spazbot wrote:Ranchos are not a coil over , they might work ok on a light rig like a zook, bit they are to small and thin to be used for a big rig, sufection went through like 3 ranchos on the front of his surf when it was running them as coilovers.
They just arnt up to the task, the walls on the tube are way to thin and collapse with the weight of the vechile
Close dude, close but not quite right. Only one of them had collapsing problems, that was running a poly bush in the mounts and placed too much stress on the shock body under articulation, so it bend like a banana !! I hadn't actually noticed had i , until you *eagleeyes* were crawling around under it drooling everywhere and spotted it !!
Yes i've gona through three shocks running rancho based coilovers, and would think twice before doing it again. But it can be done properly, and dobbins were done properly. The key is to make sure the upper and lower mounts are beef, and have johnny joints, heims or something with a decent degree of misalignment to allow for forward/back/side movement as the suspension cycles.
The other thing that must be done with a rancho is to keep the coil/s away from the shock body. Just running a spacer between the two springs is NOT enough, as when they compress and squish up they will contact the shock body [in MOST cases anyway], this will result in the wall of the shock rubbing through and that's it for a rancho. The crap about being 'double walled' means nothing in this instance.
What needs to be done here, IMO is to get some plastic tube, the same ID as the shock OD and slide it over the shock, then have the spring spacer/guide machined up to match the OD of the plastic sleve. You may have to replace the plastic sleve every six months but it's alot cheaper that a shock !!!
Dobbins had addressed this issue with his so i would have no problem running them, although i wouldn't buy them, i'd buy racerunners/swayaways, something with a bigger diameter rod, and a bigger, heavier walled body. One downside to dobbins versions were they were very heavy, but as i said they were beef so if weight isn't a problem this won't worry you.
I know sam's upper/lower mounts were the $hit, not sure how he went about guarding the walls of the shock body, you'd need to speak to him about that.
HTH, Jeremy
![Very Happy :D](./images/smilies/icon_mrgreen.gif)