I've been keeping a thread going on JA about my D44 swap. I thought some of you might like to see how it is progressing.
As some of you may or may not know, I had a bad, bad day with my Jeep back in the middle of April. To say that I broke is to say that the Pacific is a nice little pool of water. At any rate, I did some soul searching, and decided to completely re-think my front end. With that in mind, I decided to convert the front to a full-width HP Dana 44. Conveniently, we had one just sitting around gathering dust.
Now, this axle had been previously started as an Early Bronco build, and was already setup with nice new 1/2" tubes, new Ford Factory wedges, etc. etc. yada yada yada. It is nice. However, if I wanted to keep my existing short arm suspension, I would have had to fab all of the TJ bracketry onto the axle.
I decided that the KISS principle was in effect, and so I chose to convert the front of the Jeep to an Early Bronco-style radius arm setup using the existing Ford wedges on the axle. With this in mind, I bought a set of extended Early Bronco radius arms off Ebay. I also bought a used ARB, which turned out to be a huge mistake (it was BROKEN!!!!).
Here's some pics for all you pic-hungry peeps:
oooohhhhhh - Purty.....(and yes, I know it's upside down)
More bling (thanks to Scott at Rockbuggy Supply for the conversion spacers!!!):
The world's ugliest aluminum wheels...welcome back to the 80's!!! But hey...for $50 I could not say no...anybody want the 31's that are on them? You get them taken off the wheels, and they're yours. One is almost new, 2 are about 50%, and one is no good.
How it sat back in June when I started this jackstand odyssey:
And my broken ARB
Broken cross-shaft:
Wasted diff case (the broken pin wobbled out the hole):
ARB resolution, short version:
After much hassle, I got half my money back from the guy who sold it to me and then I sold it for the other half. As it turned out, even after I fixed the locker, it would up being for the wrong application, so I couldn't use it anyway.
More coming...
More progress on the Jonco over the July 4th weekend:
They sure look good, but boy are they wide. That's what I need, though. But, with the 15x8's, I think I really won't be THAT much wider than stock (at least, in the rear). Keep in mind the 31's are getting swapped out for my Krawlers (and those 31's are available, free of charge, to anyone who wants them and is willing to come pick them up...I'm gonna give 'em to the tire dealer otherwise):
Next I started cutting the lca and track bar brackets off the frame. That seems like such an innocent statement, but cutting that stuff off the frame is a PITA. I was ready to pull out the torch for the track bar bracket, but I'm leery of torching stuff off the frame...then I remembered I had a sawzall....
I also rebuilt my ARB and stripped the d-44 housing down.
I really didn't get anywhere near as much done this weekend as I wanted to, but at least I got something done. I was going to do more today, but I wound up working instead. Gotta pay those Jeep parts bills...
Well, after the whole ARB debacle, a buddy of mine offered up his LockRight, and so I used that instead. It's nowhere near as sexy as the ARB was gonna be, but it'll do just fine. So, over the weekend of 7/8 I got the gears setup. The pattern is really nice. These will be good for quite a while.
This got me to the point where I could start fabbing the brackets and mocking everything in place. I had just lost my job, and was looking forward to having some time off to finish this pig. With that in mind, I WAS going to do that over the following week, but before I could even sit down to enjoy my first post-employment beer, I got a better new job that has me travelling two weeks out of the month. So it had to wait until this past weekend. Darn the bad luck.... :grin:
I got a little bit done on Saturday. Not a lot, as the heat finally chased me from my garage. But, the tires are switched over to the new wheels, and they look good.
All loaded up:
3 hours and more money than I wanted to spend later:
The wheels look WAY better with the Krawlers on them. Since I was switching everything around, I realized that I can get a second life out of my sidewalls by putting what was previously the inner wall on the outside this time. They look brand new again! Woohoo!
Which brings me up to date. Yesterday we got a LOT done. I know Chris wanted to have the axle actually fabbed in by tonight, but I think we made awesome progress.
The first thing we needed to do was get the passenger side LCA bracket off the frame. I could tell that Chris was happy to be back fabricating after 6 months in Japan:
Then we mocked the axle in place and bolted on the radius arms.
Next we had to figure out how to actually mount the radius arms to the frame. We looked around the garage and found a couple of used bearing races that had the exact correct inside diameter for the RA bushings. After looking around a little more, we found that they would fit perfectly into some 2" receiver tube, so we welded them up. It worked better than we had any right to expect.
Once we figured out how to mount the radius arms to the bushings, we found that we needed the bracket to have a little bit of drop, and it had to angle out from the frame. We decided to take a piece of rectangular box tube, which just happened to hold the RA bracket perfectly. We can weld the tube onto the frame at any angle we want, and then we can weld the bracket in the tube at any angle we want. Quick, clean and simple.
