Removing Leaf Springs from a HF Trailer

[Jerry Bleeg]

I'm considering removing one leaf's on my Teardrop, built on a 1740# Harbor Freight frame, in an effort to smooth out the ride some. I have lowered my air pressure down to 35 pounds, which helps, and my trailer weighs about 1100 pounds. My question is would I remove the shortest leaf on the bottom (which I think is considered an overload spring and only touches under the U-bolt plate), or the middle spring, which more closely follows the top spring in contour. I would thing removing the middle spring would soften the ride, and by leaving the short overload spring, the suspension has some capacity to take a hard hit like a pothole.

So which leaf would you remove?

[Yekoms]

I'm not familiar with the HF springs but from your description and my experience with early Ford leaf springs I'll throw in my ideas. You probably thought of all of this but this gives me a chance to maybe help someone out instead of me askin' questions.
First make sure that the springs are not bound up at the spring eye mounting points and between themselves. When you remove a leaf the spring rate changes and being that the axle is on the bottom of springs you can add a spacer to get your ride height back if needed. If you end up keeping the middle spring a product like this between the leaves helps sometimes. http://www.speedwaymotors.com/Leaf-Spri ... ,2079.html
Is the small helper spring flat or a little curved ?

[Jerry Bleeg]

On second look, the bottom leaf on the HF 3 leaf set up looks more like a regular spring vs. a overload spring. It follows the contour of the middle spring vs. a overload spring like I have on my half ton Chevy Truck, whereby it is mostly flat and does not contact the other springs until heavily loaded. So I think I will just try removing the bottom spring. Thanks for the suggestion of using leaf spring liner. I have used this stuff on old leaf spring setups for 4WD vehicles and it quiets things done a lot, and facilitates the leafs moving against each other, thereby reducing friction. I think you can do the same thing with grease between the leafs, but thats kind of a mess. Here is a pic of the typical HF slipper spring.

[LDK]

I thought about doing something like that also but I'll wait and see how yours turns out.