Thanks for the advice and the links. Really helped out. Depending on what my donor truck has, i will probably ditch the coils. its a tight truck to start (built to tow our boat during the summer) so im not really worried about the comfort of the ride. All i need is a truck with good 6 wheel traction for working on the farm in the winters (and the occasional mud hole of course haha). Donor trucks im looking at in the area are an '87 F250 with IFS and a 460 or a '89 F350 with a 7.3 naturally aspired diesel and the straight axel.