Today I built a rear shock tower bar mount for my 84 and figured I would share to give others inspiration as i have not seen a ton of threads for rear shock specific info. I'm sure there are plenty of build threads out there with something buried deep inside but so far I haven't seen anything for my specific application. I found that you can slide a piece of 1 3/4 tube on top of the frame, through the rear fender well. I picked up these tube hangers that should hold everything fine once welded in. They worked really well for holding things while mocked everything up.
I didn't want to go with the typical crawler shock design that has the shocks pointed inward towards each other. Unfortunately my truck gets more pavement time and that particular setup is lacking in some on road performance. I also needed to retain my spare tire and try and want to use the longest possible shocks I could so I picked up a few different shock mounting options from ruff stuff and settled on these angled ones for the top bar. I'm going back and forth about how I want to mount the axle shock mounts and was hoping for some input. I've never used the shock mounts that position your shock sideways in the mount, seems like it would bind quite a bit with axle wrap and whatnot but I'm hoping someone can shed some light on this. Also, that axle mount has to be installed in a way to where it will hang down a bit. Now I've seen newer rigs that have a crazy low shock pockets and they seem to be fine so maybe this is ok? I just always cringe about putting things down too low to get hung up on. In another pic there's my current shock mount that will work but I would need to burn a matching one in on the driver side. Thoughts?
I like the clearance you have on your current lower mount better, especially considering that there only looks to be a 1/4" or less of difference in overall length between them. That said, neither of them looks like they hang down low enough to be a problem in the rocks.
I like this setup and might end up doing something similar when I get around to doing the rear shocks. Nice work.
Thank you! Really appreciate the feedback! I talked to a few people who agree that I should just keep the shock mount above the axle line like you mentioned. More pics to come when I install it
