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Full transcript: https://www.etrailer.com/tvinstalla...
Hey guys, it's Jake here with etrailer. Today we're gonna be taking a look at and installing the Air Lift LoadLifter 5,000, air helper springs on our 2022 Toyota Tundra. Air helper springs are going to help to support the rear end of your vehicle when you're hauling something in the bed of your truck or from the hitch. With newer trucks, they tend to have softer coil springs for a nice ride quality. But what that leads to is that anytime you put any amount of weight on the back of the truck, it's going to cause a significant amount of squat compared to the older leaf style springs that we're on older vehicles. So when hauling those heavy loads, the air helper springs are gonna help to level out your load so that your truck is not squatting in the rear and you can get your headlights pointed back down on the road and a more sound contact with the front tires on the ground.

So today we have a TRD edition but this is going to be the same application for any of the 22 Toyota Tundras. Basically what an air helper spring is, it's going to be an adjustable jounce bumper. So instead of having a jounce bumper that's always engaged or like the factory jounce bumpers you may notice, they're about six inches away from the part of the axle that it actually hits. So you have to squat six inches in order for them to engage. These are gonna be adjustable, so matter how light or heavy your load is gonna be, you're gonna be able to adjust the air pressure in the bags to match the load that you're hauling.

I have a set of airbags on my truck and I find myself, even when hauling the same load, that I find myself adjusting more and more to find a better PSI to put in the bags so that my ride is as good as it can be. Now, a quick measurement unloaded from the ground to the top inside of our wheel well here, it's gonna be about 39 1/4 inches. So we'll go ahead and load up our pontoon boat and see what that does to the squat on the truck. Now we're getting 38 1/4 inches. So, yeah, that is just an inch of squat, but this truck is already pretty well level when it's unloaded so that inch means a lot in the terms of squat.

Now speaking to how the squat affects the front, we are still loaded but we'll go ahead and take a quick measurement. We're looking at about 38 3/4 inches with our load on. So we'll go ahead and take the boat off and see what our measurement is. Now we ran over to the shop, we put about 25 pounds in each of our airbags and we can see we are right back to that factory ride height. So you can see how big a difference that just having the airbags on and with a little bit of air in 'em is enough to support the rear end.

And I can tell you we don't even have that much weight on the tongue of this or on the hitch of this truck. There's only about 350, maybe 400 pounds from the tongue of this boat. But if you get something much heavier, maybe an 8,000 pound camper or something like that, you're gonna have more like 800 to 900 pounds on the back. So having that adjustability in the bags is really gonna help you. Now one feature about these bags that will separate it from a lot of other airbag kits is that these are actually gonna have internal jounce bumpers on the inside of the bag itself. So what that does is that allows you to carry a load for a short period of time so that you can get to an air source in order to put some air in the bags. It also works as a failsafe. So if one of your bags ends up blowing or one of the lines comes loose that internal jounce bumper's gonna provide the support so you don't crush the bag. Now there is one accessory that I would always recommend when thinking about getting a set of airbags. I've had airbags for about five years now and I had 'em without an onboard air compressor and it was such a pain because you don't know when you're supposed to load the bags with the air. I did a lot of landscape side jobs, so I would have to load the air into the airbags before I left but my whole drive to pick up material was super rough. And the same thing if you're using it for camping, that's a little bit easier but you're gonna have to air up before you leave your house, if you're picking it up at a storage place. So adding an onboard air compressor is gonna allow you to change the PSI in your bags on the fly and that is priceless. So that is definitely something I'd recommend. When it comes to the installation for these airbags, it's a very straightforward installation. It should only take you a couple hours to get installed. The custom bracketry, it fits great. We didn't have to make any modifications to the veh