Copy from Disco3 UK forum
I put on the height rods shortened by 10mm (raising the vehicle 100mm) and then proceeded to drive about 800kms on them two weeks ago. For those familiar with the geography, put the shortened rods on at Balladonia, WA and a week later pulled them at Esperance, WA after driving to Mt Ragged, Israelite Bay, Cape Arid NP, Cape Le Grande NP. The higher rods are wonderful. An additional side benefit was being able to raise to aviation heights when parking my V8 petrol beast over very flammable spinaflex. We were pulling a trailer of about 600kg the entire route. The Israelite Bay-Cape Arid road (about 140km) is horrible washboards. Others told me that they had to do 10-15 kmh across it "...although with air suspension you may be able to go a bit faster." I ended up taking the entire section at 60-70km at the elevated "normal" height and essentially skipped across the tops of the 250mm deep washboards. Makes for interesting cornering this technique! Saved a day of mind-numbing travelling slow having the raised and softer suspension. I also figured that this was as good a test as any of the consequences of using the shortened suspension arms. While the D3 survived this drive just fine the same can't be said for the contents of my trailer.
I did manage to crack the cover of the air compressor despite the higher elevation (can only guess what the damage would have been with normal length rods on Shocked ). The steeler has replaced the cover and I had him look at the drive seals/joints, diff joints, etc. This included the brand new right rear drive assembly and brake disk damaged as part of a incident reported in another forum (parking brake failure). All was in perfect order and no unusual wear was noted. Quirks noted while driving this are as follow:
At higher speeds (>60kmh) the D3 wallows more like a truck. Reminded me of a Nissan Patrol and reinforced the correct decision to get a D3 instead Smile
The suspension seems a bit "softer" (more forgiving) at the elevated "normal" setting than at the normal "normal" setting. This was important on the washboard sections.
Raising the beast to maximum (aviation setting) works a treat in not scratching the lower side panels on WA vegetation and rutted roads.
One odd quirk was that after driving about 200m on pavement (granted this was just after the 140km of washboards) and then shutting down to pay the national park entrance fee, the oddest electronic glitch I've experienced appeared. Multiple transmission, safety airbag, electronic warnings flashed, and amongst other things, the transmission wouldn't get out of Park. On about the 7th restart it all returned to normal. This might have nothing to do with the sortened suspension rods and everything to do with other components reacting to the washboard road. The transmission lock did appear at a number of subseqnent re-starts but have disappeared when putting the normal length suspension arms on. Might be related to the arms not all being EXACTLY 10mm shorter, who knows.
Having the higher suspension settings worked wonders when putting in sand mats on the side of a dune (lots of room to slide them in) and made recovery a simple task.
I managed to pull one of the rods apart (silicon joint failed) when replacing them with normal rods at Esperance. This wouldn't have happened if I had a small pully puller to slowly and controllably remove them.
I'd be interested to hear how anyone else fares with a long drive at higher elevations.
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Jim Dowell
D3 '05 HSE V8 5 seater Gold, 19" MTRs, raised intake, 4x4Intel rear spare tyre, 110l aux fuel, 40l water, rooftop tent, ARB Front Bar (to swat away any pesky Hilux's), winch, dual battery, matched offroad trailer