Next up:
Track bar and bracket. I'm very excited!
As some of you may or may not know, I had a bad, bad day with my Jeep back in the middle of April. To say that I broke is to say that the Pacific is a nice little pool of water. At any rate, I did some soul searching, and decided to completely re-think my front end. With that in mind, I decided to convert the front to a full-width HP Dana 44. Conveniently, we had one just sitting around gathering dust.
Now, this axle had been previously started as an Early Bronco build, and was already setup with nice new 1/2" tubes, new Ford Factory wedges, etc. etc. yada yada yada. It is nice. However, if I wanted to keep my existing short arm suspension, I would have had to fab all of the TJ bracketry onto the axle.
I decided that the KISS principle was in effect, and so I chose to convert the front of the Jeep to an Early Bronco-style radius arm setup using the existing Ford wedges on the axle. With this in mind, I bought a set of extended Early Bronco radius arms off Ebay. I also bought a used ARB, which turned out to be a huge mistake (it was BROKEN!!!!).
Here's some pics for all you pic-hungry peeps:
oooohhhhhh - Purty.....(and yes, I know it's upside down)
More bling (thanks to Scott at Rockbuggy Supply for the conversion spacers!!!):
The world's ugliest aluminum wheels...welcome back to the 80's!!! But hey...for $50 I could not say no...anybody want the 31's that are on them? You get them taken off the wheels, and they're yours. One is almost new, 2 are about 50%, and one is no good.
How it sat back in June when I started this jackstand odyssey:
And my broken ARB
Broken cross-shaft:
Wasted diff case (the broken pin wobbled out the hole):
ARB resolution, short version:
After much hassle, I got half my money back from the guy who sold it to me and then I sold it for the other half. As it turned out, even after I fixed the locker, it would up being for the wrong application, so I couldn't use it anyway.
More coming...
More progress on the Jonco over the July 4th weekend:
They sure look good, but boy are they wide. That's what I need, though. But, with the 15x8's, I think I really won't be THAT much wider than stock (at least, in the rear). Keep in mind the 31's are getting swapped out for my Krawlers (and those 31's are available, free of charge, to anyone who wants them and is willing to come pick them up...I'm gonna give 'em to the tire dealer otherwise):
Next I started cutting the lca and track bar brackets off the frame. That seems like such an innocent statement, but cutting that stuff off the frame is a PITA. I was ready to pull out the torch for the track bar bracket, but I'm leery of torching stuff off the frame...then I remembered I had a sawzall....
I also rebuilt my ARB and stripped the d-44 housing down.
I really didn't get anywhere near as much done this weekend as I wanted to, but at least I got something done. I was going to do more today, but I wound up working instead. Gotta pay those Jeep parts bills...
Well, after the whole ARB debacle, a buddy of mine offered up his LockRight, and so I used that instead. It's nowhere near as sexy as the ARB was gonna be, but it'll do just fine. So, over the weekend of 7/8 I got the gears setup. The pattern is really nice. These will be good for quite a while.
This got me to the point where I could start fabbing the brackets and mocking everything in place. I had just lost my job, and was looking forward to having some time off to finish this pig. With that in mind, I WAS going to do that over the following week, but before I could even sit down to enjoy my first post-employment beer, I got a better new job that has me travelling two weeks out of the month. So it had to wait until this past weekend. Darn the bad luck.... :grin:
I got a little bit done on Saturday. Not a lot, as the heat finally chased me from my garage. But, the tires are switched over to the new wheels, and they look good.
All loaded up:
3 hours and more money than I wanted to spend later:
The wheels look WAY better with the Krawlers on them. Since I was switching everything around, I realized that I can get a second life out of my sidewalls by putting what was previously the inner wall on the outside this time. They look brand new again! Woohoo!
Which brings me up to date. Yesterday we got a LOT done. I know Chris wanted to have the axle actually fabbed in by tonight, but I think we made awesome progress.
The first thing we needed to do was get the passenger side LCA bracket off the frame. I could tell that Chris was happy to be back fabricating after 6 months in Japan:
Then we mocked the axle in place and bolted on the radius arms.
Next we had to figure out how to actually mount the radius arms to the frame. We looked around the garage and found a couple of used bearing races that had the exact correct inside diameter for the RA bushings. After looking around a little more, we found that they would fit perfectly into some 2" receiver tube, so we welded them up. It worked better than we had any right to expect.
Once we figured out how to mount the radius arms to the bushings, we found that we needed the bracket to have a little bit of drop, and it had to angle out from the frame. We decided to take a piece of rectangular box tube, which just happened to hold the RA bracket perfectly. We can weld the tube onto the frame at any angle we want, and then we can weld the bracket in the tube at any angle we want. Quick, clean and simple.
Next up:
Track bar and bracket. I'm very excited!
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