ADS Off-Road Racing Shocks - Information, Pictures, & BS Thread

Don’t have the specs...

 

The specs for the ads sorry

 

What did your rebuild cost, and was it just the rears?

 

$340 + shipping. Fronts only.

 

That's not bad considering the shafts were probably $70-$90 each.

 

Finally got around to building a set of 3.0 Coilovers for the wife's 4runner. Everything fits perfect and stuffed some 285/75/17s on there. We are also trying out a new top out spring to help keep the shocks from making as much noise when they hit full extension under hard use, especially when your pushing the lift height and have limited down travel.

 

@Moots34 @SpeySquatch

Did you guys make any progress in getting the harsh drop in cracks/potholes figured out?

I took mine on a couple pretty basic trails yesterday and when dropping a wheel in a hole or coming off a rock it was extremely harsh and accompanied by a pretty loud bang. Almost as if the wheel was dropping without any damping in the drop. This was with clickers at 7 clicks and only seemed to affect the front.

I increased the damping to 14 on the front which helped a lot but I still got some occasional harshness when the wheel would drop quickly.

I spoke with Tyler at ADS about how I have my coils set, running more preload than they ship, and he confirmed they should be fine.

I’d hate to have to lower them down a bit, it feels more damping related. Maybe the digressive rebound is just not what I need, in which case I’ll be very disappointed.

 

Can someone elaborate on where the idea that ADS was digressive on rebound came from? I’m not finding that information from any source.

 

I guess I’m just following what I’ve heard, I haven’t seen documentation either and they don’t spell it out on their site

Good point, thanks for bringing that up

@M C M can you speak to this?

 

Either way, what you’re experiencing is a harsh top out because you have minimal down travel at ride height. I’ve seen this with all shock manufacturers. The shock is the limiting factor is these setups.

 

You're just running out of down travel. Probably stuff you can do to make it softer, but no amount of shock tuning is gonna fix lack of droop due to suspension geometry limitations

 

This is the very thing that he was trying to solve in his post. A negative spring would assist in this harsh top out.

 

How many miles are on your shocks? If you haven’t hit 1000 miles then they probably aren’t broken in. I do agree that adjusting the clickers more helps with bumps at speed. I set mine at 10-12 for daily driving in the front. They seem to be pretty darn smooth to me, but I have like 7k miles on mine

 

Probably also that the Tacoma really doesn’t have that much travel in its components (stock or aftermarket) regardless unless One went LT

 

It doesn’t and if you do a 3” lift it has even less down travel than factory. We are only working with 5” shocks with stock length equipment. If you lift your truck 3”, you’ve lost 1 1/2” of down travel or 30%, assuming it’s a 2:1 ratio.

 

I’m at about 2.25” over stock.

The down travel has always been harsh, even when not topping out. I mean 1/2” to 1” drops or pavement imperfections are quite a bit harsher than I expected. It’s not always topping out.

Do the 2.5” coils have a top out spring like @M C M has on the 3”?

It’s like the wheel drops completely uncontrolled and slams into the end of the travel.

***im trying to learn here, asking questions. Not trying to be argumentative

 

For the sake of the conversation, the ADS I’m currently working on are not digressive on rebound...

 

Exactly why i did 1.5” of lift (about 7/8” preload)

 

Is that default config or after you adjusted them?

 

How many miles on your coils. They are harsh before they are broken in. My OME were a lot harsher than my ADS