I want an insulated shop with heat... December - February I really slowed down on progress, tried working in the shop a bit but turns out I'm just too much of a pud. The weather this month has been really nice and I got back at it.
Finally got my suspension sorted out. A bit over a year ago
@Greg recommended I reach out to Matt Bell at Desert Speed Shock Tuning if I needed work done on my coilovers and that turned out to be great advice. As I mentioned in earlier posts, when my coilovers were originally valved they were set up to have light compression and stiff rebound. I got with Matt and explained my rig and he worked to come up with a more appropriate valving stack; in addition to the valve change he rebuilt all four shocks and also added crossover rings to the front coilovers to allow me to run a duel rate setup. Working with Matt and DSST was an awesome experience; I got several quotes and he beat all of them, very responsive and took the time to understand what I was trying to accomplish, quick turnaround, local, and has followed up several times to ensure I was happy with the valving chosen. So there's the plug, if anyone is in the market for something similar I'd recommend DSST.
One issue I had with the amount of travel I'm after is avoiding spring coil bind, especially on the rear. After research/shopping I ended up going with Hyperco springs. Hyperco utilizes a "barrel" type design on their offroad springs and they also offer an "ultimate high travel" lineup of springs which I used on the rear. Looking at the pictures below you'll see barrel type profile which allows them to use further spaced coils, reduces coil buckling, and increases the amount the spring can be compressed prior to bind. I got three sets of springs real quick, but the fourth set took ~3 months due to a manufacturing issue, wasn't a problem seeing as how it was the middle of winter and I wasn't working much anyway.
Before:
After:
Packaging reservoirs is pretty tight up front.
Rear limit straps installed.
As part of this rebuild, I screwed up the electrical to the fan so that took about 4hrs to track down and fix which was irritating.
Trimmed skid plate to match frame mod to clear front driveshaft yoke.
I'm really happy with my spring selection which I was kind of nervous about. I utilized the old springs to get the load per spring on each corner which turned out to be very accurate. Then after a lot of research/calcs on duel rate setups I settled on 250#/350# front and 125#/200# rear. Once I installed the springs at zero preload the buggy settle to almost exactly what I'd calculated; both front and rear should only require ~2-3" of preload which is the range I was shooting for. I plan to run the crossover rings 2in above the slider at ride height on the front, and 3in in the rear.
Pulled the buggy out and took it for a trip around the block and that got me really excited to wrap this up! Even driving around the neighborhood I can tell how big of a difference the new springs/valving made. Also, correcting my brake peddle throw made a huge difference in stopping ability.
Plan to mount the rear reservoirs tonight.
I found that due to my new coilvoer/limit strap axle side mounting on the rear my brake line routing was all screwed up. Parts/tools should come in next week and I'll be redoing the brake lines on the back half of the rig.
Still need to figure out winch mounting. I deleted the wishbone in the front and to mount the winch on the front of the chassis gets very tight, doable, but tight... What do people think about mounting the winch to the axle? Pros/cons?
Then... rockcrawl. I hope. ha.
Fingers crossed for more warm-ish weather.
