Soooo funnay. Good one Saurian. Remind me to kick you in the nutz and crush your truck. Actuall the driveline is there. I couldn't make it work without the proper pinion angle. The cool news was that I was able to put a new slip yoke on my driveshaft that extended it so I don't have to screw with actually extending the shaft at all.

You might be right on the Crane knuckles. I thought they were making them for Ford know but can't seem to find them anywhere so maybe not. Probably good anyhow since Crane's junk is overpriced. It's nice and all but big $$. Dedenbear is $249 a piece.

The diff cover I'm using is from Great Lakes Offroad. It's 1/4" steel with a 1/2" brace down the front. I'm still waiting for it to show up. http://i5.ebayimg.com/01/i/02/df/68/c1_1_b.JPG $160 shipped, recessed bolt holes. The only thing it doesn't have is a high fill plug. I'll get pics when it arrives.

 

So what if your truck has 16 more inches of lift then mine...and 14 more inches of tires...and a 1-ton+ drivetrain...

...Now I'm depressed.

Good to hear about the driveshaft almost being ready to hook up. Course you'll be running around for about a week and a half before you park it again to get to work on something else.

 

Well he stills kinda needs to finish that dash project of his and get that 70 underneath the rear, not to mention i think he still wants to build a new set of rear shackles.

Ahhh, the list but only gets longer

 

Fo shizzle. I'm also doing a rear mount radiator, new heads, cam, exhaust, and if it gets done any time soon I need to put on the new hood, fender, grill and radiator support.

Okay, where did I leave off? C's are off the axle tubes now and I cleaned up the tubes to make sure they're SMOOTH with no rough edges. I was really dreading the process of reinstalling the C's after the nightmare of removing them but I decided to do the dry ice again and Pro suggested that I make good use of Kath's oven by baking my C's to warm them up. So that is what I did. I got the axle positioned under the truck with the weight on the front axle. If you attempt this make sure you have a good angle finder. If not you'll have no way of knowing where you are and if you screw up the installation you get to pound them back off again and start from scratch. You don't want to do that now do you? It's important to make sure the truck is sitting level. If it's not then you need to know how many degrees of tilt the truck is sitting at so you can add that to the caster angle when you install the C's. If this doesn't make sense to you then don't chance it, just get the truck leveled out.

I put the C on the tube about 1/8" (all it will go) and rotated it until I found the caster I wanted. I went about 6* with the top of the kingpin back slightly and bottom forward. A sharpie marked where I wanted to line them up and I compared this to my punched marks from earlier. I turned the C about 1/2" at the tube. Now comes the fun part. I stuffed the tube with pieces of dry ice.

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On a side note: If you've never played with dry ice before pick up some. It's fun stuff. You can get it from any party ice place (check the phone book) and some grocery stores sell it too. It typically costs $1-$1.50 a pound. Dry ice is not actually ice at all but rather frozen CO2. It's EXTREMELY cold (like my ex girlfriend but quieter) and it will cause an instant freezer burn if it comes in contact with your skin. Make sure you wear gloves when handling it. It comes in cubes and can be broken apart with a hammer but wear glasses because if a small piece gets in your eye you're not gonna like it. Dry ice does not melt, it evaporates. This makes for a major coolness factor when you work on your truck and you have spooky looking fog around you. Throw it in hot water and see what fun you can have with that. Crush it up into small pieces and throw then in a 2 liter pop bottle with some water, cap it and RUN. Sorry, off on a tangent. But back to evaporation, you cannot keep it cold enough to make it last, even in your freezer. So only buy enough for what you're doing right at the time and then go right to work. Otherwise all you'll find is an empty bag. There, that's my rant on the many joys of dry ice.

