First off, a HUGE thanks To Jeff; as normal his garage, skills and willingness to help gets us through the installs with minimal issues. Last night was no exception. I started this thread under maintenance because the need to get done were the break pads. But the post is ending up being all about the upgrades. Jeff took care of the breaks while I was under the car doing the shock skids. I know he took both front tires off consecutively and I ended up with worn pads in the box, but otherwise I'm taking his word it's done
Skid shocks went well, I cut off the two driver side mount tabs (4.5" angle grinder w/ cut off wheel) and removed the lwr shock bolt to find out there was probably room to straighten and fit the ears inside the skid. Oh well! Temporally mounted the skid to the shock mount with the lwr shock bolt, using the skid as the template, I located and drilled the required bolt hole in the shock mount. I was going to use hot dipped galvanized bolts but darn if the SS bolts weren't close to the same price.
When I got to the passenger side I was going to straighten the tabs, which now faced forward. But found that they were banged up and pointing out to the sides. No way I was straightening them in place (under the X). Grabbed the grinder & problem gone. Drilled the mount and installed the skid using the same methods as the driver side. It was on to the U-Bolt Flip Kits.
Jeff got a jump on the U-Bolts as I was finishing up the skids. With the X jacked up on the frame to remove the wheel, the spring started to separate from the axle as the U-Bolts were backed off. We ended up using a second Jack under the leaf springs to keep proper contact with the axle. Dry fitting the top plate and U-Bolts reviled an interference with the brackets, as noted in a previous post. The following pictures show the bracket after we cut the inboard end off the axle tube and twisted into a non-interfering location in line with the wire's route. The tube was dressed and hit with some paint. The rest was easy, well except for the final torque on the passenger shock bolt. Laying under the X trying to generate 140 ft-lb downward on the torque wrench. Thankfully I'm not a little guy, and I was able to get there.
Driver side shock skid and flip kit.
Passenger side, skid on with standard orientation U-Bolts. You can see I was lazy about trimming them back when we changed out the springs. At least one has been whacked pretty good. Not to mention the paint well beaten off the plate too.
adjusted bracket:
Tightening up the flipped U-Bolts evenly, note bracket location:
Ma-Bell I'm trying to get ready!
Scott