I just finished changing out the air springs and shock on my 4.6 HSE. The job itself was very quick, probably about 4 hours start to finish. Both my springs and shocks were very much Land Rover originals (marked as Land Rover products). I replaced them with a set of Arnott Gen 2 springs and Boge shocks. I was told by the supplier I purchased from that the Boge shocks were actually what Land Rover used, they just rebadged them as their own. I don't know if this is true or not, but either way the Boges were $52 each, as opposed to $85-95 each for the ones with the Land Rover logo on them. I have finished test driving the vehicle, and at this point it appears that the repair has been a success. Furthermore, the thing rides and handles like a new truck. I really found this to be a quick an easy repair. Furthermore, I believe that this is a significantly safer operation than doing it on vehicle with coil springs, because you don't have the coil spring compressed and filled with a lot of potential energy which can be very dangerous if your holding mechanism ceases functioning. Plus I have always found that compressing coil springs is a royal pain, and you can never quite get them compressed enough. With these, you just release the air from them and you're done.

I didn't completely remove all air from the system as I'm supposed to. Instead what I did was I had the battery disconnected (might not be necessary, but I had it disconnected anyway for other reasons), and was simply very careful with removal of the air hoses at each spring. If you do this right, you can get it to bleed the air out of each spring slowly. This allows you to keep air in the tank, and prevents you from having to run the compressor for a long time when you start up the truck afterwards.

I found that the rear springs have no desire to come off of their top mounts. I had to use a prybar here to get them loose. Be VERY careful, as there are some other hard plastic lines in the area on both springs, and you really don't want to hit those. I did (specifically the one to the air tank on the passenger side). Here's the advantage of leaving air in the tank: You immediately know when you hit the line going to it! The loud and long "woosh" noise sure helped pinpoint the problem.

The result was a nick in the side of the plastic line. I solved this by going to Lowes and purchasing some high-strength epoxy (claims 2600 psi clamping strength), mixing it together, and then applying it around the affected area using a gloved hand. The result ended up being a band-aid of epoxy going around the line. I let it harden for a few hours, and then shorted the two wires for the compressor, making it run for a while to ensure that it appeared to hold air. Once this appeared successful, I put the rest of the truck back together. I started the truck, leaving the driver's door open (in order to prevent the EAS from doing anything other than running the compressor), and waited some 10 minutes for the compressor to shut off. Once it did, I closed the driver's door and hit the "up" button to let it do its thing (the rear was still on stands since the springs had not been inflated, and the fronts had already been inflated) and success! Turned the truck off, put the wheel back on, took it off stands, and took it for a test drive. Upon return, I heard a leaking noise from the passenger rear, and feared it was my epoxy job gone bad. Nope, turned out that I hadn't inserted the plastic line hard enough into the spring. Got it in there harder, did another test drive, and all appears well. If this doesn't hold, I'll try a compression fitting, but I didn't know at the time what the size of the line was, and I wasn't certain if I could use a compression fitting without potentially breaking the line.

Anyways, hope this helps anyone looking to do the spring job anytime soon.

 

Was this to eleiminate the air system and go with a regular shock and spring system? Thanks