Air Lift 1000 Air Helper Springs for Coil Springs - Rear

Video Transcript for Air Lift 1000 Rear Coil Springs Air Helper Springs Installation - 2020 Nissan Pathfinder

Hey everybody, Ryan here at etrailer. Today on our 2020 Nissan Pathfinder we're gonna be showing you how to install the Air Lift 1000 Air Helper Springs for the rear axle. But before we get into that, let's just take a minute check 'em out and make sure that they're gonna work for you. Underneath your Pathfinder, this is what the air springs are gonna look like once you have 'em installed. And the way they worked is really simple. Essentially they just fit inside of your factory coil spring.

And so once you inflate 'em full of air it's going to provide additional support. And these are adjustable from five psi up to 35 psi. And so you can kind of fine tune 'em to your particular liking or whatever you're hauling. So obviously, you know, if you got something heavier you probably wanna put more air in 'em, something a little more light, less air. These are going to require a minimum of five psi regardless.

So just keep that in mind, especially on those, you know those fall evenings and mornings, whenever it's warm out and gets cool and pressure kind of drops it's not a bad idea to keep an eye on 'em. To make adjusting 'em a little bit easier maintenance, you can pair these up with a compressor. Just keep in mind a lot of those compressors are pretty powerful and you don't want to exceed that 35 psi cuz you have more in that in this bag, you know you could potentially cause damage and things of that nature. So what these are mainly gonna be used for is to prevent the back of your pathfinder from sagging or squatting down. You know, we've all been there before and if you're watching this, you're probably wondering how to fix that issue but you load it up, our pulling a trailer around the back starts sagging and you know it's just causing unnecessary wear and tear on your suspension and your tires and it affects everything honestly.

So by putting these in here, you can fill 'em up full air, you know, get some additional support get your vehicle back up to the factory ride height and have a much better towing experience. There is another option for those of you that are looking for some additional support. There's actually a Firestone brand bag very very similar to this. And to compare the two, you know not really a huge difference there. They're pretty much the same, at least in my opinion.

I do kinda like the Firestone's fittings a little bit better. That's just me. But either way, you know, I mean these are gonna get the job done and help out whenever you're towing or or hauling around heavy items. As far as getting these installed, really straightforward, you know, you let the vehicle suspension hang so jack it up by the frame and then you'll kind of suck all the air outta the bag, the air springing and then just put it in the coil run your lines and that's really about it. So no special tools or anything really required. And if you're interested in seeing how that's done feel free to follow along. We'll go ahead and put the bags in together now. To begin your installation, you're gonna be underneath the back of your Pathfinder and you want to jack it up by the frame. All right. That way your suspension will hang and you'll have you know, adequate space here in your coil spring because this is where the airbags are actually gonna go. So just be sure to use, you know, proper safety precautions jack stands and so on. But to get this in there we're gonna have to do a couple of things and it's easier if we go over to the work bench and get our bag sorted. So if you take your bag, pull the cap off of it what you're gonna want to do is try to smash this down as much as you can. Get all the air out of it and then put that cap back on. And then that will allow us to kind of move this around and get it jammed inside of the coil spring. So to help things out a little bit, I sprayed this area now with some soapy water. And pretty straightforward here, we're just going to bend this, make sure we put it in the right way. You want the fitting to face down towards the ground I'll just sneak that in, until we get it inside of the spring. And then we should be able to kind of pull that cap off, let the air in it and just kinda make sure this is positioned how it should be. See, want it to look just like that. So now we can take this little protector and this is gonna go on the bottom of the bag and that way our air fitting will pass through that opening there. So pretty straightforward you can just kinda work it into position. We'll line that hole up and then we'll take our air spring and just push that down flat to it. So now we can take our airline and what you're gonna do there's these little clamps that come with it. You squeeze that, you'll be able to place it over the line and then you're just going to push your air tube over that fitting. Make sure it's all the way up there. And obviously once we have that over the fitting we'll come back and work or clamp on it. At this point, you'd simply just repeat this same process over on the other side to get that airbag installed. And then from there we can start to route our airlines to our inflation fitting. So I'll get these routed and show you the path that I took to get there. So I got our airline routed and you can follow the instructions too. They tell you to zip tie it up like this and give yourself a little slack, you know, cause this control arm is gonna move around. But then just routed it up along through here use some zip ties to secure it. And here's where it drops down. I think we're gonna mount our inflation valve replace this plastic fitting with it. So I'm just gonna let this hang and we'll go over to the passenger side, I'll show you how I routed that one. On the passenger side, here comes our airline. And one thing, the note over here, they give you a little heat shield. You can put that on the airline in this area where exhaust comes through, but pretty much the same deal just run it up along through there. And then I have it just kind of essentially just running along the top of our trailer hitch. So to get our inflation valve mounted up I'm gonna remove this push pin fastener. So you just take a flat head screw driver and pry underneath it, it'll pop out. And then what you can do is take the valve and you're gonna thread on one of the nuts there, push it right on through. And you're gonna put on the rubber washer followed by a flat washer and then this star washer and then the nut. And I'll just snug that down. You can do it by hand with a half inch socket. You don't have to crank down on it by any means, but get it snug. And since we're gonna be running both of our bags and do one fitting that way they'll fill up at the same rate. And now we can grab the little T fitting tie the two lines together and then eventually connect them to the back of our valve. So I started to kind of prep everything it's just gonna make it a lot easier. You're gonna have the plastic T fitting. All right, and I cut maybe like a eight inch piece of line, push that line over the T portion, put on a clamp other end of the hose, get your clamp on. And then the two hoses from the airbags. I also put clamps on just so everything's kind of prepped all at once and it's gonna be pretty straightforward. So airbag hose into one end, other airbag that end. And then this will go to our inflation valve. So we need to push all these on just like we did on the airbag. These ones are really tight, so kind of just a quick pointer, you can put some heat to the hose, a heat gun or even a hair dryer. It doesn't take much. You don't want to get this thing cooking, but just a little bit, Just to kind of make it warm to the touch almost. Like I said, you don't wanna stall the thing or compromise it. So that just softens it up and makes it a lot more manageable to slide that end over. So I'll get that one on. Get our clamp in place. Then I'll do the same thing for this one here. Now all that's left to do is put this end onto our inflation valve. And for our inflation valve we'll work the exact same way. Now that we have everything hooked up we can inflate the system to 30 psi. That way we can check for leaks. To check for leaks. Obviously you can listen for 'em but another way it can take soapy water and spray down all of our connections. So on the bottom of the bag all the T fittings, inflation valve all that stuff that we did where we made any connection spray it down. And what you're looking for is for bubbles to be rapidly and consistently forming around there. And if you see that, that'll indicate a leak. Now obviously you're gonna have some from just spraying it on there, but as long as they don't continue to grow and keep forming you know that everything is sealed up. If you do happen to have a leak take the air out of the system, recut the line, get it back on the fitting again, and clamp everything back down. And that should correct the issue. And that'll finish up our look at and our installation of the Air Lift 1000 Air Helper Springs on our 2020 Nissan Pathfinder..