What Lift Kit Height is Right for You?
Choosing the right lift kit height is critical to maintaining the comfort, ride quality, and utility of your truck.
Depending on your choice of lift height, your lift kit might be as simple as spacer blocks between the body and the frame, or complicated enough to require replacement components to ensure you vehicle’s suspension geometry still works.
Picking out the right lift kit height means you’ll need to know a little bit more about how certain lift heights will affect your vehicle’s performance and what they are generally used for.
To help you, we’ve written this short guide to the different lift heights, so you’ve got all the information you need to make the correct choice.
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Why Lift Your Vehicle
The primary reasons for installing a lift kit on a vehicle are aesthetics, how it looks, or for more practical purposes, such as to improve towing or off-road performance.
Increasing the ride height of your vehicle means you can fit it with chunkier, harder-wearing off-road tires for better traction over wet or uneven ground.
The greater ride height also helps to protect parts of your vehicle, like the bumpers, suspension, and exhaust system, that tend to be at road height on a factory model.
Lifting your truck means you can travel over obstacles, rough terrain, and steep inclines without worrying about damaging the underside of your vehicle.
Lifted trucks also have some on-road advantages to match their enhanced off-road performance. If you use your vehicle for towing, then a lift kit can give you an additional weight advantage that will help to keep your vehicle stable when pulling a heavy load, adding to your on-road steering and control.
Matching Your Lift Height to Your Needs
Installing different lift heights on your vehicles will result in changes to the utility and handling of your truck. The key to finding the right lift kit height is to match those changes to what you need from your vehicle.
To help you out, here is a short summary of what different lift heights can achieve:
Two-inch Lift – A two-inch lift is most often achieved by putting “spacer” blocks between the body of your vehicle and its frame. This means it’s unlikely that you’ll need to replace any parts, such as the shocks or springs.
Adding those additional two inches won’t give you much in the way of extra ground clearance, although it will help if you are regularly traveling on dirt roads with a heavy load. What it will do, with the appropriate off-road tires, is enhance your vehicle’s stability, giving you greater control over uneven surfaces and when taking sharp turns.
Four-inch Lift – A four-inch lift is better suited to drivers looking to do some serious off-roading. That extra four inches will allow your vehicle to travel over most obstacles with ease and handle steep inclines without roughing up your undercarriage.
Depending on your truck, adding a four-inch lift might involve replacing your shocks and springs to keep your suspension effective.
Six-inch Lift – A six-inch lift will make you and your vehicle king of the trails, able to traverse just about any terrain and move comfortably over any obstacle. If off-road performance is what you want from a lifted truck, a six-inch lift is where you’ll see the most significant changes.
Because of the extra height of a six-inch lift, your vehicle will most likely need purpose-built shocks, springs, brackets, and other custom components in order to keep your vehicle’s steering and suspension within factory specifications at this new height.
Rocky Ridge Expertise
When you are making significant changes to your vehicle, such as installing custom components, you want to know it is being done by an expert. Especially if you’ll be making use of those upgrades when doing some hard off-roading.
That is why we use Rocky Ridge Trucks for all our truck lifting customizations. With three decades of experience in creating custom trucks, Rocky Ridge is a name you can rely on.
