Advice on axle brackets

when you gusset it i would use a piece of 90 degree iorn that is facing towards the inside and is the length of the bracket, that way you dont loose any clearance with a big triangle piece

Where is the progress

Ok, well I made some progress but I have a bit of a dillemma. Maybe someone can help me figure it out. But first the progress.

The axles are good, turned out the leakage was just a cracked driverside seal.

So here we are at the start.




So the frame clearancing. The rear lip of the crossmember is about 1/2"-3/4" lower than the front. This is a problem, need to sit vertical, or even lean towards the rear of the vehicle.


The second clearance problem. The pumpkin hits the frame about 4"-6" before the bumptop. This needs to be removed.








Nice final weld. Shiny. I did 2 more passes after this one.


Trying to limit my inhalation of rust. I hate the black boogers.


And its under!


How it sits now


So! The beams clear everything all the way to the stock bumpstop, but at the stock wheelbase width the spring perches on the beams are about halfway under the frame rail.

There is no way to fit a spring on there.

I tried drilling new holes to move the beams outward, but now the center u joint binds when the beams get within 2" of the bumpstop.

I feel like my bracket is fairly conservative, it is about 4" below stock.

How does the skyjacker lift kit's springs clear the frame rails? Do they end up lowering the bumpstop at all to deal with this issue? I didn't think they did.

It seems as the beams follow their arc the spring perches end up under the frame rails.

When I spread the wheelbase to accomodate this, the center u-joint binds. The yoke is hitting itself, its not a bad u-joint.

Any ideas? Im going to have to do more research I guess. Im really not happy where the u-joint is binding, and I would lean toward doing an x-member swap over having to lower the bumpstops so much to accomodate this.

I don't understand the u-joint binding (if anything spreading the width apart would cause a too-little spline engagement issue on the slip-shaft).

Got any pics of it binding? Also pics of where the spring perches are in relation to the upper buckets?

Also, many lift kits do lower the bumpstops, though typically by less than the lift is tall.

4x4junkie said:

I don't understand the u-joint binding (if anything spreading the width apart would cause a too-little spline engagement issue on the slip-shaft).

Got any pics of it binding? Also pics of where the spring perches are in relation to the upper buckets?

Also, many lift kits do lower the bumpstops, though typically by less than the lift is tall.

Click to expand...

Your lifts didn't lower the stops any did they? Do you have any estimate as to how far your brackets dropped the pivots? I read your tech article on clearancing the d35 yokes, but I felt like it was more of a precaution than a necessity.

The spline engagement is an issue with the current setup.

I will probably mess around with it more this weekend, and get more pics.

this is similar to the ol ttb 250 lifts. i looked for one quite a long time to use in a hybrid build at one point.

i too am having a hard time visualizing the bind issue...and spring placement.

AlaskanRider said:

Your lifts didn't lower the stops any did they? Do you have any estimate as to how far your brackets dropped the pivots? I read your tech article on clearancing the d35 yokes, but I felt like it was more of a precaution than a necessity.

The spline engagement is an issue with the current setup.

I will probably mess around with it more this weekend, and get more pics.

Click to expand...

The bumpstop extensions Skyjacker provides with their 4" and 6" lifts I think are about 3.5" long (a little long IMO for the 4" lift, but right about perfect for 6").
Rancho's 2.5" lift has 1.5" bumpstop drops.
Most lift heights are based on how far the axle brackets are dropped down compared to the stock ones (so 2.5" for the Rancho).

Clearancing the yoke is typically needed if you run long-travel Jeep coils or something similar, however this isn't something normally needed if you're just using regular TTB coils.
What is the spacing between your pivots laterally? (should be ~14") If this spacing is off, I could see this causing some of the issues you're having such as the springs not lining up

4x4junkie said:

The bumpstop extensions Skyjacker provides with their 4" and 6" lifts I think are about 3.5" long (a little long IMO for the 4" lift, but right about perfect for 6").
Rancho's 2.5" lift has 1.5" bumpstop drops.
Most lift heights are based on how far the axle brackets are dropped down compared to the stock ones (so 2.5" for the Rancho).

Clearancing the yoke is typically needed if you run long-travel Jeep coils or something similar, however this isn't something normally needed if you're just using regular TTB coils.
What is the spacing between your pivots laterally? (should be ~14") If this spacing is off, I could see this causing some of the issues you're having such as the springs not lining up

Click to expand...

Well that explains my problem. My goal was to not lower the bumpstops any for maximum travel.

