hi russ,
the first thing to do is to have a look at the airbag itself. my drive bags had the part number on the side of the bags (all 4 of them). that made it easy.
one of the 4 of my drive bags had been replaced as it had a date code that was only a couple of years old. i replaced all of them anyway and kept that bag as the spare.
it does appear to be hit and miss on the part number being on the bag itself. like i have said, my tag and front bags do not have them on it. it does appear that my front bags have been replaced as well but my tags do need replacing as you know from my adventures.
it does make me wonder why the bags on some seem to last almost forever and show no signs of cracking or wear and others do. my coach does have nearly 200k miles on it so maybe that is it. or where it has been etc.
when leo took off my tag bag he didnt use the lift. it was in use on another coach. he did lift up the back of the coach with air assisted hydraulic jacks and block it. he uses metal stands that they made to block it. then he took off the tag tire/wheel and then had total access to the bag. taking the bag itself off was then only a ten or fifteen minute thing.
but he did need to lift it a bit more with the jacks to get the bag out.
without taking the tire off would be a bit tougher.
the front bags have a lot better access to them.
it took him about 2 hours start to finish to change all 4 drive axle bags. using the lift and tall floor jackstands.
you can get pretty close to what bag it is if you get lucky or take some measurements.
on the tag and drive axles, on the late 90's and early 2000's the suspension appears to be made by ridewell. if so, they put a suspension model number metal plate on the the vertical riser plate that is welded to the frame of the coach on the drivers side in between the tag and drive wheels and if it is cleaned off it is visible to see just looking in between the two wheels. on mine the drive axle model number plate was there. if you call ridewell with that number they can tell you what bag was on that suspension. i called them and what they said matched the bag that was on mine.
you could see where the tag plate had been on mine and that it had fallen off. so if it is there, then you can perhaps call ridewell and or newell and find out what bag was supposed to be on it.
but.....before buying it, look at the mounting of the bag itself and the diagrams of the bag to make sure they match. that is what didnt match when i did that.
however, you can see the bolt mounting pattern on your bags fairly easily. that is where when i looked i saw that they were NOT rotated 90 degrees like the bag that i was told should be on there was.
but i could measure center to center on the bottom mounting bolts (i did with a caliper going center to center on the holes where the nuts go) and get pretty close.
i also did an estimate of the top mounting bolts.
then you can look in the catalog starting with the series we know it is part of. the W01-358-xxxx to find the similar ones.
also, since the airbags themselves have different components, with the firestones, some of them have the bellows number stamped below the firestone brand on the bag. that will help you narrow it also. but, on mine they didnt have that stamped on the bag.
the firestone airspring catalog goes through how to identify the bags and is quite helpful.
then, once you get the airbag off, hopefully the sticker isnt worn off.....
on the bag we took off to look at, part of the sticker was worn off, but fortunately not where the part number was....
the front axle on at least mine appears to be a newell design and they specified the airbag on it.
tom in shanghai
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