PEAK PUTTERS

No more procrastinating: I'm tired of looking at parts so out with the old and in with the not-so-old. In goes the 90's v6 axles and housing along with disk brakes from the 85 front end via an adaptor bracket from Front Range Off Road. I'll use my original 4cly 3rd member in the new axle housing. Swapping over the bracket for my goofly looking anti-wrap bar may be a bit of work. Upon today's inspection the slip bar and sleave don't show any wear or distortion: still lots of clean grease on the sliding parts.

Its been over a year hasnt it? Probably closer to 2

I'm very happy to see that the 3rd member guts don't show any type of wear. Donny Simmonson re-set the 3rd member and ARB years ago after I had issues resulting from the previous installer.

Rats, the IFS axle housing the I ended up with has 3" wide spring perches. I Have to remove those and weld on 2.5"' perches.

Didn't you take that housing out of a Toyota?

SPR wrote:Rats, the IFS axle housing the I ended up with has 3" wide spring perches. I Have to remove those and weld on 2.5"' perches.

you'll still have to get new u-bolts and spring plates right?

V6/turbo trucks have 3" perches 4 cyl is 2.5

The plan is to replace the 3" perches with my old 2.5 perches; set a new pinion angle to omit my home made shims; slap it together with wider u-bolts and plates. Oh ya, install new rear brake lines to the rear calipers.

i ended up buying new perches from Trail Gear. I cut away most of the factory perches and figured i could slip the narrower perches inside the remaining portions of the old perches. Does anyone see a problem with this method?

Go for it

shouldn't be a problemand will help keep them straight. for future reference I like to buy the longer perches

I'm moving pretty slow is on this project but it's turning out to be more work than I had anticipated. I wasted a mornining looking for OME 4cyl IFS u-bolt plates at the wrecking yards. Therefore I may do the flip kit which means relocating shock mounts and possible buying new - shorter shocks.

I burned up today goofing around with new tools and making mounts for the wrap-up bar.



Next job is test fitting the rear axle, setting the pinion angle, and tacking on the spring perches and lower wrap-up bar mounts.

After a little drilling on the jack, I was able to mount a Ford Ranger brake drum to the jack with nicely holds the axle. This works much better than the previous method of strong backs and near misses

Why didn't you just leave the Turbo perches?

Roman wrote:Why didn't you just leave the Turbo perches?

Did the axle originally have turbo perches? I thought it came from a V6 4-runners. Anyways, those perches were for a 3"wide spring pack. My stuff is 2.5" wide. After my trips to the wrecking yards, I think the 2.5" spring width IFS stuff uses the same u-bolts and plates as the 3" spring packs.

Regardless, new 6" long perches means no more big homemade shims.

79chevy39.5's wrote:V6/turbo trucks have 3" perches 4 cyl is 2.5

Funny, missed the part about the turbo inclusion.

http://www.ruffstuffspecialties.com/cat ... 988-8.html
can still mount shocks low

Seems to be a many little modifications with this project that can burn up a lot of time. Since I'm going with a u-bolt flip, I need to modify the bump stop mounts in addition to the shock mounts. Here is my previous style bump stop mount which was held down by the stock u-bolts.



The new style will allow me to raise the bump stops if needed by using longer bolts and a spacer. Like the previous mount, it needs to be removable: allowing access to the u-bolt nuts. I tapped the plates to accept 3/8" bolts instead of welding a nut to the bottom of the plate. Either way would work, but I think looks better without partially melted nuts attached to the bottom of the plate.


I'll set the height of the bump stops to match the compressed shock length once I figure out the shock setup.

Using 0.35 flux core with my 140 Miller seems to be working pretty well for welding the thicker stuff together.



I appreciate the tips that I received for this project. The anti-wrap bar took a bit of work to transfer to the new axle but its done. Now it's time to figure out how to re-mount the long Rancho 9012 shocks in a manner that compliments the u-bolt flip.

Looking good Steve!

Nice job.

*heads to the store for some .035 flux core*

That's gonna stick right there!!

I played 3/4 hooky from work today to finish up the shock mounts. Wrench had given me some recycled lower shock mounts that worked perfectly after a relatively tiny bit of work. With some help from Scumby, we eyeballed things over and welded them on. The bottom edge of the shock mount sit about 1.5" higher than the lower edge of the axle housing. This is several inches higher than my stock shock mounts. Therefore, I'll have to switch to a little shorter (10" travel length) shock.

Last coat of paint... Getting closer.