mckellyb

This has taken a few weeks to get right, but I think I have it.

What you need:

Techstream 10.whatever is the common one

A cable, which is USB to OBDII (the above come as a set on eBay for under $20)

A laptop (as long as it's a Windows OS, XP or later, it doesn't matter...I run it on 64-bit Win 10 machine, no VM, no dual boot, nothing special)

Patience

Some gasoline in the tank

A notepad if you don't want to take notes on the laptop (paper and pencil may be easier, in fact)


Fire up your TS and connect it to your running LS. Double-click Air suspension Live. Give it a while to figure things out...

Eventually, you'll be able to go over on the left side of the screen and select Data List. There's going to be a bunch of stuff in there you don't care about, so at the bottom of this window, see the field with the drop-down arrow, the one to the left of the graph button? Yeah, that one. Hit the drop-down and choose Only Suspension Height.



Now you have only the fields "after height adjustment" and "height adjustment".

The corners are labeled FL for Front Left, RL for Rear Left, FR for Front Right. RR is the only one which looks normal.

Take a freakin' screen-shot of this before you change one damned thing! I didn't, and regret it. I have no idea where I started, but would really like to so I have a better reference. In fact, if a few of y'all could PM me a screen shot of your un-modded height at 'normal' ride height, I'd really appreciate it. I think my first foray into the suspension was lowering one inch, just to see how things may change.

Oh, there's also "Height Offset Max" as a field, but what I did was use that one as a separating field with "After Adjust" above and "Height adjust" below it. I haven't figured out how to put them on the same line, left and right, but I found it's easier to track changes if they're in the same order. Height Offset is how far the car will rise when you push the “Height High” button. I wish it were more like 2” of travel available, but I’ll take what I can get.

I’m one of the very few who uses Height High daily, because it’s easier for my crippled self to get in/out. That 0.8” makes a very noticeable difference. This is even more true since I’ve dropped it a bit.

Be aware...changing the left front, or the front left in this case, WILL change the right front and probably the left rear a little. Might even change the right rear if it's a large change.

The first two times I did this, I measured from the floor of my garage to the edge of the wheel well, going through the center of the wheel. This way every corner is measured identically. You'll very likely find if you measure with a yardstick or the like, yours may have two matching corners...if you're lucky. I had none.

In playing with heights, I found that, for freeway travel, because the air suspension lowers at speed, I couldn't dial it in as low as I wanted. Once on the freeway, I'm pretty certain I feel the bump stops and the ride was choppy (though still not at all 'bad'). It's been 25+ years since I owned a lowered vehicle, and even then I did bump stop trimming so as to have as much travel as I could, so I'm a little rusty on what feel is what.

This is where I'll save y'all a ton of time. A ton of it.

Now, instead of measuring every corner every time you adjust one, use the TS to bleed all the air out of each spring. Select Active Test, and a new window will appear. Double-click one corner of the car, let's say RL, and you'll see yet another, smaller window appear at the bottom-right. It'll say, for example, RL wheel up/down (S307-24). There will be "OFF" and a left and right 'button'. Pressing and holding those buttons either releases air, the left one, while the other adds air, the right one. When the solenoids or compressor are doing something, the “OFF” becomes “ON”.

In the main screen behind where the button is, you'll see the data readout. Choose the left or "down" arrow and watch the real-time data stream. See how it's dropping? -0.3, -0.7, -1.3...eventually you should get to around -1.6. Might be -1.9...every car should be different, but just a little.

Get out and just look at where that left rear tire is sitting in the wheel well. Awwwwwww, yeah, buddy!

Repeat letting air out of the springs until your numbers on the TS stop dropping. You should see the front has much more travel than the rear...like an inch or more, more. I think this is why some people, including me, see the LS460 and think it looks low in the rear. It's because the front rides a little higher.

After you lower every corner, go around them, again, and press the ‘down’ button for 15 seconds and see if you get any closer to the ground via the TS’s data readout. Might be only a couple tenths of an inch, or a few MM, but you need to have everything bottomed-out for this to work.

Just to have it, I’d go around an measure the height at every corner. I found, when bottomed-out, there was still a variance, which is important, or you’ll never finish.

Here are the actual measurements on my 2008 L (attached picture).

Please note, even with seemingly no air in any spring…I went corner-to-corner, around the car, twice, and held the bleed arrow for 30 seconds on each corner, just in case, but nothing happened after the first time I went around it. It’s as if air can move around a little in this system. Not much, a couple tenths of an inch in height here and there, but it all adds up.

