Date: 05/29/2009

Carli Suspension, Inc Engineers Proprietary Shock Piston Designs

Beyond Suspension...

One thing that remains a constant in this arena is the fact that Carli Suspension, Inc continues to look deep and pull out products that are just more well thought out specifically for the Dodge Ram. Upper ball joints, custom inverted King 2.0 hydro bumps, long travel airbags, lower ball joints (coming soon) and the rest of the system component family are hallmarks of the Carli brand. It's been an adventure to watch how quickly things turn a corner when you take a bit of a chance.

Why did we do it?

The suspension tuning had been at an all time high for over a year running... it seemed like every time you walk into the shop, the guys are staring down the front of a Dodge Ram and talking about how well the Bilstein 2.65 shock brought a level of performance that forced an answer out of the King's. The 3.0 line of King's have gone through an incredible amount of R&D and at one point, we had 5 rigs in the dirt, with 5 different tunes and even our weekends in Mexico were consumed by this topic. Sage has always spearheaded the development of the King product lines and Mike has been focusing on the Bilstein's for a quite a while... and from an inner point of view, there was no clear winner. There are so many positive things to say about both manufacturers that you can't knock either, but that doesn't mean the conversation's over. That's how it is down at Carli Suspension... it's always bleeding out a new edge.

There's been a silent and friendly competition between the guys at the Carli shop. Bilstein vs. King as far as how much all around, real world, performance can you suck out of a custom length shock for an 8,000 pound diesel that likes whoops but has to make it to work on Monday - and do both, superior to any alternative. That's the identity of Carli Suspension. What happened is almost too convenient... the two sides started talking about what they're doing, what they tried and what happened - constantly. This lead to a King tune that utilized something inherit to a Bilstein piston design... and a breakthrough. Things started to pick up and we quickly found the performance spectrum and had it dialed in from being a modest driver out for play... all the way to rolling 5 deep in a Megacab doing hotlaps in Glamis through the biggest ATV whoops we could hit on the way back to camp. But still, that wasn't it. The more things came together, the more it started sounding like there was something that wasn't being looked at. Oh yeah, that's because it didn't exist, yet.

The best of both worlds...

The Bilstein's had more adjustability with free bleed through their piston and shim stack design. The King's always delivered smooth dampening transitions and we've taken them to their limits and we've only been impressed by them in many ways. So what if we had a King piston that had Bilstein characteristics and while we're at it, we might as well build a whole new method of controlling fluid that offers 5 times the level of control? Oh, plus the tweaks that were on the radar for a year. Well there you have it - that was the objective of this engineering... and you know what? They did it.

What it does...

It's still a shock piston, fluid passes through it and you can control flow and speed with shim techniques. So what's the big deal? Real world suspension tuning. Every shock manufacturer brings down their flagship race technology and applies it to their major applications. So we're running the same piston that was designed for hitting bumps at high speed in a race scenario. Well, what happens when you take the same design and slow things down by half? Let's get realistic, if you're in a Dodge Ram in Baja and you can average 30 mph, you're up there on bell curve. So this entire pursuit started as an effort to refine the performance of the King shocks for how we use them, an entire new design just for us. The piston does so much more work than the shims all the way around, tuning is done with about 40% less metal thrown at it to control flow. The feeling of these pistons brings everything up, the slow parking lot stuff, general drivability, lift-off's and landings and all the way down concrete freeways - you feel more control and a smoother ride.

What to expect next?

Every time something breaks in the Carli shop, the one thing that is certain is that there is no ceiling. Where every other suspension manufacturer out there has worked with what's available, there's one that is carving out their own line through performance engineering. Things pick up speed pretty quickly and when something is working, it gains momentum. There's pistons laying around the shop like cookies after a two year-old got left in the kitchen too long. At some point there'll be more. The shop transformed itself into a ball joint graveyard, not long after Fox bumpstops and not all that long after diff guards and stabilizers. We can expect one thing for sure... that there's going to be another level and soon there's going to be          laying around every flat surface of the shop. It could be resivoir that got changed out for the Carli design with an anti-cavitation valve, piles of OEM sway bars, smooth bodies stacked up in exchange for bypasses, control arms discarded for radius arms or something even greater and as always, there's only one way to find out...

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