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So I stuffed the tube end full of dry ice. I put the oven on broil (don't even know what broil is but it sounded hot) and wrapped my C's in aluminum foil so I could fool Kath into thinking I was cooking. Once the house stank like axle grease she figured out I was full of crap. Side note: Clean those C's up good before you pop then in the oven or they'll catch on fire . . . so I've heard. I left them in the oven for a half hour and then took them out. I used welding gloved to handle them and it was STILL uncomfortable holding them but that's what we wanted. I started with the passenger's side and left the driver's side in the oven so it wouldn't cool off. When I went back outside there was a light layer of frost on the outside of the axle tube. This is a good sign! I sprayed the tube end with Liquid Wrench and positioned the C aligned with the mark made previously. Then I whacked the fark out of it with a 3 pound hammer, about 4 whacks to eack side, alternating. This got the C moving. I checked the angle once more to make sure nothing had moved. When I determined that it was where I wanted I resumed the beating and had that C on in less than a minute! Then I repeated this process for the driver's side. I set a straight edge across the upper and lower ears of the C's for a good even measuring surface so I could compare sides and make sure they were even. It took a little fiddling to make sure the driver's side was lined up but once it was it went on no problem.

Once both C's were on I threw the knuckles on the axle and the tie rod too for one last paranoid visual inspection. I figured if I screwed up the angles I'd see a difference in the tie rod position between sides but all looked good. So I set the axle on stands, cranked the welder to 200 amps and went to town, making a wide pass all the way around. I then took a second pass just to fill in a little extra material. Given the option I've got to say I probably would have preferred a stick here vs. MIG as it's easier to keep the heat on a wider bead with stick, but it welded up fine and will have no problems moving anywhere. DON'T ATTEMPT THIS WITH A 110 VOLT WELDER! It will not give you the penetration you need.

That about sums up the C's!

 

Ahh nothing beats the smell of burning grease . Turning the C's sounds like its not as big of a pain as i thought it would be, but with the info it makes me more confident if i end up having to do it.

 

is your ram gonna clear the passenger side u bolts ands tuff ok?? i couldnt ge tmine mounted like yours...i had to turn it around the opposite way. but it may be my mounts pushed it ouw farther?

 

Well it looks like I'll have plenty of clearance but of course I haven't tested it. I made the mounts on the axle tube a little long to give the ram enough clearance but didn't think it my drunken state to throw a u-bolt on there and test it. Infact I'll go do it now.

EDIT Just checked and I still have a half inch between the ram and U-bolt at full turn.

 

cool, must be how my mounts are, i just wanted to make sure you didnt have the same problem as i did.

What kind of ram is that? bore? 8 inch stroke?

 

1.5" bore and 8" stroke. I also have a 2x10 ram but I'm thinking the response time will be better on this one. I want to get the axle under the truck and test everything out as far as the new gears, etc and then I'll do my steering box and hook up the hydro.

 

As compared to an ewe?

I'm looking forward to hearing how this goes for you because I'll be doing mine soon.

 

Hahaha! You a funny guy!

Btw, the ram I'm using is the one I bought on ebay for $48. The mount in the base was turned the wrong way, to where the hoses would have faced forward or backward, not up. So I pulled it apart and cut the mount off the back. I just turned it 90* and welded it back up. Should be good to go. My brackets are made from my old front shackles (remember to recycle! ) for both ends of the cylinder. On the tie rid I made a fixture that mounts with u-bolts so I can move/adjust it if I need to. These are the same u-bolts I took off of the steering dampener. I'll probably throw a tiny bead on the tie rod on either side of the u-bolts to prevent them from sliding under pressure.

 

I think the 1.5x8 will work well. I just had West Texas Offroad spec out a setup for the M715 and that's what I ended up with. You're running quite a bit more tire so a 1.75x8 may be needed though, hard to say. Did you do any pump mods to help with the volume?

 

umm what exactly will ewe be doing?

 

my 1.5 is more than enough for my 44's

 

I haven't touched the pump yet at all (especially since the axle isn't even under the truck yet). My plan is to do the mods to my box and try running the hydro with the stock Ford box for a couple weeks. I just want to get a feel for how it works. I have a remote resevoir Sag pump + cooler I'll replace it with when I go to hydro brakes but I want to experiment with it so I can compare the Ford and Sag pump under the same load.