Hey guys! This is my 1982 GMC 1 ton crew cab. You may have seen other videos that I've done on it. I'm kind of excited because I'm going to put on a four inch lift on here. I've got an ORD Offroad Design 4 lift that's going to go on here. The suspension on this is pretty sagged right now so it may even give me more than four inches. But I've been wanting to do it for a while and I'm kind of excited about it. I think I'm going to do two videos. One for the rear and one for the front. So I'll throw a link up here. It should be fun! So before we start taking the truck apart I'm going to measure from the center of the axle to the bottom of the fender trim and then we can measure after the lift and determine how much lift we actually got. On the rear here we've got 22 and 5/8 is the measurement.
Here we are on the front. I'll give it a quick measure. That's 22 and 1/8 on the front so we'll redo this after the lift and tell the overall lift that we got. So the lift that I bought from ORD came in two boxes from ORD and then the front springs are drop shipped from Tuff Country. Here's the first box. I haven't really gotten into it much yet. SX shops, four corners. Dana 60 U-bolt kit. It's better to get new U-bolts rather than to reuse them. This is a drop pitman arm for steering correction. That's what that looks like. Obviously three more shocks in there. Here's the second box from ORD. The bill and actually gives you some instructions for the shackle flip for the rear. Here are the shackle flip brackets. The one ton and the other trucks have different brackets so make sure you specify but they look really nice. Nice welds. Second bracket. I bought the front greasable bolts and the heavy duty shackle kit. My front shackle is really close to the frame and this gets it a little bit further away so I wanted to do that. And also I got the greasable bolts for the front of the front springs. Anyway, that's it except for the springs. I'll show you those in a little while. You can see obviously I've got the bed off the truck now. This is not necessary to install the lift but I've been needing to redo my soft fuel lines for a while and they're kind of underneath the bed in a hard to reach location. So taking the bed off helped me there and it helps with the lift and helps with the filming actually. It's not necessary though. So this is the back of the truck. This is the stock shackle mounting bracket right here. This is the shackle itself and obviously this is the spring. The way the ORD shackle flip works is you take this bracket off and you mount the new bracket. So the spring mounts at a lower position and that's where you get your lift. You can see here it's higher and if you mount it lower it raises the truck up. This is a 4.
They also make a 2.5. These are a little bit more expensive than a block they're just generally accepted to be safer and a better way of doing it. So our first step here is we need to raise the back of the truck up, put it on jack stands and then we're going to disassemble this. Take the spring off of the bracket and then we need to get the bracket off the frame and that requires removing these rivets. So real quick I do want to mention you guys need to be safe with this. Make sure you wear eye protection and gloves because we're using a lot of big hammers and grinding and stuff like that. First of all support the rear of the frame with jack stands and put a jack under the rear axle. The instructions tell you to remove the shackle and take these bolts out and that sounds easy but in reality it can be pretty difficult. These bolts here likely have been in for over 30 years so on my truck what happened is there's a steel sleeve inside the rubber bushing and that has rusted to the bolt. So you can't get the bolts out. It's pretty frustrating. I did not in the beginning order a heavy duty shackle and greasable bolt kit for the rear but since I found out I'm going to have to basically destroy this just to get it apart, I went ahead and ordered it from ORD. I just finished doing the other side and what I did there was I cut this bolt head off and then I cu the shackle hanger right here. So when you remove the nut on the back sideyou should be able to pull that off except that it's stiff with the spring. Then I went a head and removed the rivets. The four here and there's two on the underside and then the shackle hanger bracket could come off, swing down, and then I would be able to pull this bolt off that way. So it's kind of complex but just make sure you allow a lot of time for this because it's a little bit difficult. Different people like to remove these rivets in different ways. What you can do is, you can torch them out, you can plasma cut them out, you can cut a X in them and chivel them off, or you can drill them. What I actually ended up doing, for the ones that you can get to easily, like these threeand the two on the back side, I ground them down flush with a flap disc wheel in the grinder.
