Garage Projects

The Lone Ranger – 60/14 Bolt swap – Rear Test Fit and Chevy 63’s

For the rear, I decided to ditch the standard Ford springs and go with the Chevy 1500 rear leaf pack. These are a cheap way to lift the rear 3” when left in the stock location. Not that it matters since I’m moving everything around anyway.

I grabbed the stock pack off a 2wd which has 3 leaf’s and a overload:
Sara L.: Build and Misc &emdash;

Pulled the overload off:
Sara L.: Build and Misc &emdash;
Sara L.: Build and Misc &emdash;

And now the pack looks like this (The overload is about .75” by itself):
Sara L.: Build and Misc &emdash;

After that was sorted out, I played around with where I wanted the rear springs to live.

All of the following photos are with the WB set to 115”

At first I played around with how much angle I’d be comfortable running on these springs as Ideally, The spring eye’s should be about level with one another (From what I understand). So I laid things out like that:
Sara L.: Build and Misc &emdash;

Sara L.: Build and Misc &emdash;

That got me a little nervous as it looked like that rear body mount was going to have to change quite a bit and I’m just not real excited about that prospect (Probably because it took waaay to long to get the dang cab lined back up).

So I tilted the springs so that I could clear the body mount which netted me more of an angle than I liked:
Sara L.: Build and Misc &emdash;

Sara L.: Build and Misc &emdash;

At this point, I realized that trying to fit leaf’s with no weight on them isn’t getting me anywhere fast. So I went ahead and tightened up the U bolts and put some weight on the springs. At which point I had this setup going on.

Hub center is at ride height:
Sara L.: Build and Misc &emdash;

Much to my surprise, this looked pretty dang good, but gave me too much lift in the rear though not enough that I couldn’t tweak it to where it needed to be. But then I got out of my brain fart and realized that I need to stuff a BII fuel tank between the rails so that idea was nixed.

I think I’m going to do a hybrid of the ideas. That being out boarding the spring to the stock spring width, but mounting the front spring eye low enough to not interfere with the cab mount. I’m going to sleep on that tonight, but I think that’ll work.

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