GEN 1 Fox 3.0’s and IWE longevity??

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Hasty

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Any concerns in killing my IWEs early than normal when going to Fox 3.0s? I understand they have an increase of .5” in shock length which is where you pickup the extra 1” travel over stock. I’m looking to increase performance but not necessarily decrease reliability.

Thanks!


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Trick.Raptor

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IWE failures are completely different issue and it doesn't matter what type of shock you run. It's the CV joints you have to worry about when you increase the pre-load on the OEM 2.5 shocks or any other shock you are running.

Running the 3.0 shocks out of the box with factory pre-load settings will be fine. You can even increase the pre-load so the front sits at the mid-perch of the 2.5 shocks and you will be fine.

You won't start to see any CV joint issues until you go with enough pre-load that brings you to what would be top-perch on the 2.5 shock. Even then it won't be much of an issue if you don't go off-road.

I did increase the pre-load on my 3.0's more and more until I got to what is about top-perch and it took about 7 months of hard off-roading before I started seeing CV issues... First issue for was drivers side inner boot failed and I found the outer CV joint was bad. The 2nd was the passenger outside boot failure however the CV joints where good so we just put new inner/outer boots on.

However I do believe it was a combination of things that led to my CV issues including 95k on them with lots of off-road runs. IWE and IWE vacuum hose failures and some front diff issues.

I ended up going with IWE eliminators, a bearing/shim/seal rebuild of the front diff to address some slop in the 3rd member and reducing the pre-load to mid-perch and all is good.

All said my case is on the extreme side my Raptor spends a lot of time in the dirt so I consider some of the issues just maintenance from off-road abuse.


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Hasty

Hasty

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Awesome, that’s the detailed feedback that I was looking for with the answer I wanted to hear!


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