If you look at ‘current normal’, that’s normal ride height after me playing with it a little. You can see, I managed to get it mostly level, though the rear behaves strangely when changing pressure (hence, height). Sometimes you’ll get a huge change in the RR when you’re working on the LR. Small changes in any other ones are to be expected, but the large swings are frustrating to work around.



We, however, are interested in the ‘bottomed-out’ number. In this case, about 25.75”, with two outliers. We can deal with them, later, if need be.

As she sits, my car has 2” of compression suspension travel before she hits the bump-stops. I learned this is about 1/2” too little for 70 MPH (posted) freeways here in Fort Worth, Texas. I went, after my first adjustment last week, from about a 1-1.5” drop to an even 2”, and that was about ¼” too much, maybe the full ½”.

So today, I went out to my car, laptop under my arm, and what I did this time was re-bottom it out, then from there, did some minor maths to bring the whole vehicle up 2.25” from as low as it goes. I guess I can’t see 3/8” when eyeballing the tire-to-fender clearance, ‘cause they all look to be the same distance. I also tweaked the front height to be more in-line with what the rear looks like, because to my eyes, every LS460 looks like it has a couple of bags of concrete in the trunk.

Back to getting it mobile…

Lean your driver’s seat back, back, get in, put the laptop on your lap, engine running, and make quick notes about how much air to put back into each corner so they’re all at about 28”-28.25”.

At this point, in Techstream, choose Active Test again, but this time add air and watch the numbers on “Height Adjust” change. What you’re shooting for is X” added to the bottomed-out number.

So, if you want 3” of travel because your roads suck, on my car, I’d have to put air into the LR spring until it read about 1.3” higher than it is, now.

When adding or removing air, I suggest you stop a couple-few tenths of an inch from what you want the final reading to be, until you’re on the last spring, because changing the pressure to any of them lessens the load on the rest, so the whole car moves a bit.

I may add to or change this, depending on what I find or remember.

comotiger

McKellyb, thank you for the detailed procedure for changing ride height. Looks like this method is not for the faint of heart . It's surprising that there is no setting that allows all four corners to be changed simultaneously. No wonder the Datasystems (DS) controller is pricey because it takes the guesswork out of the process. Even with DS, I have read of cars with some corners riding very high - I hope you don't run into similar issues down the line. I am beginning to realize that this mod is not for me.

Lynzoid

Pure madness

213374U

Excellent write-up McKelly!! This is all very exciting because just Sunday I was cleaning up the garage and found my old ThinkPad and charger. Plugged it in, booted it up, XP SP3 still running with no problems whatsoever. So now that I have a shop computer I need to go ahead and order the software/cable and start tinkering, your thread will be a HUGE help

comotiger

Questions/comments about the bolded quotes.

1) Looks like you are giving the compressor a real workout. You have probably bottomed and raised the car several times. Are you concerned you may burn out the compressor? I doubt whether this component was designed to be used in this manner. BTW, where is the compressor? I have heard it when changing to HIGH but could not localize the noise.

2) I should measure the height at normal setting in my car as you have done. It's entirely possible that the four corners show substantial variability (up to 0.5 or 0.75 inches). In which case, adjusting height at the 4 corners to match in the manner you suggest may actually make the car ride better (more level) than it does now.

3) Do you know by how much the height is lowered at highway speeds?

mckellyb

It's underhood, somewhere, but I'm not certain where. I think it's behind the bumper, driver's side...somewhere.

When I was doing this, I was careful to let it cool down between pumping up sessions. I raised it from bottomed out only one time, though.

I have a piece of plastic hanging down from underbody cladding which is broken, and on side streets, it doesn't drag all that much, but at highway speeds, it takes almost nothing for it to hit the ground. However, I don't know how much wind is pushing it backward and down.

I'm gonna venture a guess of 1/2 "- 3/4".

mckellyb

Took pictures of the final height, today, though I need to look at the numbers on the LF, because it looks a little high. Might just be my eyes and the sunlight.

comotiger

Beautiful car! The height looks great! All that hard work has definitely paid off. I like the LF height, if anything I think the RF is a bit low . So, reading off the Techstream sensor data, are the four corners at exactly the same height now, or will they be close but within a 0.5 to 0.75 inch range? I am realizing that the naked eye may not be able to pick up height differences of 0.5 inch or less between the corners. I also don't think that you will notice that difference while driving. For all I know, my car which drives and rides very well may have significant height differences between corners; I just haven't gotten around to measuring it.

mckellyb

Thanks for the very respected compliment on her. She still lacks a name, but when it just comes to me, it'll be the correct one. Might take a year, might be later today.

I've had many a compliment on her, with pretty much everyone almost not believing she's nine years old. They don't see the light hail damage or the relatively minor curb rash on every single freakin' wheel.

For that last bit, I really want to have all five wheels polished. Not chromed, but polished to close to a mirror finish is just fine.

I've gotten over having the ding in front of the LR wheel fixed. The hail dings don't bother me as much as I thought, either. Though, being Texas, and having an open parking lot at work, I figure this car will have more some hail damage after a couple of years, at most.

I'm pretty certain the LF and RF are really, really close in height, and it was the light playing tricks on me.

Yep, according to the TS and my notes, they're within a tenth of an inch of each other. After a short while, it's easy to see how they behave in relation to each other and to anticipate how what you're about to do will affect the other corners.

More than anything, I wanted to be absolutely certain she wasn't hitting the bump stops in normal driving. On my daily commute, there's a nasty, abrupt change in road bed height, which isn't a bump, but much like the ugly frost heaves in rural Canada/Alaska. At 50 MPH, with the damping toggled to 'sport' (and that still makes me chuckle), my head barely grazes the headliner. On "comfort", I hit the headliner, gently, at that speed. I don't feel anything but suspension action at that speed, and she should be as low as she's going to be at 50 MPH.

For reference, I'm 5'10", 31" inseam, but I prefer to sit "high" in every car, so the seat is set to the higher side, and I have the backrest fairly upright, like it should be.

The Height High button raises her just enough for me to not have to struggle getting in/out (with getting out being more of a challenge), but I have to remember to engage it about a minute before I park. I don't, every time, but I'm getting there.

BTW, anyone concerned about wearing out the pump or changing the suspension's height, regularly, stay tuned. I likely use the Height High feature more than 99.9% of owners. Every day, I drop her after backing out of the garage, then re-raise as I approach work. The reverse is true when leaving to go home.

I try to remember to raise her if I stop on the way home for groceries/bank/whatever, but I'm still getting into that habit. It's rare that I'll sit and wait for the height increase, but there are days when, if I don't raise her, getting out is damned difficult and somewhat painful, but meh, that's merely a reminder of living life to the fullest, and getting it just a bit wrong 17 years ago.

CJITTY

excellent write up...makes me appreciate my Data Systems controller even more lol. but this is good though if folks are patient. I also have Techstream but I also have two Toyotas in addition to the LS

comotiger

It seems that the high cost of the Datasystems controller is justified because it is plug and play (I think), and you get a range of height settings. But I have also read a few posts here where the DS controller has acted up and people have cars with one corner or an entire side riding much higher than the other. So, it is not entirely problem free, and if it acts up, is there a way to trouble shoot and fix the problem (if resetting the system doesn't work)?

mckellyb

So everyone knows, while it took me several hours over multiple weekends, I've figured out the stuff which took forever. Were I to do it, now, I bet I could dial a car in to where you want it in 30 minutes, maybe less.

Thanks, everybody, for the compliments on my write-up of this. I've partially finished a book about our travels, have co-written a book when I was still in HS, and have written multiple manuals for various companies about processes which had absolutely zero documentation. I hope to contribute more as time goes on and I find things which may not have documentation.

It helps that I'm a gearhead.

"Have you fixed one of these before?"

Nope.

"But then, how are you going to..."

It's made by Man, I have a manual, I can figure it out as we go along.

This said...even though I know how automatic transmissions work, the innards are full of unicorn farts and magic. I'll mess with computerized settings and the valve body, but the rest of it...NOPE!!!!!

213374U

Hows this holding up for you after a couple of weeks? Height remaining where you set it?

I just received my software and cable today and got it installed and talking to the car. Changed a few of the Customize settings but didn't dive too deep. My girls both have volleyball tomorrow but I'm hoping to knock out my first oil change and play with the height a bit.

I'll screenshot my initial settings for you, and may even go through and screenshot step-by-step as I play with it to complete your write-up.

Lynzoid

Never do this. Never.

teedub21

elaborate?