This forth one over here, you can't really get the grinder to so I drilled it and then I used some pry bars and chisels to pull the plate away. Chisel down and from the sides and it pulls the plate off. Again, it takes a while so make sure and leave yourself enough time. I wanted to show you guys a technique that I've been using to remove these stuck bolts. Again we've got a bolt that is inside a busing with a steel sleeve in there and the steel sleeve is rusted to the bolt. So it won't just slide out and you know you could beat on this all day and probably bend up the bracket. So what I do is grind or cut off the bolt head and then you stack on some washers and put the nut back on and just start cranking on it and it starts to pull that bolt through there. You'll have to take off the nut and add more washers eventually but it will come out. And that's a lot safer than damaging this bracket. It's been pretty critical for this project. On this side you can see that I've got the shackle and shackle hanger removed and punched out the rivets. Again there's two underneath here also. So the shackle flip kits use the existing springs so you keep your existing carrying capacity which is a bonus. If you're going to use these bushings you know you don't really have to do anything but you know they're probably pretty old. I would consider changing them if I were you. If you are going to remove them they're just notoriously difficult to get out. A lot of people will melt them out with a torch or you can drill with a small drill bit, all the way around here and it finally loosens up and then you can pound out the bushing. After you remove the center steel sleeve and the rubber portion of the bushing, there's still a real thin steel sleeve on the outside. They say that it's easiest to cut with a sawzall or a hacksaw right here. Where the spring eye wraps around there's kind of a little gap here so just cut it there and knock it out. You can see that I've got most of the suspension disassembled and almost ready to go back together. Obviously I painted the frame. There were some extra brackets on there that weren't being used.
Some exhaust hangers that aren't being used right now and four brackets for an old fifth wheel hitch. So I took all of those off and cleaned up the frame some. Put a few coats of black on there. I would encourage you to, at a very minimumpaint the frame here where the shackle flip is going to go. The chance of you taking it off in the future to paint underneath is it is pretty slim so just go ahead and paint while it's off. So I've been working on the project for a couple more days in my spare time. What's been taking so much time is that when I got deeper into the project I noticed that three or four of the leaves in my leaf spring pack were broken. So I had to source these new springs. If you need to buy new springs, make sure and shop around because there's a really wide variety of prices for the same product. There's like a number that they designate for the springs and you can type that into an internet search and find lots of different places. Just make sure you check the shipping. So once you knock out the old spring eyes, you just press the polyurethane bushings in there. Make sure you grease them up before hand because it makes it a lot easier. The same with the shock eyes. The grease makes it a lot easier. Back to the shackle flip. ORD sends these bolts with. You have to drill out the frame holes just a tiny bit bigger but the holes are already there. So from this point we just need to add the shackle itself and hook everything up. So here's the shackle installed. This is the ORD Super Shackle. Here is the stock shackle. You can see it's bent. I bent that by hand pretty easily when I was removing it and you can see my bolts are seized in there so that's why I went with these guys. Here is the other Super Shackle.
You can see it's a pretty beefy piece so nice work... One thing that I wanted to make note of is that these mounting points on the shackle hangers are offset so this one is specific to this side of the truck. The mounting point is offset from the center so you want them where the mounting point is towards the cab of the truck. When you're assembling all of this you'll have to lift the truck and adjust the height so that the bolt holes line up. Here we are above the rear axle. You can see that this is the rear soft brake line here. I've got it disconnected from the frame so there's enough slack when I'm installing the lift. What you don't want is for there to be a lot of tension on this when you're installing the lift or definitely when you're driving. It could rip this out and you could lose you're rear brakes. This is a extended braided brake line from ORD. You can see that it's about four inches longer than the stocker and this will prevent there from being to much tension on the brake line when the suspension articulates. Here are the new Tough Country SX8000 shocks on here. When you're installing a lift that's anything over just a tiny lift, you need to do new shocks because they don't have enough travel to handle the new lift. You could damage the shocks. Also make sure and take note of which way the shocks are supposed to be oriented. In this case the body of the shock is supposed to be down and if you had to destroy your lower mounting bolts, the size is 9/16 x 3 inches long.
So here's the truck with the rear lift finished. It looks kind of funny with just the rear lifted and the front still low. The lift ended up giving me more than 4 inches. I'm going to do a measurement for you in just a minute here. It was a fun project. It took quite a bit longer than I expected because my particular truck is a little bit rusty. Luckily I was able to replace a lot of those rusty parts so anyway. I think it looks good and it will look better when the front is done obviously. So here we are at the back of the truck. We're going to do a measurement to see how much lift we actually got. And that measured 28 and 3/4 so we got a little bit over 6 inches of lift which is obviously more than we expected for a 4 lift. I think that came from a couple different places. The new spring pack that I had to replace because of the broken leaves, is about a 1/4 inch taller. So that gave it a little lift. Then there's the super shackle on the back that's about a 1/4 to 1/2 longer than the stock shackle and I think the rest of it probably came from just settled out old springs. So I think that's where the extra lift came from. I'll keep you updated on weather or not this settles in a little bit as the springs break in. Right now it hasn't even been hardly driven so it might come down a little bit. Anyway, thank you guys for watching. If you like my videos, please consider subscribing and let me know if you have any questions!
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar