Old Man Emu suspension in the UAE

Old Man Emu started in Australia in 1976, founded by John Chapman with roots in off-road racing. ARB says the name is a reference to the emu, a bird that manages to stay stable while moving quickly over ground that is anything but level, which is a fair description of what a touring suspension is being asked to do. ARB bought the brand in 1988.

The parent is worth a sentence because it explains the shape of the catalogue. ARB 4x4 Accessories was started in 1975 by Anthony Ronald Brown, who hand-built roof racks and bull bars in his Melbourne driveway. That is a company whose first products were things you bolt onto a vehicle to make it carry more, and it bought a suspension brand thirteen years later. Everything about how Old Man Emu is sold follows from that order of events: the suspension exists to carry the accessories, rather than the accessories being an afterthought to a suspension kit.

Today ARB says Old Man Emu offers tailored suspension solutions for more than two hundred popular four-wheel-drive vehicles. Tailored is doing real work in that sentence, and the next section is about what it means.

The single most useful thing on this page is ARB's own three-class system for coil springs, because it is the decision every other decision hangs off, and because most people arrive at it thinking about the wrong variable.

ARB rates springs Light, Medium or Heavy. Light is a vehicle with minimal constant accessories. Medium covers moderate additions, and ARB's own example is a bumper fitted without a winch. Heavy is the fully built vehicle: a full-width steel bumper with a winch on it, loaded drawers in the back, a roof-top tent on the roof.

Notice what the classes are measuring. They are measuring weight that lives on the vehicle all the time. They are not measuring how much lift the owner wants, and they are not measuring the heaviest single load the vehicle will ever see. A truck that carries four passengers and a full fridge twice a year, and is otherwise empty, is not a Heavy vehicle. A truck with a steel bar, a winch and a drawer system bolted in has already chosen Heavy before anyone opens a catalogue.

ARB is explicit that the point of an Old Man Emu system is not raising ride height. It describes the brand as an integrated system balancing comfort, load-carrying capability and control. Lift is a consequence of fitting a spring rated for the weight the vehicle now carries, not the goal. That distinction is the difference between a vehicle that sits level and rides properly loaded, and one that sits high and empty and crashes over everything.

The practical version, for someone building a vehicle here: weigh the decision by what is bolted on and staying on. Bull bar, winch, dual battery, drawers, long-range tank and a rear bar are permanent weight, and they are mostly weight on the ends of the vehicle rather than the middle, which is the worst place for it. That total is what picks the class.

This is the compatibility rule people find out about late, usually after ordering. ARB says Nitrocharger Sport shock absorbers are specifically tuned to match the selected spring. The damper is not an independent choice made after the spring; it is valved for the spring rate it is being sold alongside.

Two of the other ranges go further and make it a hard requirement. ARB states that both Nitrocharger Plus and MT64 require the 4xxx-series coil springs, and that those are not cross-compatible with the Sport-series coils. So a vehicle already sitting on Sport-series springs cannot simply have a set of Nitrocharger Plus dampers added to it and be finished. The springs change too.

BP-51 is the exception in the range and ARB says so directly: unlike Nitrocharger Sport, which is tuned to a specific spring, the BP-51 is valved to let the owner tune it to load and terrain themselves. That is a genuinely different proposition, and it is the reason the BP-51 sits where it does in the catalogue.

None of this is exotic engineering and all of it is on ARB's own selection page. It matters because the ordering mistake it prevents is expensive: buying a damper because it is the next one up the list, and discovering it will not work with the springs already under the car.

The BP-51 is an internal bypass damper with a remote reservoir, and each of those two things is doing a separate job.

The internal bypass gives what ARB calls position-sensitive damping: the shock firms up towards the ends of its travel while staying comfortable around ride height. In plain terms, the damper knows where in its stroke it is, so it can be soft where the vehicle spends most of its time and progressively firmer as it runs out of travel. A conventional damper is only velocity-sensitive; it knows how fast the shaft is moving and nothing about where it is.

The remote reservoir is about oil volume and heat. ARB specifies a 6061-grade aluminium canister for increased oil volume and lower oil temperatures, and a 6061-grade aluminium body with a type III hard-anodised finish for heat dissipation and corrosion resistance, on a 51-millimetre bore. More oil, more surface area, lower working temperature.

On top of that the BP-51 carries external, independent, on-car adjustment of both rebound and compression. Independent matters: adjusting rebound without touching compression, and doing it with the shock still bolted to the vehicle, is what makes tuning for a specific load or a specific surface practical rather than theoretical.

ARB also says all BP-51 shock absorbers are designed and manufactured in-house by ARB. It is the only manufacturing statement ARB makes about this range, and it is a statement about who, not where.

Old Man Emu is a spring brand as much as a damper brand, and a page that only discusses shock absorbers gives a false picture of what is being bought. The range covers coil springs and leaf springs as well as dampers, and ARB sells them tuned as complete systems rather than as a shelf of individual parts.

Leaf springs are worth naming explicitly because they are still what sits under the rear of a great many of the pickups and utility vehicles used here, and because they behave differently from coils in a way that affects the load-class decision. A leaf pack carries load and locates the axle at the same time, so changing it changes more than ride height. A coil only carries load; location is somebody else's job.

We are not listing leaf springs among the part types this page uses to select shops, and that is a limitation of our own vocabulary rather than of the brand. The parts we match shops on are shock absorbers, coil springs and struts, so the businesses shown below were selected on those. If leaf springs are what you need, say so at the counter rather than assuming a shop that carries the dampers carries the packs.

ARB names two things in the United Arab Emirates on its own dealer directory, which is why this page is able to name them at all.

The first is ARB Middle East FZE, listed as a Regional Office with authorised status. That is the manufacturer's own regional company. It is not a retail counter, and it is not the same thing as an authorised trading distributor, which is a distinction worth holding onto because the two get collapsed constantly.

The second is ARB Emirates 4x4 Accessories, listed by ARB as an authorised dealer in the country. We have deliberately not attached an emirate to it here. ARB's own listing gives one emirate in the page title and a different one in the dealer name, and rather than choose the one that suits us we are telling you the source disagrees with itself.

There is a third claim in circulation and it is not on this page. A large UAE group's own website describes ARB Emirates as one of its companies and as the exclusive distributor of ARB products in the country since 1990, with two retail locations. Every part of that may well be true. None of it is verified by ARB, all of it is a business describing itself, and exclusivity in particular is the kind of claim that is easy to assert and hard to check. ARB's directory says authorised. That is what we say.

If authorisation matters to you for a suspension purchase, and for a system where the spring and damper are matched by the manufacturer it reasonably might, the question to ask a shop is not whether they are authorised. It is what they are authorised on, shown to you from ARB rather than from themselves.