Had good weather so I made some progress.
Spring perches and knuckles tacked.
Everyone was right, the cut and turn was easy. In fact it took me longer to fit the pass side diff perch than to cut the knuckles, turn them and tack them
Had to do quite a bit of grinding on the ruff stuff diff perch. Overall, it's a beefy piece of hardware, not too bad to fit
For the C&T, I used a cutoff wheel.
I masked the area next to the weld and hit it with some black paint to get a clear line of where to grind.
I ground small notches in the housing at 90deg increments so I could work a small section at a time.
Some have mentioned it, and you probably can't tell from the photos, but at about .230-.250 deep you can see a faint line separating the two pieces of metal. I used calipers to check depth, and actually found it easier to find a landmark on the cutoff wheel that matched 1/4" depth and grind to that... hard to explain but you know what I mean.
Turning wasn't too bad, I used a pickle fork and a ball peen hammer to tap them around.
I measured the distance between the notches to check movement and calculated the angle vs circumference changed. I wanted 19 degrees since I rotated my pinion up about 15 degrees. That should give me 4ish caster.
Here's the math
Then I fine tuned it on the truck after bolting the axle in and setting it down on jack stands at ride height. I ended at 3.5 deg
and a circumference change of .519" so pretty close to my math.
I didn't take any photos of the setup while I set the knuckles and perches, but basically it's this:
Weight on jack stands set at ride height
Install drive shaft
rotate pinion so drive shaft angle meets pinion angle (or so pinion is down about 1 deg, mine's 1 deg low)
Tack perches
rotate knuckles to 3-5 deg caster (can't remember what's neg or pos, but you want the top of the knuckle toward the rear of the vehicle)
Make sure the knuckles are rotated the exact same on each side
For this, i used a wood spacer between the springs and a metal shim, this made sure my angle finder was square to the springs, then I set the angles.
This also allowed me to use the same exact setup on both sides. Since there is some kingpin angle, I was concerned that the angle finder would be rotated and I'd be picking up some of that angle in my caster measurements. The block and shim helped.
Sorry no pics of that either
I also went back and ground a bevel on both sides of the groove for the knuckle. That should help when welding.
Next up is weld it up and move onto shock mounts and diff armor.
)
