Immediately after installing the Chevy 63 leaf springs at Zane's @Speedytech7 shop - with a lot of his help - and loading up the Tacoma for the trip back home, it was clear that the rear end was sitting just a tad low. In setting up the leaf packs, Zane guessed that I'd need four of the five leafs, and had kindly removed one prior to my arrival.
Upon returning home, I promptly set about removing the packs from the Tacoma and reinstalling that fifth leaf, which pushed the rear end of the truck up a couple of inches.
Restoring the pack to its full glory.
I thought that would be perfect once the truck was loaded up for a trip, but after my first trip to Death Valley in more than a year, and spending a week on the Arizona Backcountry Discovery Route, it turned out that I really only wanted to push the rear end up an inch. Two inches left the stance significantly better than it'd been with the Alcans, but still just a little too stink-bug for my tastes, especially when trying to level out the Tacoma in camp.
Hopefully, the fix is easy: remove a leaf. While this might sound like it simply returns the pack to "the way Zane had it," I'll be removing a different leaf than he did, crossing my fingers that the result will be perfect. The only problem: with the Tacoma stored in Las Vegas, I had to wait until I brought it home in order to do the work!
The way a leaf pack works - I learned from Lew, the owner of Alcan - is that the closer to the bottom of the pack you go, the more lift and support each leaf provides (assuming each leaf is the same thickness). This is somewhat counterintuitive, since leafs on the bottom of the pack are shorter than those on the top, but makes sense when a pack is disassembled and inspected.
Leafs at the bottom of the pack have more arch than those at the top, and as such are pushing up on other leafs in the pack, increasing their carrying capacity.
When we first installed the leaf pack, the 2nd leaf from the bottom had been removed from the pack. By replacing that leaf, the lift was increased by two inches, one inch more than I wanted. So, I will be removing the third leaf from the bottom this time. That should affect the lift slightly less than the second-from-the-bottom leaf, increasing the lift height to be higher than the previous four-leaf pack, but lower than the five-leaf pack.
That should be perfect, but only time - and the Tacoma being fully loaded for a trip - will tell!
A few days later: July 26, 2024
I ran the updated leaf pack on the Montana InterVANtion trip and the ride height is perfect. Of course, with the ride height being slightly lower, I now have a bit less uptravel on the shocks and it looks like I'll need to re-bump the setup and move the lower shock mounts (down) slightly.
Looking fancy, with just a bit of rake. Perfect!
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This is tremendously helpful, thank you. I'm about to pull a leaf from my leaf pack to de-stinkbug my truck and this confirms my plan to pull the lowest leaf (the overload, which the previous owner installed upside down).
Awesome, glad it was helpful for ya!
Nice fancy look you have going there, and I learned about leaf tuning.
For some of us, stinkbug is a good thing, my 100 series Cruiser has a poor departure angle. So giving it some stinkbug treatment helped that quite a bit. Also could be my growing up in the muscle car age where stinkbug was the rage. 😁
Funny, when I was a bit younger, I had - for a short period - plans to put larger tires on the rear and smaller on the front. You know, for that muscle car look.
Thank goodness I outgrew that thought. Or forgot as I got older. 😉