Carli Suspension Pintop Leveling System 2.5" Diesel 2014-18 & 2019+ 2500 Base Kit

This system is designed for the customer who refuses to keep the rubber on the tarmac and has an eye for quality and appreciation for bang-for-their-buck. At the heart of this system is a 2.5” lift, Linear Rate Coil Spring paired to matched travel King 2.5” Remote Reservoir Shocks that have been custom tuned, in house, for superior ride quality and handling both on-road and off. In an effort to provide customers with the best product, we designed a custom piston to determine proper base flow rates to ensure the shock works well in the heavy duty truck platform; we then tuned the shocks around the custom pistons based on the only thing that matters to us, seat-of-the-pants feel. We round off ALL our King shocks with shafts machined and polished from a solid piece of 17-4 Stainless. Unlike King’s standard shafts, there is no coating to wear off, weather is far less likely to hurt them and if there is a small chip, you can round the edges with emery cloth to ensure the seal housing isn’t damaged as they’re not brittle like the stock, hardened shafts. The shocks are finished with King oil good to -55* F. Note that all King shocks are built with a plated steel body. If subjected to inclement weather for extended periods, we recommend wrapping your shocks in 3M to provide a moisture barrier that’s replaceable.

The rear piggyback reservoir shocks are also included with this system and have been custom tuned to maximize the ride quality of the factory air bags. As the rear bags remain unmodified, load capacity is maintained while on and off-road handling and predictability are massively improved. The included Adjustable track bar centers the axle to the frame. For those that love the way their Ram tows from the factory but don’t want to be limited to a crawl when leaving the pavement, this is the perfect kit.

We do not need to deep dive the base kit components, they’ve been sufficiently covered in our other articles covering the coil-spring trucks. Same goes for the shocks, we’ve spent PLENTY of time detailing our tuning process to hone the ride of these HD trucks – the same applies here as these shock packages are all air-ride specific tuning we developed during this R&D cycle. If you’d like any further info on this process, hit us at the shop and we’d be happy to chat about our process in as much detail as you’d like!

So let’s look into the rear, starting with the airbag spacers. They’re included because the air-ride trucks have 1″ less rear to front rake when compared to a coil sprung truck. Our choice was between making a shorter coil and shock combo to a truck already starved for suspension travel or space the rear to match our 2.5″ spring; we chose the latter to maximize the travel and ride comfort. For the leveling system, this required some engineering as you can’t just throw a 1″ spacer on; the length of the factory stud doesn’t facilitate this. We designed a 2-piece spacer. Half bolts to the bag, half bolts to the axle – in between, chromoly spacers to support the load, then it all bolts together.