Made some progress today! Went up and worked on it for about 7 hours. Got the front hanger modified and mounted. Because the FJ80 axle is a bit wider, the typical 29" spring width is a bit too narrow to be practical. 30-31 is much easier to work with, so I wanted to find a fairly easy way to accomplish this. Of course the rear frame width and Marlin's hanger are both setup to work w/ the 29" width. So, not wanting to waste the marlin hanger, and not wanting to have to fab up offset shackles, I decided to widen the marlin hanger. How do you widen it? By cutting it in half and adding a 2" reciever tube.
Once you've got that done, then you need to add some material to brace the hanger back along the frame rail. I had some 1x2 laying around, so I made up some quick pieces out of that and welded them on.
Finally I welded the whole thing to the truck. Nothing too complicated, and I know I still need to brace the actual spring mounts back to the crossmember.
While I was doing all that Baber was diligently grinding away at the frame cleaning up the remains of the IFS. Thanks again Baber!
After we got the hanger done, we decided to throw the springs and housing under there to see how it looked.
That's as far as we got today. I needed more Oxygen for the torch to do the frame tubes and I ordered the wrong size replacement bushing for the springs, so I need to get that fixed. Thanks for looking guys and keeping me motivated.
Ary