I did some math with right triangles, and you really cant allow the beams to travel much more than 6 inches above the pivot point before the distance between the spring perches becomes too small. (stock is 5-3/4").

I took some pics of what the problem I'm talking about is. The pivots are only about 13" apart.

Here the beams are both about 2.5-3" from the stock bumpstop, and the u-joint is starting to bind. You can see where it rubbed the frost off itself.


Here is the spring perch problem at full bump. I have 2" of clearance and I need 3".



And here is the spline engagement issue (or non-engagement issue)


So i guess there are 2 options for retaining max travel.
#1 clearance the u-joints and buy coilovers
#2 clearance the u-joint and extend the passenger side axle shaft

Right now I'm thinking i might just drop the bumps 4" for the cheapest and easiest route to a driveable truck. And probably will come back to it this summer, when my diesel is running again.

here is some triangles I came up with if you could extend the passengerside axleshaft by 1.5 inches. Im not sure if you could clearance the yoke enough to allow for this, but it would be cool if you could.

In the picture above the straight lines are lines between the pivot and the center of the coil mount stud.

Do you guys think the u-joint could tolerate that much of a bend, with proper clearancing?



Oh, another thing, I mis-measured the lift, currently the brackets are about 6" below stock. I made em huge though, so I can move the holes around quite a bit.

Im coil shopping right now so I will probably start moving stuff around once they show up and I know what ride height ill be sitting at.

Well, if it helps your coil shopping, 4" coils should sit at 14.5-15" long with full weight on them, 6" lift coils @ 16.5-17", and so on (stock being 10.5-11"). Put the axle to where it's level (no angle on the center joint) and see what distance you have in between the upper & lower spring seats.


I would agree, you're pushing too much upward movement there. I would say lower the bumpstops down maybe to 1" short of where the u-joint would bind. Even at that, I suspect it'll probably still be too much uptravel for your shocks, so you might have to lower them down even more (I probably wouldn't worry about the bumpstops just yet).

And FWIW, that's about how my spring perches are when it gets close to the frame like that too.
Remember, the coil won't be standing straight off the perch in the same direction as the stud bolt, it'll actually be bent outward some as it goes straight up to the upper bucket. If any contact does occur there, it'll probably be pretty light (I only had to grind a couple of the rivet heads down a little to clear my Jeep coils, which are even bigger dia. than RBV TTB coils).

4x4junkie said:

Well, if it helps your coil shopping, 4" coils should sit at 14.5-15" long with full weight on them, 6" lift coils @ 16.5-17", and so on (stock being 10.5-11").

And FWIW, that's about how my spring perches are when it gets close to the frame like that too.
Remember, the coil won't be standing straight off the perch in the same direction as the stud bolt, it'll actually be bent outward some as it goes straight up to the upper bucket.

Click to expand...

Thanks that is really helpful. Got shut down the weekend before last. Thermometer was maxed out and my propane gelled. So no progress.

But this weekend I got my coils under there. 60$ free shipping Moog CC824 progressive rates. 4" of lift on my std. cab shortbox. They wont be any good for crawling, but this truck wont see much of that in all likelihood.



I redrilled my brackets for 3" of lift, figuring I could realign it but i think it might be a little high. Camber looks really far off, but maybe it's within alignable range. Coils are right at about 14"-14.5" loaded. Ill have to check again next weekend. I think if I were to draw a line from the center of one hub to the center of the other, the pivots would be about 1" above this line, but Ill double check on saturday.



Still need to reinforce the bracket some. Also thinking about steering.

Does anyone know if the manual steering units use the same arms as the power steering units?

AlaskanRider said:

I think if I were to draw a line from the center of one hub to the center of the other, the pivots would be about 1" above this line, but Ill double check on saturday.

Click to expand...

SHould be good to go. That's about the perfect position for them to be in.

Does anyone know if the manual steering units use the same arms as the power steering units?

Click to expand...

No, they do not, the splines are different (one has indexing splines, the other either has none, or they are positioned different, I can't recall offhand the exact details though).

looks like some custom steering is in the works then. The only cheap manual box pitman arms I can find are for LOWERING your truck...

I like the simplicity of stonecrusher, but it sounds like it doesn't work too well without the proper pitman arm. I really liked Crashtest84's steering. May try to go something along that route.

Getting excited shopping on roughstuff and ballistic. I think id like to run tie rods rather than heims.

DON'T buy from ballistic fab!!