after that, the box fit perfect and it's removable with the bumper in place. so i pulled the bumper back off (only had it held in place with 2 bolts anyways). put the new bumper bracketts on, along with the frame bracketts and tow hooks. figured out that i did'nt have enough grade 8 stuff in my "stock" so off to orchard. it's amazing how little hardware it takes to run up a $80 bill.
at least i have some spare hardware now, i hate running out.
got the bumper back on and all the hardware installed, put the PS box back in with a couple of bolt for mock-up only and then installed the one end cover of my warn 8274 to make sure everything would clear. no problems!!!!!
finally, things were starting to come together. Fc stopped by so i had to take a couple of hours time to have him help me hand up a pot rack in the kitchen for angie; gotta keep her happy, she's been super cool about me wrenching on the cruiser every free minute i have.
got that done and went back out in the garage. FC talked me into getting the front springs installed. we split the packs to flip the springs. got em put back together. knocked out the old cut up bushings and installed new ones only to find out that my shackles use 5/8" bolts and those would not go into the buching we were using, the stockers or at least a urethane replacement for the stock units.
instead of ordering the proper urethane bushings and having to get delayed on parts again, we decided to drill them out. i have tried drilling them out before in a drill press and it turned into nothing but frustartion and f'd up bushings.
so this time around, i decided to chuck them up in the mill and use a new end mill at high speed to "shave" the material away instead of trying to drill it. the bushings proved to be too soft to chuck up properly and would distort, so i put them in the freezer for a while. that made enough of a difference to make them easy to drill out.
got the "new" bushings installed along with the greasable spring bolt at the front only to find out that the flange on the bushings was too thick to use them with the rear shackles. pulled them back out and chucked them up in the mill again, this time to shave some material off the flange. worked like a dream. i made sure not to remove too much material, don't want to end up with the ever popular "death wobble".