Got the rear finished, another long weekend in the garage! I was able to do all the front suspension work by myself but the rear work I needed another set of hands and enlisted a friends help, all went fairly smooth other than a few stubborn nuts & bolts. I will also need to go by the muffler shop and have the rear section hump over the axle reworked, I’m unable to get much drop without contacting the exhaust pipe!
I didn’t take a lot of pictures, it’s all pretty straight forward.
Did one side at a time, pulled the trailing arm off, replaced the trailing arm bushings, lower and upper shock perches and drilled the frame for the air bag. Removal of the old trailing arm bushing was pretty easy, the instructions called for burning them out of the sleeve, we just used a small spike/ice pick and pried the old dried up bushing out in small pieces. The upper shock perch has two rivets each that we cut off with a grinding wheel and knocked out. For the holes to mount the bag I copied the hole locations and used that as a template to punch mark the frame plate for drilling.
Mounted every thing up and ran the air line along the frame to the rear license frame. I ran the line inside some fuel line I had to protect it, especially between the area were the fuel tank is mounted since I could not anchor it in that section, it is well protected!
I also mounted the rear sway bar, not sure if I did it 100% correct or not, the instructions said that the spacer tube may need to be shortened for dropped vehicles. I took an inch off just to keep it somewhat out of the way of speed bumps, may need to buy shorter bolts and shorten it more, with the threads that were on the supplied bolts, 1” shorter was the most that would work with them. ANY BODY KNOW?
Even though I am unable to drop the rear where I want it (due to the exhaust pipe needing to be reworked) with the air bags I was able to set a stance that looks pretty good, handles like a race car and is as smooth as a Cadillac! The difference is just plain amazing! I took it on about an hour-long drive and hit the freeway too, 85 MPH it was rock solid, let go of the steering wheel straight. The steering response, ride and no body roll makes all the work more than worth it!
I’ll take another picture once I get it to the muffler shop.