the fluid which also gives more consistent damping. The 5100 series has a huge 46mm piston with maximum bearing area for durability and increased valve sensitivity.

 

The 5100 has a unique multi layer zinc plating for great corrosion resistance.  The shock uses a deflected disc valve system that is set up to have a digressive curve.  This means the shock has a lot of damping force to combat body roll, dive and squat yet blows off to a softer rate when a large bump is hit allowing the suspension to soak up the bump.  Properly tuned digressive damping can give you a best of both worlds situation where you have improved motion control and good ride all together. 

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