Air Ride Schizophrenia?

[SeanPwnery]

What I thought I'd do is detail every little symptom just in case any of you have experienced or even "felt" this with your air ride. I replied in the "Right rear" thread, but I thought I'd build on it with a more specific set of issues. I'm working with a 2016 Lone Star, "air ride is nice ... when it works" is what I'm used to hearing from a lot of people with these.
Here's the symptoms list as I've owned this now for about 19 months or so - just crossing a little over 110k miles.

• When selecting air ride setting in the cab, it seems to want to lift the rear first. As it does this, it always feels like it's kicking me in the back of the seat as it starts - a real jolt. In the time I've had this truck, it's always done this, and I thought maybe a little binding or jolt was just how it goes.
• It rarely happens, but when it does, the right-rear droops, it feels like it's on the bump-stop when it happens. If I select Offroad 1, sometimes it airs up and works fine. Sometimes I'll even park it in Offroad 2 because I rub ever so slightly with my tire even with a hub-centric spacer behind the wheel if I don't and I drive out of my cul-de-sac in the morning. I run a 295/60R20 Nitto Ridge Grappler on stock chrome-clads and a 2" hubcentric spacer I put on only to stop a slight rub up front edge of the tire on the sway bar at full lock that now moved to the rear edge of the tire on the wheel-well liner with the spacer.
• Sometimes, and it seems to be happening a little more often in the past two weeks, the air ride is really slow to respond. I'll press the button for O/R 1, and it'll blink, but the dash won't say "Raising" for a good long while, sometimes not at all. In those instances, I press the down button to go back to normal just to cancel the operation. Sometimes when it does say "Raising" - it won't actually raise, it'll just sit there til I give up on it and cancel it back down to the normal height setting.
• This particular set of errors only happened 2 times, each was a different message - one time the message was "Unable to use selected height because of excessive load" despite nothing in the bed - the other message was "Unable to change height until system cools down" - neither time did I hear the pump running when I stepped outside to check.

I've said this a lot about Dodge/Chrysler in the past 25+ years ... electrical gremlins are what these always seem to have. It's gotten better with the advent of solid state electronics, but it still has issues from time to time that are downright frustrating in a "we've come too far technologically-speaking to have to tolerate this in this day and age." I'm curious if anyone here has experienced anything like what I described, and what you came up with for fixes. I suspect I'll be at it the next fair-weather off day I have with a can of contact cleaner and just pulling every connector and checking and cleaning them as a start. As of the time I wrote this, my truck was down on the right-rear at work when I headed home, selected O/R 1 - it aired up, the thump in the back of my seat hit me and it made the height no problem on the first try. I drove the rush-hour trip home keeping it under 40 in O/R 1 and it rode fine. About a block from my house I went into O/R 2 like I do most nights to pull into my spot in the cul-de-sac. Again, it aired up just fine, and I went outside about 30 minutes later to see the right rear was still up and fine.

...so the schizophrenic air ride strikes again.

 

[SeanPwnery]

Update : This morning was fine, although by the time I got to work, it didn't want to air up. I left it in the current normal setting and headed into the shop. About 8 hours later, I was on the bump-stop on the right rear again. Fired it up, set it to O/R 1, heard some sounds, mostly the compressor pump back there, but I thought I heard a hissing sound too. Funny thing of it is, I left it on "raising" and drove out of the parking lot, there's a couple elevation changes coming out of my lot and entering the next lot over and by the time I did that, I was in O/R 1 - the jostling allowed the right rear to pull out then begin taking air if that makes any sense. It's sitting next to my mailbox right now in O/R 2 with no issues.

I'm not sure if it's a bag issue or just the fitting feeding into it at this point. If it aired down parked in "normal" but then took air to O/R 1 and 2 settings, you'd think a bag leak would have been present when it finally raised.

 

[TC Diesel]

Sean, call Me on this...it's too complex to type ,Plus I'm not good at Internet typing.

 

[SeanPwnery]

Thanks TC ... turns out the problem I described and symptoms were something a fellow Youtuber went through several times in his 10+ years of ownership. I ended up replacing the right-rear bag in less than 45 minutes and road tested it picking up 400 pounds of topsoil for my folks. Looks like I'm back in business.