The removal of the axle was about the easiest thing to do. This took about 3 hours. It consisted of removing the pitman arm, shocks, coil spring retainer, the Radius Arm nuts and the TTB Pivot bolts. It sat on 2 floor jacks as I did this, releasing the jacks caused the coil springs to fall out and hit the pavement. I then pulled it out in front of the truck. The amount of torque required to remove the Radius Arms from the Axle made this decision a good one. The original brackets are held on by both bolts and rivets. This was the most tedious portion of this project. The rivets required center punching and drilling out first with a 1/4" bit then to a 1/2" bit to finish the rivet. If you've never used a center punch before, it's purpose is to score the center of the rivet head so that the drill will not wander on the rounded rivet head. This allows for drilling out the rivet, not the rivet and part of the frame. (Don't ask). Once all the rivets and bolts are removed, a sharp blow with the shop hammer will remove the offending bracket. Some of the original holes for the old brackets will be used, along with several newly drilled holes. The best thing to do is to use the existing holes to temporarily mount the new brackets. This will allow you to use the brackets as templates for drilling the remaining holes. This is after many hours of drill and grinding. The parts are all Cepek. I positioned this by myself with 2 floorjacks. The trick was to pull it out from under the truck and mount the new Radius Arms This requires a 1 1/8" socket, and a 1 1/8" wrench. The best way I saw to do this task was to place Jack Stands to the rear of the Radius Arm Brackets on either side of the frame. This allowed for all the work to progress. The removal of the axle and all old bracketry was accomplished without having to re-position the vehicle support.

The tools required for this job were a good set of 1/2" drive sockets up to 1 1/8", a good breaker bar, a 1/2" drive drill, Drill bits up to 1/2" size, center punch, 3lb shop hammer, and wrenches in the same size range as the sockets. These are all hand tools, power/air tools would obviously make the job go quicker. The list of tools is what I have available. I set all the parts up on my garage floor to check the fitment before I placed them on the truck. As I pulled off the old parts I set them in the same configuration next to the new parts. This gave me a good idea on the placement of the parts and also showed me the great compostion of the Cepek hardware. The Cepek instructions are very detailed and are easy to undersatand. I had to read over the part regarding the TTB Bracket installation. I kept getting confused about Driver side TTB bracket (passenger axle) and Passenger side TTB Bracket (driver axle). The saving grace was the part numbers are stamped on the hardware and the instructions reference the part #s throughout. I put the instructions in a 3 ring binder and kept it with me all though the installation process.