Greetings to all!

I have a '96 Range Rover with 135,000 miles. Rear end was sagging (the Rangie, not mine!) and I ignored it. About a month later, driving to work, the car just wouldn't pump up and I got an EAS fault! AARRGGHH!!

Looked around and decided to buy two new air springs from Arnott Industries. I got the 2nd generation springs. They were about the same price as the originals, and quite less than the 3rd generation springs. I also decided to replace the bump stops with new poly stops. Wonderful people there, the woman I spoke with cut me slack on the $6 shipping of the stops (hey, every little bit helps). Since I was down, I had them next-day shipped. By golly, they arrived 11 am the next day. Took the afternoon off and went to work on it.

I've done basic work on my cars forever, but I'm no mechanic by any means. This was a pretty easy job. It would have been easier if the car wasn't in fault mode, though. You have to depressurize the system, but since I couldn't put it in kneel mode (essentially bleeding the air out) I had to carefully unscrew the bolt in the air tank. Next, jacked up Rangie on the left rear side. You don't have to take off the wheel or the plastic inner liner. It *might* make it a little easier, but not necessary. Using a long, skinny flat-headed screwdriver, I pressed on the collar holding the air line in. I couldn't get it at first, so I took a wire hanger, bent a small J-hook in it, and used that to pull on the air hose as I pressed the collar and it came out. I used the same hook to grab the upper clip and it came right out. I then got under and pulled the lower clip out. Woohoo, I did it! Uh, not quite. The bottom came out real easy, but the top was a bugger! I have a buddy who helps me with stuff like this, but he wasn't around. I thought, what would Jim do? Usually when I'm stuck he comes over, looks at it and whacks it with a hammer. I wound up using a long, thin but sturdy screwdriver to go from the wheel well and touch the top of the spring. A few whacks with a hammer and a couple of expletives later, the old spring came out!

The spring was definitely shot. I purposely didn't buy just the bellows because I wasn't sure about how to get the old spring apart (I hear it's a bi%*h to do) and I wasn't sure how good the air hose connector was. I repeated the above procedure on the other side.
Installing the spring was very easy, except for one stupid mistake on my part. The air springs come "rolled up", meaning they are ready to install and they're not fully extended to the point there is no curl. I was testing the air hose connection on one side and I didn't have the spring fully installed. I manually jumped the EAS to start the compressor and open the valve. Darn, I fully extended the spring. Called Arnott and they told me to install it as best I could and I'd have to play around with extending/compressing the spring until it curled properly. Again, the nice folks there told me if I couldn't get it, ship it back and they'd do it on a special press. I finally got it all together, manually inflated the suspension and went to the LR dealer. 10 minutes and $93 later, they cleared the fault. Grrrr, I know they're not into charity, but they charged me an hour's labor.

The car rides like a dream! I will soon replace the front springs so I don't have a reoccurrence of the EAS fault. I'd recommend anyone to replace their springs. It's easy, Arnott is very helpful and sells a quality product that has a lifetime warranty, and I have the air suspension benefits instead of a coil spring conversion.

Steve Olson

 

Thats great to read you were able to tackle this on your own instead of going to the Stealership... Wish you were closer, I'd drive mine over so you could help me do it.. :-)

Whats next??

 

That was an encouraging write up. Congrats on a mechanical job well done. Most posts concerning Range Rovers deal mostly with how fast to run to the dealer, and I'm glad someone out there tackled a job on their own.