Setting Up Your Firestone Ride-Rite Extreme Duty Rear Air Helper Springs - 2025 GMC Sierra 3500

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Hey neighbors, Kevin here at etrailer, and today we're gonna be showing you how to install the Firestone Ride-Rite Red Label Extreme Duty Air Helper Springs here on our 2025 GMC Sierra 3500. So even though the 3500s are typically gonna come with a really stiff suspension to help handle those heavy loads that you're probably gonna be taking along with you when you're in this truck, there can still be the need for some sort of suspension help once you're hauling those heavier duty trailers. So if you're a contractor and you've got some large equipment that you got on the trailer, maybe a excavator, something a little bit larger, maybe you're just throwing a lot of heavy stuff in the bed, maybe you got a bunch of toolboxes, things that are gonna really weigh it down and put a lot more pressure on the rear axle instead of just the front axle, then adding in some air helper springs so that you can fine tune your adjustment and eliminate that sag is gonna be a major game changer. These air springs are gonna have the double convoluted design, so that's where you see how it has the two kind of bulbs going for the whole air bellow here. It's gonna have custom fit brackets, and honestly this is one of the easier installs that I've kind of gone through with some air springs because it's just gonna clamp right up to your factory jounce bumper. You're not cutting anything off, you're not drilling into the frame.

Honestly, you're just kind of piecing a few parts together bracket wise, there really isn't a whole lot of hardware here to get this in place. So this is a pretty nice install, and with the bags being the heavier end of our air spring selection here, this is gonna have a 7,500 pound load leveling capacity. Now it doesn't mean that you can just throw 7,500 pounds in the bed of your truck and be good to take off because your truck does still have a limit for the pin weight that it can handle. So you're gonna wanna definitely make sure that you double check your owner's manual, check your glove box. Typically GM likes to hide some stickers in there that'll have some more information that you're gonna need to fine tune exactly what your towing capacity is.

So that way you're not overloading the vehicle because like I said, even though the airbags can handle it, your suspension might not be able to. Since these are the extreme duty, these are gonna have a much higher PSI rating. These are gonna range all the way from the bottom at five PSI to help protect the bag when you're unloaded and then all the way up to 150 PSI to get that full 7,500 pounds of load leveling capacity. Now, typically most air springs are gonna max out at 100 PSI and a lot of the compressors do as well. So when you are picking up your onboard compressor, you definitely wanna make sure that you're picking out one that's gonna be able to give you that full capacity out of the air springs.

Our neighbor today wanted a very specific air compressor and it only goes up to 100 PSI, but he's stated that he's not gonna go over that 100 PSI. He's never had to in the past with any of his other trucks. So he's fine with doing that. If you are, that's totally fine as well. Just know that you won't get the full capacity out of your bags.

So to give you an idea of how this all works, we're gonna show you, this is the factory ride height right now. We'll take a measurement of it. And that comes out to right at around 40 and a quarter. And that's just from the ground up to the bottom of our wheel well liner. And then when we come over here to the back, we're sitting right at 42 and a quarter. So we got a two inch difference between our front and rear axle. And now when we put the weight of our trailer on it, we should start to see this sag down. Now we've only got about 600-ish pounds of ton weight with this trailer. So it's really not gonna sag this down like some of the heavier trailers really would. And we're fully on it now. And that dropped us down to 41 and a quarter. So that dropped us an inch. And up front, so it raised us up a quarter inch because now we're at 40 and a half. So that's just kind of an example of, when you start loading up your truck, you're gonna start to see the back sag down and then the front lift up. And as that load is shifted from the front