The story:
My poor heep has seen many revisions of its suspension in the 6 years I've owned it. Starting with my custom sway bar discos, moving on to a 2.5" budget boost, up to 3.5" to clear 31s, new lower arms, booster springs and blocks to push up to 4.5" to clear the 32" MTRs and all the driveline mods that go along with it. In January the blocks decided that they were going to walk out from under the rear springs. Luckily I caught it before it actually spat one of them out. The solution to this problem was a set of 4.5" Rubicon Express rear leafs hooked up to my 1" drop shackles netting me 6.5" in the rear. I know the math doesn't work out, but Rubicons springs seem to be a little under rated. The problem was that now the a$$ end sat way up in the air. I knew that I was going to have to lift the front, but I figured it could wait. Well, I kept driving it and soon started noticing some new clunking noises from the front end. I shook the tires and realized that i had killed all 4 poly bushings on the lower arms, as well as 2 of the rubber bushings on the stock upper arms, and this was allowing the axle to move around almost 3/4" back and forth. Time to fix it, but as I always say, why fix it when you can upgrade it?
The reasoning:
I've wanted a long arm set up for several years now. I didn't really know why, I just thought it was awesome and the flex was amazing! After discovering that my front end needed some major attention I began to actually look into the long arm kits and what it is that they do. Turns out that they do a lot more than just give you tons of flex and look freakin' sweet. There is a ton of geometry that gets adjusted with these kits, and this does things like improve on road handling as well as correct wheel base and pinion angles. I looked at several kits including Rubicon, rock-krawler, Claytons offroad and TNT customs. It came down to Claytons or TNT due to the thicker materials as well as recommendations from other wheelers. I chose the TNT kit because of the relatively simple install, the beefy skid/crosmember, and the bent arm design, a feature unique to TNT, which gives you several inches of clearance that straight arms don't allow.
The install:
I know, blah blah blah, talk talk talk where the he!! are the pictures???? Well here they are. (Finally, Geeze!:asshat
I ordered the upgrade kit because I already had the brake lines, sway bar links, etc. So I got the belly pan, arms, hardware kit, springs, and a drop pitman arm. I also ordered the weld on frame stiffeners as part of the kit. They are the only part on this install that required any welding, everything else is 100% bolt on.
The belly pan/crossmember/Tcase skid.
Upper arms:
Lower arms:
Control arms painted:
Belly pan painted:
The next day the magical brown truck of happiness brought me the frame stiffeners so it was time to get those installed.
First all the undercoating/paint/rust/crap had to be ground off the frame:
I decided to use rosette welds as well as stitch welds to hold the reinforcements to the unibody, so I had our friend Kevin drill several 1/2" holes for the plug welds.
Someday I hope to own a drill press with that many features!
Once prepped, you form the stiffeners to the unibody rail with a floor jack:
All ready to weld up!
Burn it home!
All done!
What i don't have pictures of is the upper stitch welds on that side and the paint.