I'm feeling a bit nostalgic today. This thread is now over 11 years old and I remember a period of time in the early/mid 2010's when this thread was always on the front page of the Electric Off Road forum.

The information I gained in this thread from fredswain is still massively useful to me. I'll use my recent purchase of a 22 5.0 DCE as an example to illustrate. I bought the car second hand a few weeks back. I checked it over and the suspension setup was box stock. Before doing anything to the car I threw my electronics in it, mounted some tires, and drove it around on my tiny basement track. The surface is mostly smooth concrete and the grip level is a relatively good approximation of driving on a dry outdoor clay track. The car was a handful to drive to say the least. It felt super sensitive to throttle inputs in a really frustrating way, usually resulting in snap oversteer when trying to slow down before entering a corner. It was just undrivable to me.

The car came with a boat load of springs - I counted 17 pairs. I set the car on the bench and went to work using the spring balancing procedure outlined near the start of this monster thread. I use a phone to record the car in slo-mo as it rebounds from being pressed flat against the bench. As I suspected, and as is usual for all cars I've done this to, the front end snapped up way faster than the rear. Since I'll be running this car on an outdoor dirt track that tends to not be the smoothest of surfaces I decided to soften up the front instead of stiffen the rear. I wound up using what seems to be the softest front spring of the bunch, and even with that I still had to move the lower shock mounting position in one hole to get the front and rear end balanced (note: I also moved the battery fully back and added 2oz into the rear since I'll be on a loose outdoor track. I'd rather have a standup transmission but haven't bought one yet so this will suffice for now). But it was worth it.

The difference it made on my basement track was night and day. The car was so much easier to control. The driving characteristics of the car are way less affected by throttle input which for me makes the car feel so much more stable, consistent, forgiving, and predictable. Looking back at this thread I should probably do a bit more with oils and pistons but for the most part they line up with what I think they should be based on what I learned in this thread - namely the kit pistons use bigger holes in the rear shocks. That's actually rather interesting as there was a time I can remember tuning doctrine being "always use bigger holes in the front and smaller holes in the rear." The last two TLR kits I've had (the 3.0 and now this 5.0 DCE) have bucked that trend, so maybe there's hope they'll start equipping kits with more closely matched spring rates.

Sometimes I wonder why the information in this thread never took off. Every car I've ever used this method on has driven better for me as a result. Based on my experience, and the reported experience of others in this thread, it just seems like so many could benefit from it, but now that fredswain is no longer active the knowledge is at risk of being lost to time. At the end of the day it doesn't matter to me how anybody chooses to tune and run their car, but I just think it's a net loss for this information to fade away into the shadows of the past.