Got my extended radius arms made. Decided to keep the factory trans crossmember. The tube inserts are from Ruff Stuff. 1.25-12 thread for 2x2x0.25 wall square tube. The rod ends are QA1 rock ends. I built them to put the beams square with the ground with the weight of the truck on them. I had read somewhere that that should give me 5° of positive caster. Passenger side ended up at 89.8° and drivers side beam ended up at 89°. Not perfect and I’m not sure what happened but definitely manageable.
Tuff country 2.5” drop brackets
Rough Country leveling springs with a 0.75” thick stainless spacer below them. They actually ride a lot better than the stock springs but I’m sure the RA’s help a lot with that.
And the brackets for the arms. I drew these in CAD and burned them out at work. The outside plate is doubled up to be 0.5” thick. I have a newer style trans crossmember cleaned up and painted to go in but that’s not important right now. I’m going to pull everything apart in spring and paint.
The only thing I didn’t put on yet were the Camburg braided stainless brake hoses and I still need to do the rear which will consist of 4 door explorer leafs with a 1” zero rate block and the stock Ranger shackles.
The truck how it currently sits. Definitely going to need to run a wheel with a little more backspacing or rework the radius arms a bit in the spring. Major rubbage about a half turn from lock.
The front sits about an inch higher than the rear. Before I started, the rear was 1.5 inches higher than the front. I’d like to keep the rear 1-1.5 inches higher than the front for towing purposes. Tie rods are perfectly level with the Superlift FA400 pitman arm. I ended up swapping boxes with my spare after I broke my pitman arm puller trying to remove the stock pitman arm. Whoops.
Well there’s my update. I suck at stopping to take pics. I’ll get it in for an alignment next week after the rear is done. I don’t feel like doing it myself again. It’s a lot of frustrating trial and error.