To sort Monty's handling I knew the dreadful original factory rear leaf springs had to go, shockingly they'd gone soft in just 10,000 miles so they clearly weren't correctly tempered from new!!!
After doing a lot of research and taking advice from Simon at SiFab, I went with the excellent two seater anti-tramp springs (made by Owen Springs in Sheffield) that I sourced from BCC, these were combined with a pair of Bilstein dampers I bought from SSL as I'm a big fan of this damper brand, and a SiFab Panhard rod was added to the mix to eliminate lateral axle movement.
To ensure the investment gave its best, I then commissioned Techniques to go right through Monty's suspension while fitting my chosen components; they used lowering blocks to drop the rear ride height that also centred the rear axle in the arches. To match the rear my front AVO coil overs were adjusted, while doing so they found and replaced a collapsed front damper bush on Monty's Mulfab front wishbone conversion and completed a wheel alignment, the excessive toe-in they also discovered was corrected to a shade off parallel to complete the work.
The combination of BCC two seater anti-tramp rear springs and quality Bilstein dampers with their big bump stops turned out to be an excellent pairing, the result is taught yet complaint handling with really excellent ride quality for a leaf sprung beam axle setup, and the horribly harsh bottoming out I’d previously suffered was completely eliminated too.
The above recipe and the setup from Techniques absolutely transformed the handling and ride of my 2012 Plus 4, Monty now corners super flat with fantastic turn in while also soaking up all but the very worst potholes and UK road imperfections.
Highly recommended
