1975 Brutally Simple Daily Driver

[neohic]

My springs arrived!

I went with a Zone Offroad 2” YJ kit without shocks. Reason being is that Zone is under the Fox/BDS umbrella and I’ve heard great things about the ride quality and flex. These are more on the basic side though being they don’t have military wrapped eyes, but let’s say that this kit was also “cost effective”. With the addition of the Bilstein shocks, I’m hoping for good suspension performance.

In the spirit of “cost effectiveness”, i decided to make some of the components I’ll be needing too.

Shackle bushings and spring plates are on order. I considered making the plates, but the disgustingly rusty plate I had in mind isn’t big enough to get four plates out of it. Next on the list is making the shackles. Maybe I’ll start the suspension swap soon?… still not in a huge hurry.

 

[colojeepguy]

 

[neohic]

Another day in the shop and I’ve got nearly everything I need to get started on the front suspension. I started with making the front shackles and then moved to getting real world measurements on the shocks.

Shackles are 4.5” from eye to eye because that’s the length I could get out of the 3/8” material I had. The front shocks are 28.5” extended and 17.75” collapsed. Rears are 23” to 15”. They are both 3-4” lift YJ shocks for the ease of future replacements. Eyeballing it, I think the rears might just drop right in, but the fronts are obviously much different than what’s currently in there. To get real numbers on the springs I started with measuring the current setup.

The spring moves a whopping 1” from ride height to droop and is 39” from eye to eye at ride height with a 2.5” shackle. This thing had a much longer shackle years ago but I put the tiny ones on it to try and get some caster in it.

Moving to the new springs, I started with static measurements to see how much it’ll move.

They’ll obviously move more with the weight of the Jeep and axles moving around, so it was more the measurements with weight on it that was important to me. Looks like they’re going to be nice and flat at ride height! With that I started figuring where the front shocks will live. The bottom mount will pretty much be where it currently is. That should keep the caliper playing nice around it.

 

[neohic]

The upper mount will be more creative. I started with a piece of steel something-er-other that I nearly ran over on the road years ago and then decided to pick it up. Maybe from a tow truck?… it’s shock mounts now.

My torch made short work of extracting what I needed. Then I made a quick template to get the angles right and cut out the rest. Paint and rust was removed with one of those “hamburger” stripping pads. Those things are awesome! They consume pretty quick, but still awesome!

The current upper mounts need to get cut out and these will go in their place. Again, we’re just eyeballing things based on compressed spring measurements. This might change once I get the new springs in and flex it around to get hard numbers on the shocks. Fenders will need to get cut also.

While I had tape measure things happening I took a look at where the spring and shackle mounts will go based on factory YJ numbers.

My plan is to move the axle forward some and modifying the bumper is now in the cards. There is some factory boxing on the inside of the frame over where the new spring mount will go but I need to connect the dots a bit.

Right now, it looks pretty straight forward to me. My tape measure tells me everything will work so it’ll be fine… probably.

 

[neohic]

Crazy mad flex!

I ran the CJ up my buddy’s ramp today to get some more baseline measurements. Unfortunately, I ran out of traction before lifting a tire so the winch got used to pull it up the rest of the way… very embarrassing.

Let’s talk about the rear.

With the rear tire bouncing off the ground, the shock was about topped out at 19” of travel. At the other side, the tire was just about into the wheel well and I wasn’t even close to the bump stop.

As for the front…

… I also have a mile or so before anything touches anything. The shock bottomed out before the tire was anywhere near full stuff.

Pretty sure there’s some room for improvement here.