Thread: Changing the Height of a Defender

Originally Posted by Reads90

Drivers side are always heavier than the passenger side.

This is why even when you buy OME or Dobinsons they are labeled for passenger side and drivers side.

Front and rear

Says who?
Mine has always had the slightly longer springs on the passengers side. They compensate for the camber of the road to make the vehicle sit more level.

Originally Posted by Dougal

Says who?
Mine has always had the slightly longer springs on the passengers side. They compensate for the camber of the road to make the vehicle sit more level.

Wouldn't he mean heavier - as in higher tensile- rather than longer?
My understanding is the passenger side is slightly longer & driver side heavier duty to compensate for driver weight..

Originally Posted by DeeJay

Wouldn't he mean heavier - as in higher tensile- rather than longer?
My understanding is the passenger side is slightly longer & driver side heavier duty to compensate for driver weight..

Yeah that what I mean

Originally Posted by DeeJay

Wouldn't he mean heavier - as in higher tensile- rather than longer?
My understanding is the passenger side is slightly longer & driver side heavier duty to compensate for driver weight..

All the springs are going to be made from the same tensile strength wire and have the same material stiffness.

The possible differences are the number of coils and the length. The spring rate is always the same on either side of an axle, otherwise you'll get some really undesirable ride and handling problems.

This leaves us with the length. Which is always factory fitted longer on the passenger side to compensate for road camber.
The "carry the drivers weight" thing is an old wives tale which keeps getting repeated but fails every logic test and is inconsistent with every factory vehicle setup.

In my experience with rovers, the passenger to driver side springs, are usually longer on the driver side, but otherwise identical spring rate.

Some aftermarket springs also follow that convention, while on the other hand some are identical P/S & D/S.

Over time it is very common for the driver's side to sag more than the passenger side. I have never noticed any sag more on the passenger side, not saying it can't happen if the vehicle was consistently loaded more on that side (and I am aware that land rovers have the motor and gearbox offset to the left).

Over the years I have done many spring swaps than I care to count, and it is surprising the difference in height/sag of the D/S spring after relatively short periods of use. If I put used springs back in, I always select the longer one to go in the driver side, and that is usually opposite to how they came out.

I don't see any good reason for putting a longer spring on the passenger side to compensate for road camber. Why would you want to?

IMHO the potential for greater sag on the driver's side is the only reason for using different spring heights when new.

My 85 RRC always had a significant sag to the drivers side (1-2 inches). Most of the classic rangies of this period did.
In the US, despite the drivers being on the other side, they still lean to the right. Giving material for all sorts of fat wife jokes.

In my 85 I traced this lean to not the springs, but the front axle and radius arms. The radius arm brackets on the front axle were misaligned. If I jacked up the chassis the axle did not hang level. If I removed the axle, the radius arm on the right side of the axle would point higher. Swapping the radius arms from side to side made no difference.

For years I fought this with an extra 1" spacer on the spring. But then I fitted axles from a 97 discovery. By then landrover appeared to have sorted out their radius arm brackets.
This 97 axle had both radius arms sitting level. If I jacked up the vehicle on the chassis the axle hung straight.

And since then with equal length springs the vehicle sits level. The springs I have now have what I presume is natural variation in length of about 10mm. I put these in the LHS.
I level my EAS rangie to be 5-10mm lower on the RHS (measuring these is not an exact science).
Every japanese car I've owned sits 5-10mm lower on the RHS. I haven't measured the euro, it's seldom in the garage.