Ultra cheap offroad race Explorer turned rock crawler

[Shran]

A bit more progress - I finally have my plasma table working correctly, IE not cutting beveled edges on parts, thanks to a buddy of mine. I cut some tabs for the drag link to tie rod spot, and made a mockup drag link out of a piece of pipe. Now that I know the angles on that piece, I started working on the frame side track bar bracket. I have the frame plated with 1/4" and one of the brackets cut out - the rear bracket will be slightly different - once I have that tacked together I can build the axle mount, that part should be fairly easy. Then once I'm happy with where all that lands, I am going to cut the upper & lower link material to length and get those tacked together so I can cycle the suspension and get a measurement for coilovers.

 

[Shran]

I got a few more brackets cut out over the weekend - frame track bar mount is tacked together, axle mount is partially assembled. Both of these will get a bunch more gussets but I'm holding off on that until I get the bump stop mounts and lower shock brackets built so that I don't run out of room for those. I got a length on the drag link and am having my buddy thread me another piece of DOM for that. Once I get that in place I may rotate the mounts on the tie rod a bit, I ended up pushing the track bar back towards the axle. They are the same length and parallel to each other but I think it'll look/function better if I rotate the drag link mounts about 5 degrees.