Everyone has their opinion, and I've noticed that people tend to stand behind what they are running on their own XJs, and I am no different. I personally run the Rusty's longarm conversion kit on my '99 XJ and I LOVE it. By far the best upgrade on my long list of mods. The design and the 4-link setup is great.
One of the biggest things that drew my attention about it was the bolt-on design. The installation wasn't a cake walk because I had welded on a set of rock rails the year before, and one of the welds was located where the frame brakets were supposed to be for the long arm kit. So I had to mod the kit a little bit, which made my installation time much longer. These pics show where I had to cut the frame bracket to fit around my rock rails and I had to drill the hole through the frame in a different spot:
Offroad, the flex is not limited by anything but your shocks and brake lines. It performs so smoothly too, no clunks or anything when the suspension is doing its thing offroad. I daily drive my Jeep too, and it rides just as great going 75 down the freeway.
I will agree that there are other Rusty's products that do not have a good reputation, and I would avoid some of them, like the tie-rod conversion kit that I have, but as far as the long arm conversion kit goes, it has left me completely satisfied. The only thing that sort of surprised me when I installed it was that you use the factory nuts and bolts on the control arms. That's no necessarily bad, but I just thought that it would come with new ones, which it didn't. Here's some flex & poser shots:
If you want to see a in-depth write-up on my installation, visit my cardomain page:
http://www.cardomain.com/ride/803172/8
Hope that helped. Let me know if you have any questions about anything. :looney:
