C10 with Hydraulic Suspension Can Lay Frame and Carve Corners
This suspension from Finnegan’s Garage‘s Mike Finnegan is like a hydraulic lift and coilover all in one.
Air suspensions are always a favorite of many due to their ability to offer a wide range of ride heights and overall ability to be adjusted. But the main pitfall of riding on air is that a car’s handling characteristics change with respective ride height. Not in a raised-center-of-gravity type of way, but in the sense that the essential “spring rate” of the air suspension usually softens at lower settings, and stiffens at higher settings.
One of the ways to fix this is with a hydraulic system. This isn’t your low-rider type of hydraulic system, because it actually combines the benefits of a coilover with the benefits of hydraulically-adjusted right height.
For those familiar with the Finnegan’s Garage series and Mike Finnegan‘s C10 build, you’ll know he’s been looking for a solution to this problem, and in this video we can see it in action.
Installing the new suspension goes in hand with also installing an entirely new front clip for the car. This front clip is mandrel-bent, and as with anything custom-made, it needed a bit of fab work to get it to fit.
Finnegan also lays out all the components for the install. Obviously there are pumps, lines and hardware to be installed, and it’ll be routed in a completely different way than the air suspension.
Made by Mittler Brothers, Finnegan explains how this setup would solve his ride and handling issues and noting how the main difference for this system is that “the mount for the coilover is fully adjustable.” When you think of it as a mount, rather than a moving part of the suspension, you can see where the real benefits are. Overall, the system can be fully closed or fully extended and the spring rate never changes.
