Last weekend I finished up the transfer case crossmember. Not much to add on to what I've already showed you guys. I cut the pipe to length, leveled and squared up all the brackets. Then tacked it all together. With that now holding the drive train from moving. I removed the transmission crossmember and started to mock up the transmission crossmember tubing.... more on that later.
This weekend I decided to tackle the traction bar. I tried to start on it last weekend, but realized my new tubing notcher requires a drill with a 1/2" chuck. I dont have one here at the house, so I made sure to bring mine home from work this weekend. I got the traction bar kit from Ruff Stuff. It's a universal kit that comes with a few pieces of .250" wall tube, brackets, bushings and a heim joint. Originally it had a 2" lower tube and a 1.75" upper tube. But after looking at it the lower tube just seemed MASSIVE. So I got another piece of 1.75" × .250" for the bottom tube.
This seemed like a straight forward install.... but it took me most of the weekend to dial it in. Suspension parts require ALOT of measuring and adjusting to get it right. This was the first time I've installed this kinda of traction bar so I took my time to get it right.
First I notched the upper and lower tubes so I could tack on the bushing boss for each tube. Then I cut the lower tube to the same length as the drive shaft when measuring from the center of the bushing to the center of the heim joint. Next I pressed in the rear bushings and installed both tubes into the axle brackets. That kept everything square so I could line up the brackets on the axle. Ruff stuff said I could install the axle brackets at any angle I wanted. But I decided to set the center line from the upper to lower mounting bolts perpendicular to the floor. That made the most sense to me. With the axle bracket clamped in place I set the lower tube to the same angle as the drive shaft. Then I assembled the front shackle with the bushing and boss to square it all up when I tightened the bolts. Last I set the shackle to 90* off the lower bar. With all that lined up I could finally measure for my front mounting brackets. The kit came with brackets to mount to a tube crossmember. But since it lined up really close with my existing crossmember I thought I would build custom brackets to mount it off of that. I measured out the location of the bracket and made a cardboard template.
This is what I started with and bellow is what I ended up with. I trimmed a little more off of it because after I cut them out they felt "Bulky" to me. The brackets are made from 1/4".
With those cut out I installed them over the bushing boss and lined them up on the crossmember. This was time consuming as hell to get everything to lined up and hold it square. But after a using what felt like every 90* magnet and clamp I had I managed to line it up and tacked it in place.
Next I notched the upper tube to attach it to the lower tube. With the frame being level still I set the upper bar to be level with the frame. Lastly I notched a few tubes to go between the upper and lower tubes. I got 2 out of 3 finished before I had to stop for dinner. The last one is too short to fit in my notcher so I will have to do the last notch by hand. Shouldn't take me long to finish that last tube some day this week.
The upper tube looks short because the lower is almost 5ft long. I could have made the upper longer put then it wouldn't have been level to the frame.
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