Just like your car, a hydraulic suspension setup needs maintenance. Lots of people seem to exaggerate the amount of work required to keep setups working well, but here we’ll give you the skinny on what it really takes.

Seals

There are all sorts of seals in a juice setup, but the two main places you’ll find them are in the dumps and the cylinders.

Dumps seals usually need to be replaced once a year, if that. Simply unscrew the dump stem from the body, and replace the seals.

Cylinder seals depend on the setup. If you’re running accumulators, you’ll go through seals faster. When you first get a setup, you’ll probably have to change the seals in three months. After that, it’s usually once every six months. You’ll know when you need to change them when the ride starts to fall.

Fluid

Hydraulic fluid can run low in the reservoir if it’s not watched. If you have a leak, or something along those lines, fluid can exit the system. Simply fill the tank with the truck dumped and all pressure out of the system.

Batteries

Batteries need to be charged or kept charged. It depends on use and the number of batteries, but I usually charge my 2/4 five-battery truck once every two to three weeks. On my four-pump, three-batt Focus I charged it once a month, and even went two months without charging it once. With a good automatic charger, you can leave it overnight. It’s really no big deal.

An alternative to charging batteries is the street charger. A street charger works off your stock alternator to keep your batteries at a constant level at all times. Good for people who don’t like to maintain things, they also make sure you’re always ready to hit switches.

Lines

If you’re running hardlines, you really don’t have to look at your lines, but with softlines, check for wear. If you find wear, what I like to do is to wrap a piece of larger rubber hose around the line and zip-tie it on, then fix the area where it wears. If it gets much worse, then you want to replace the line, or reroute it.

Solenoids

Remember I mentioned how I keep a quick-disconnect up front on my car? Remember how I mentioned that solenoids can stick? It should all be falling into place for you now. If you get really switch happy, the solenoids can heat up and stick open. This is called a runaway, as the pumps just stay on. If you disconnect power, it stops the system. That’s why I keep that disconnect handy.

Check in tomorrow for part 12: Q and A.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 12:25 pm and is filed under Custom Ride. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.