Going to group all these changes in to one post. Most of the time when you go from stock suspension to a lift or level kit you change up the wheels and tires at the same time. With the new found room for larger tires the stocks just dont cut it anymore.
We found these newly released Method 318 wheels and I had to try them out in the Bronze finish. They look awesome with the Pearl white paint on my Lariat F150. We went with the 18" version in 9" wide with a +18mm offset. This set up wont poke the wheels out too far but will bring the wheels out compared to stock. When you add a level kit to an F150 it brings the front wheels inward so the +18mm offset pushes the wheels back out close to the stock location.
For tires we went with the Falken Wildpeak AT III all terrain. I have had these on a few of my personal trucks and are my preferred tire. They do everything I need of them offroad but give very little road noise. We didnt go too big just yet. Eventually we are going to do a bigger lift and fit close to a 35" tire but for now we had a set of these 285/65r18 tires on hand so we threw them on because we were anxious to see these wheels on the truck.
This set up worked fine with the stock suspension, but we wanted to see what a set of Bilstein 5100 Levelling shocks would do. I was going to do installation pictures and a write up on these but during the job I decided if you dont know how to do this then leave it to a professional. Compressing the spring to remove it from the stock shock to use on the Bilstein shock requires a proper spring compressor and some experience otherwise you can seriously injure yourself. This is a great set up for the price but I could have installed 3 complete coilover leveling kits in the time it took to install these. So if you are paying labor to have them installed you may be better off paying more for a Fox, Icon, Eibach or some kind of complete coilover kit so more money goes to parts and less money goes to labor.
On the 09-13 F-150 the Bilstein 5100 front shock has 4 settings. The top setting is said to give 2.25" of lift. Since we didnt go too big on the tires I opted for the second to the highest setting that is said to give 1.75" of front lift. The after installation measurement put it closer to 2" of front lift but Im not complaining. The rear shocks were easy to install and kept the stock height in the back.
I now see why the Bilstein 5100 shocks are a top seller for the F150. The ride is amazing. While I havent taken them off road yet, the on street performance is greatly improved over stock.
Here's a couple links to the parts used in this phase of the project