Now, the front. Please ignore the piles of stuff. This shop belongs to my grandfather and we all know older people save everything.
I call this pic the mess.
I used spring pocket eliminators from airbagit which for those who don't know they allow you to run 2600 bags in the front. I would say the spring pocket eliminators are a good product.
So, I also used upper and lower control arms from airbagit and the arms have not stopped squeaking since day one. I don't know what to do but I do know that no grease anyone sells will stop it so I just turn the radio up so no one around can hear the squeaking.
Here is the front bags all done up.
Fully laying out in the front.
So I took it out for the weekend and sure enough I bent the exhaust where it crosses under the trans. I don't have any pics of how I fixed it but I installed new pipe from the exhaust manifolds to the pre muffler and flattened, if thats the right way to say it, the exhaust pipe that goes under the trans so it clears the frame and I haven't hit anything since. The section that I flattened I upped the size of pipe to 2 inch so it didn't lose any air flow.
At first I wasn't going to modify the engine bay so I bought 23 inch tall tires and I didn't like it at all. It just doesn't look right. You should notice them in a few of the pics. I still have not picked out a set of 18/20 combo set of wheels. If your gonna do it, do it all the way. Lesson learned.
Here are some of the clearance issues I had in the front. The plan was to run 26 inch tall tires and be able to drop and roll.
Up first, the blower housing.
Drivers side.
The battery was barley able to keep its home.
So as most know the blower housing is one of the largest issues when trying to run 18s. Here is what I made.
I know the welds don't look perfect but I used two old energy plant signs 22ga for the curved parts and 18 ga for the flat sections. The rust may look bad but no pits and I chemically treated it before paint. I didn't want to grind all those welds so I am going to use the excuse that I didn't want to heat up the 22ga and possibly warp it. I decided to put the blower up at an angle I don't think I really needed to do that, I think mounting it flat to the firewall gives the same amount of clearance.
For the wire harness going through the firewall I just moved it up 1.5 inches. I will say if you skip safety precautions like me just know I did catch the floor insulation on fire twice. But other than that, going the quick route worked.
Little Shop of Horrors makes are really great looking steering link kit that clears the frame on 22 inch wheels (I think 22) but at $450 and not having the same setup they used to make that kit I decided to notch the frame for the tie rods.
I wanted to keep the abs because I like the idea of safety so I relocated it. In the pic the control arm is all the way up. I was worried about the heat but it doesn't seem to get very hot and yes this mount was chemically treated and painted after this pic was taken.
I moved the fuse box up to the front section keeping the stock windshield fluid container. The mount I made is very secure and I can still access the fuses fairly easily with just a few extra steps. I had to extend 26 wires 6 inches to get it there.
For the cpu or whatever it is I just slid it forward and made a secure mount that bolts to the finder. It is also very secure and has two spots where I mounted my breakers.
I bought a yellow top battery which didn't do much but here it is fully loaded. 2ga going to everything.
I still haven't found an overflow tank that is to my liking so I did this as a temporary. So far the bottle is holding up nice.
In the end I will get about 5 inches of tuck.