Boss Suspension LA-38 Air-Bag Kit Review and Installation

In a previous posting <link here> I listed several rear air-bag kits for the 2nd generation Tacoma. After reviewing the hardware pictures and installation guides, I chose to go with the Boss Suspension LA-38 Air-Bag Kit.

Shipping was fast and the kit came out of Canada. The kit was shipped in a double thick cardboard box with bubble wrap around the mounting brackets. This was enough to keep the brackets from poking a hole all the way through the box but you could tell it had a rough trip. The 1/4" Nylon airline had kinks and abrasions from sharp edges on other components. Top and bottom bag mount plates have gouges and dings in the bellows sealing area from either rough handling or shipping damage. The two air-bags were unscathed by the trip.

While inspecting the parts, I noticed that each of the yellow zinc plated parts had nice rust pockets on un-welded seams where metal etchant (acid) has wicked between the metal pieces establishing a corrosion cell. The CEO of Boss Suspension said that later versions of the kit will be powder coated instead of zinc plated.

Included instructions are very basic but adequate for the job at hand. The third sentence in the instructions says, “ You have bought the finest quality kit known to mankind.” Following these instructions, I began installing the kit only to run into alignment, hole size and position troubles that led me to believe the kit was either designed or manufactured incorrectly. I took pictures and made measurements of the issues in order to provide the manufacturer with some feedback on the difficulties I was having. Then I put my truck back together without the bags. Finest quality kit my arse, this thing has issues!

After taking the time to document the issues I had with the kit, I had fully expected Boss Suspension to be appreciative of the feedback and offer some solutions. To sum up my customer service experience is this reply from CEO Reece Tasker, “You are the only person with a problem. Its not worth my time to try and fix something that doesn't need fixing.”

So there you have it, my truck is the only one in North America that this kit does not fit properly. I paid good money for a bolt-on kit and heck yes I expect it to fit without modifications. So now my options were to deal with the issues of this kit or order another manufacturers kit and potentially deal with different issues.

I chose the former and decided to make this kit fit the way it should have in the first place. The attached pdf file goes through the process and while adding shims and drilling new holes fixes the problems, the best solution would be to revise the kit so that customers don’t face these issues in the first place. And yes, this is the last product I will ever buy from Boss Suspension.

Edit: These pictures are in the pdf file below but thought I'd add them here as well.



-Bill