Truck Leaning Sagging or Uneven How to Inspect Leaf Spring Suspensions

So, you notice one side of your pickup truck in the rear is sagging a little bit. We want to figure out what's going on, so let's get under and take a look.

One of the first things that I always like to do whenever I'm trying to figure out how much something's sagging is to just take a quick measurement. Everybody's got one of these tape measures. We'll just kind of give a rough estimate. I'm looking at about 33 inches on this side. I'm going to go over to the other side and I want to measure at the same area. Looks like I'm just over 34 inches, which essentially means I'm approximately an inch lower on the passenger side. Your condition might be a little bit different. Might be more or less, but that's what I'm dealing with. So, let's get under the vehicle.

So, we made our way underneath the truck here, and what we're paying attention to is this area right here. This is considered your leaf springs, and it's gonna run from in front of your differential, right about here, across, and out to the back, where you have some shackles. And these are meant to pivot. Typically, if your leaf spring goes bad, you're going to find a break right along this area here. This is called your U-bolt, and that's what holds the leaf spring to your rear differential tubing. Generally, if you find a crack right along this area, it's probably gonna run straight on through, and more than likely, this piece right here is gonna actually come free and it can pivot around. Theoretically, even after a long period of time, it might even work its way out of there, potentially fall out and hit the ground, and who knows what after that? Or even start falling out and pivot until it hits up against the tire, which, of course, would be very bad.

So, if you're driving down the road, you hit a big old bump, and you hear a pong come from the rear, you definitely want to get out back and you want to check both of your leaf springs. You have one on the passenger side and you'll also have one over on the driver side. You want to make sure both of them are in good condition. Typically, if you happen to notice that your truck is sagging on one side or the other, it's more than likely due to either the leaf spring on one side, especially the sagging side, or even the shock on that particular side as well. Having leaf springs in the rear, you're obviously going to have shocks in the front as well. Those shocks, if one of those is bad, if the left front is sagging down a little bit, it's going to lift up a little bit more on the right rear, and vice versa. So, if it seems like one side in the rear's sitting low, but you don't see any issues here, go ahead to the front and double-check those front shocks. You want to make sure that the coil springs, if you have coil springs on the front, are good.

So, now that we talked about checking for cracks along both sides, especially along these U-bolts here...you want to look on that side as well, by the way...we're going to just kind of take a quick scan coming along here. You want to look and make sure that you see these nice plastic pitons in between there. Those are vibration dampeners. If they're missing, you could hit a bump and you hear "ping ping ping ping" because that's because these two pieces are hitting. There's going to be a couple of them coming up along the line, and they're just supposed to kind of separate those.

Let's keep moving along to this area right here, which is called the shackle, which is what I mentioned earlier. This is going to be super important because as your suspension is going up and down and flexing, this needs to be able to pivot in and out, and that's going to help you have control of your vehicle. If these bushings are dry rotted and cracked, like these ones are, they're very bad actually, that's definitely gonna be an issue, where this is probably going to be either too stiff or even too loose, in which case you won't have very good stability on the road. You might also find that the metal itself is rotted. This one's just flaking. But if you look at this picture, you're going to be able to see that there's actually a very big potential that they could rot out. It's very common, and that's something that you're going to want to pay attention to.

Okay, friends, so that's pretty much what I've got for you about diagnosing a saggy rear end in a pickup truck. Pickup trucks are generally going to have a leaf spring in the back as opposed to a regular automobile, which is going to have coil springs and probably shocks in the rear. The reason why the pickup trucks are going to have leaf springs is because they're overall a little bit more heavy-duty and, of course, you'd want to carry a little bit more weight in the back of a pickup truck rather than in the trunk of your sedan.

With that said, I hope you learned a little something in this video. If you did and you want to talk about it, leave it in the comment section below, because I always love to hear from you. If you like the video, smash on that like button for me. It would mean the world. While you're at it, why don't you go ahead and subscribe, and ring the bell? That way there, you can be kept up with all of our latest content. Thanks.