Petersens off-road magazine did a feature on the Raptor a few months back and they noticed a really cool feature in a picture of the front shock cutaway.
It seems as if the lower spring perch on the front Fox shocks isn't connected to the shock body, but merely slips over it. It sits in place using circlips, just like installing MM coilovers on the rear of an IRS cobra. The shock body is grooved, a circlip sits in the groove, then the spring perch slides over it and sits on the clip. Well the cutaway shows not just one, but three grooves in the shock. The spring perch is sitting on the lowest groove in stock form.
All it would take is a spring compressor to compress the spring, then you could slide the perch up off the circlip, move the circlip to a higher groove and put everything back together. Moving this up one groove might effectively raise up the front end of your Raptor and level it out.
The only problem I see with this is changing the spring rate since you are preloading the spring more than normal. If you can find a slightly shorter spring with the same rate to put in there, I guess that problem is solved. You'll also run into spring bind quicker since it's compressed a bit more than normal. These might not be huge problems depending on how far apart the grooves are, but I don't have a Raptor to look at myself. Oh, and I take no responsibility in what happens if you do this mod, just letting you know what it says in the magazine.
Anyone wanna try this out or at least confirm the grooves are there in stock form?
:beer:
It seems as if the lower spring perch on the front Fox shocks isn't connected to the shock body, but merely slips over it. It sits in place using circlips, just like installing MM coilovers on the rear of an IRS cobra. The shock body is grooved, a circlip sits in the groove, then the spring perch slides over it and sits on the clip. Well the cutaway shows not just one, but three grooves in the shock. The spring perch is sitting on the lowest groove in stock form.
All it would take is a spring compressor to compress the spring, then you could slide the perch up off the circlip, move the circlip to a higher groove and put everything back together. Moving this up one groove might effectively raise up the front end of your Raptor and level it out.
The only problem I see with this is changing the spring rate since you are preloading the spring more than normal. If you can find a slightly shorter spring with the same rate to put in there, I guess that problem is solved. You'll also run into spring bind quicker since it's compressed a bit more than normal. These might not be huge problems depending on how far apart the grooves are, but I don't have a Raptor to look at myself. Oh, and I take no responsibility in what happens if you do this mod, just letting you know what it says in the magazine.
Anyone wanna try this out or at least confirm the grooves are there in stock form?
:beer:
