First, we heard it as a rumor buzzing around the Internet. Then it became official, and now we have the official press release from Boyd’s PR firm. The entire release is after the jump.
But before we get into that, let me make a comment about Boyd and his legacy.
Before his show came out […]

We reported back in January that Boyd Coddington was recovering from emergency surgery. Sadly, we’ve now heard that Boyd passed away this morning around 6 a.m. at the age of 63. Love him or hate him, he’s put his mark on the custom scene — a mark that’ll last well into the future. Our condolences […]

Now we’ll take a moment and open the floor up for questions. There are lots of questions about hydraulics,  so we’ve started out by answering the major ones, but if you have any new ones, don’t hesitate to ask in the comments section.

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.

I could write forever about the different types of setups, but I’ll go basic for you. Each combination of pumps and dumps gives you different movements, and different levels of power.
I’ll explain ‘em in this style: pump/dumps. Meaning a one pump, eight dump setup will be explained as 1/8.

Now you know that hydraulics run on pressure, but what you may not know is that hydraulic fluid isn’t compressible. That means it has no give, which equates to a pretty crappy ride. There are lots of solutions to this problem, however, which is what we’ll be talking about today.

A switch has a very simple function: it switches power from one place to another. The switches that you use with hydraulics are three-position, momentary switches.
In the neutral position, power goes nowhere — let’s call that position 2, with 1 being up, and 3 being down on the switch. In the 3 position, power […]

After the fluid from the pump exits the dump, it needs a way to travel from the dump to the cylinder, and that’s the hose. The average hose, at least one of any decent quality, is a stainless steel hose wrapped in about 1/4″ of rubber, and it holds around 5,000 PSI. That’s right, […]

You have batteries to provide power, and you have pumps that need power — so you need a way to get power from one to the other. You can’t just wire it straight through, though, because then the pump would constantly be on. So how do you do it? You use solenoids, which we’ll discuss […]

Batteries power every hydraulic setup. Some lighter vehicles can actually run one battery — even just the stock battery — while others want to run 12 batteries for more power. I usually won’t run anything less than two batteries, but it depends on the install.