Springs are an extremely important part of any vehicle, especially diesel trucks. The springs play a huge role in how much weight the truck can carry and tow. In addition, they play a big role in how your truck handles.

Traditionally, most trucks have rear leaf springs and in the past, many trucks had them up front too. Vehicle Manufactures in recent years have started using coil springs for the front suspension of our 4 wheel drive trucks, but the rears have maintained the leaf springs. Well, RAM changed that with their 2014 model year trucks. All 2014 and newer 2500 RAMs have rear coil springs.

Now when a vehicle manufacture selects the spring for a vehicle, they take many things into account. One of those aspects is how the vehicle will ride and drive when unloaded. Especially when you are looking at a ¾ ton truck. Sure there are a number of people that are always loaded and the truck is usually working, but the vast majority of ¾ ton trucks out there live their life unloaded (most of the time).

With leaf springs, manufactures can just add overload springs or more springs to the pack. What this basically does is give you a variable spring rate. When the trucks are unloaded, only some of the springs are working but a number of them are doing nothing. Then when you add more weight to the vehicle, more of the springs are involved in carrying the weight.

See how the springs have the same even spacing between coils? This is a constant rate spring.

With a standard coil, there is no variation. Each revolution is equally spaced and the spring rate is constant through the compression of the spring. Not an ideal situation for a truck that has a load range plus or minus thousands!

So, what manufactures do, is they vary the coils. So, no longer are all the coils equally spaced. Some of the coils will be tightly packed together while others are quite far apart. Essentially, this is like have multiple coils in series. The loose coils offer a soft ride where the tighter packed coils provide big weight carrying capacity.

Notice how the coils aren’t all evenly spaced. This is a variable rate spring.

For the 2014 RAM 2500, TUFTRUCK will be releasing (in the next few weeks) an upgraded replacement coil. These coils will be variable rate so they shouldn’t sacrifice the ride comfort of the truck, but will offer more load carrying capability. While they won’t increase the load capacity of the truck itself, they are able to carry more weight without have the rear end sag.

When the rear of the truck is sagging, the driving dynamics change substantially which can be very unsafe. This is especially true in emergency braking. Having the vehicle at a proper ride height can be the difference in an accident or not.

The new coils will be debut during the upcoming SEMA Show which is the first week of November. If you are interested in finding out more information, please check out TUFTRUCK’s website or give them a call at (800) 667-6167. If you are going to the show, hit them up as they are offering a 10% discount.