Randy Progressive Suspension

All right, you boys and girls, it's time for another Jeep Talk Show interview. Today, we're going to be talking with Randy from Progressive Suspension. Randy has been involved with suspension, construction and tuning for over three decades. He looks like he's 30, so I don't get this. Working with multiple prominent race teams during the time to develop intricate understanding of its inner workings. For the past six years, he has brought his knowledge of know how suspension mechanics to the progressive suspension team to assist in developing the company's first automotive shocks in its 40 year history. He's a true believer in the patented frequency sensing technology that lives at the heart of every shock progressive suspension produces for the Jeep market. Randy, thanks a lot for being here with us today. I'm glad you made time for us and look at this, man. You're all set up with displays and everything. So I need to make sure we did well, we actually have two shows. We have a audio only show and then we have the audio video that we do on YouTube. So if you want to see what I'm talking about, you need to go to YouTube, to our YouTube channel so you can see this. Randy, thank you for being with us. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having us as a company as well. So really appreciate you guys reaching out and just really, really excited to be a part of this for the fact that we have something that's very unique and it's good to be able to tell that that side of the story for our brand. So I think everybody at some point in their life, maybe not with their Jeep, but I think everybody at some point in their life knows what a bad shock will do on a vehicle Jeep or otherwise. It just gets bouncy or it's rough or something like that. What do you do or what does a progressive suspension do to help the Jeep other than just, you know, slapping another, maybe a longer Jeep, Jeep, a longer shock if you have a lift. What is the progressive suspension? Why should I buy progressive suspension shocks for Jeep or any aftermarket shocks as far as that goes?

So a lot of times aftermarket shocks in general, they're good.

A lot of different brands out there are good for a lot of different things.

So ours is a little bit unique, but we'll talk about another other manufacturers when they have external adjustments, which means you can either adjust the rebound, which would be down here lower on the shock or sometimes on the body or the body itself will have a compression adjuster, which is usually the low speed. If it's got a dual system on it, which is a low speed, high speed, I mean, it's a little more tricky.

The good thing about that is that you can adjust it however you want. When we started our testing, we've used a lot of different other manufacturers to get a baseline of where we need to be. So by doing that, it takes I got a five mile loop by my house and our first of all, our engineering team is second to none. One of the guys that left his name Scott Hodgins put a lot of time and effort of this and worked with FST for a really long time. And we have Darrell and his team now that have taken over now that Scott has gone. And it is just really easy to work with this engineering team. I work with John really close on doing valving and stuff on it. But the good thing about external adjustments for any other brand out there is that you can tune it to be able to go ahead and have it off road capabilities. Be amazing. And then you're going to have to get out and put all your settings back in and then go in and hit the street or you're going to do light trail stuff, which is another. So you have to get settings for everything, which is which is fine if you're a tinker or you're a tuner.

Just to give you an example, for me to tune a set of shocks that we had, it took me four hours in a five mile loop. I and that that loop is part of going past my house. And I think on the like 13th loop, my wife, my wife looked at me and said, that's it. I can't pass home. Just take me home. She's like, you're constantly pulling over. You're constantly tuning it. But I mean, she gets it. That's that's part of what I do. And I I nerd out on it, to be honest, I really do nerd out on it.

So by the time I figured out, I write those settings down and then I got to go up in the dirt and figure out what it does in the dirt and write all that stuff down and figure all that out. With this system, because of the piston, it's kind of hard to see, but there's small ports right here. There's one taken apart. But these small holes inside of this thing, what it is is there is our piston has an o-ring that goes over it more like a Dalron ring. It's not a rubber o-ring. It won't roll on itself as it goes together with this piston does.

As this this o-ring will move up and down and that's determining compression to make it either stiffer or harder. Some people would say and rebound as it goes down. It'll add rebound to it, which means