Since I had the bed off to work on the exo, I took a look at the rear upper shock mounts. It turns out some dummy didn’t really set them up right, so with a load on the back of the truck , the shocks were acting as the bump stops (D’oh!). With the truck sitting static, I had about 2″ of shock up travel left (They were mounted vertical) . The problem is my bump stops allowed for 4″…

The axle shock mounts came as a part of Ruff Stuff’s “Simple Dana 60/70″ swap kit. I made the upper mounts using the same 2” tube I had in the front: On the frame side, I used a piece of 2″x3″x1/4″ wall tube to go across the frame rails. Here it is tacked on checking the mounting locations: Burned home with some gussets: Shocks installed:

It took me long enough to get around to this point, but I finally got the rear shackle mount where I wanted it (I think). I started out using the spare tire carrier holes as a base line for locating the rear mounts. It turns out that they’re spaced perfectly in relation to my front mounts to get me the correct shackle angle. First trial location (Looking at the passenger side): While this placement got my horizontal location correct, my…

In an effort to try to get rid of some of the vibes I’ve been dealing with, and to get the truck to sit level again, I hacked up another set of chevy leaves to wrap up my bastard pack. In the past, I had already added an AAL ”Boosting the Rear” (Link), but it wasn’t quite enough. So I took the stock pack that looked like this: Cut down the second to the top leaf of another chevy pack:…

After putting a few miles on the truck, I was running into two problems 1)The rear settled down more than I liked 2)I had a “Death Sway” issue going on when I had any weight in the truck. While I liked how the Chevy leafs rode and flexed, they were just too soft for me. Since I don’t know the history of these leafs, its very possible that I managed to get an ‘extra broke in’ set of leafs. The…