Had a long overdue visit to see my good friend's at Apex Overland today...
First up was a fresh set of Falken Wildpeak A/T
4W's; still 255/80/17s. I found a cut in the sidewall of one of my rear tires, and since they have 22k miles on them I didn't want to permanently mix one fresh tire and one (almost) half life tire. Secondly, since the A/T3Ws are no longer produced, I also didn't want a mis-match between fronts and rears. The only logical (
) solution was to replace 1 bad and 3 perfectly good tires with new ones.
Next were a set of heavier OEM springs to regain some of the height that was lost from adding weight (winch mount, winch, sliders, storage system, roof rack, weight on the roof, etc), especially since more weight is coming in soon (LRA rear tank and perhaps some Agile skids). My truck came with green circle/green triangle springs (
chart available here), and I went with purple circles up front (3 steps heavier) and blue triangles in the back (2 steps heavier). I wanted the black triangle rear springs, but at the time of ordering them last month, they weren't available. If I were doing it over again, at my current weight I would have gone with blue circles up front (2 steps heavier than my stock) as the front is just a bit higher than I'd like (we'll see if it settles, they only have about 35 miles and 6 hours on them now). Cost on the OEM springs is not insignificant. For the four springs it was ~$1450, but all of them were (very surprisingly) in stock in the US!
With the install of the springs I also installed a set of Koni's Raid adjustable shocks. These things are
massive and beefy. It has been 15+ years since I ran Konis, but I had more than a few sets on my autocross and track prepped cars back in the day. I didn't know Koni had shocks available for the Grenadier until a few months ago when I got a phone call saying a set had arrived with my name on them. Full disclosure because I feel like transparency in this industry is lacking, I did not pay for these shocks. They were provided to the shop that installed them as a promotion, when I got a phone call asking if I wanted a set of shocks, I said absolutely. With that being said, everything else from this visit was regularly priced, including the install.
Initial thoughts after 35ish miles of driving. Wow. I was afraid I had oversprung the front and thus expected some jarring over expansion joints (more so than the typical, as this is one of the Grenadier's weak points IMO); but a mix of highway, residential, and city/suburban surface streets has proven that to be a non-issue. We set the shocks to the middle of their range of adjustment (they can only be adjusted off the vehicle, and while this doesn't take
that long, I figured the middle was a safe place to start) and they are both supple and composed. Quick harsh hits like expansion joints, potholes, and manhole covers are much more smoothly absorbed without transferring the jolt into the cabin. Sweeping highway off ramps at speed are also not overly soft or squishy, nor are they filled with body roll.
If you're just doing shocks the install is quite fast (even with the springs it was only around half a day, but they've done lots of Grenadier suspensions at this point) and no alignment is necessary.
I wish I had taken more pics of the suspension while installing, but this is the only one I took:
View attachment 7890462
I'm positive the Apex Overland socials will have the comparison pictures of the stock Sachs dampers and the Koni Raid dampers, I'll steal those as soon as they are posted and add them here. For instance, the Koni's use slightly offset mounts on the bottom of the rear shocks because otherwise the diameter of the shock would prevent it from fitting
