Last fall I was doing some routing maintenance on the front suspension of the LJ, and upon unbolting my shocks and allowing the front axle to completely droop out, I realized the shocks were too short and were limiting droop travel:
I put this in the memory bank and went about my business. A few days later, I was sitting at work and began to ponder the droop travel situation. In my haste, I had forgotten to look into the possibility of the trac bar further limiting my droop travel. This seemed to be a valid concern because I’m still running the stock trac bar, which has a TRE on the frame end, and they are known to have a fairly conservative range of motion… So, last night I put the LJ back in the air and methodically unbolted and czeked things for travel and interference. Here is a rundown of what I found, and how I addressed it.
With the shocks disconnected, here is what was limiting my droop travel. You can see the trac bar hitting the upper portion of the axle mounting bracket:
I pulled the trac bar, and found another significant gain in droop travel:
As it turns out, the TRE was not the limiting factor at all, and in fact the TRE allows for significantly more droop travel than several other components in my front suspension. The LCA hits the axle mounting bracket, even though I had already carved them out in an effort to gain droop:
Also, at full articulation, the LCA flex joint body contacts the frame mounting brackets:
Luckily though, these two points of interference happen at exactly the same amount of vertical wheel travel, so either/both are truly the droop limit of my front suspension. So, it was time to address the trac bar to see if there was any gain to be made without going to an aftermarket setup. I pulled out the grinder and carefully trimmed away the upper bracket as far back as possible. I also carved out a doubler plate for the front face of the trac bar mount bracket, and drilled a new hole to relocate the trac bar toward the driver side and down slightly, trying to gain as much range of motion as possible inside that captured bracket:
In that picture, you can see just how far down the trac bar can hang, compared to full droop on my suspension, showing that the TRE has a range of motion greater than my available droop travel.
And with the trac bar reinstalled and again at full droop:
So now the issue was that my shocks were
still too short, even shorter than before thanks to the additional droop gained by modifying the trac bar mount. Rewind the clock to August 2012… I was attending the All-4-Fun event in Empire, Colorado and it was door prize night. Up for grabs was a full set of Fox 2.0 IFP shocks. The crowd was hushed as the event host thrust his hand into tumbling barrel to retrieve a lottery ticket. When my name was called, I jumped up and screamed, wildly waiving my hands to ensure I wasn’t lost in the crowd. The gift certificate was put in my name, and some time later a set of Fox 2.0 IFP shocks arrived on my doorstep. Unfortunately, I have changed wheeling rigs since that wonderful day, and I had spec’d the shocks for my prior ride… When I initially put the LJ together, I briefly attempted to measure out the differences between the RC Series 2.2 shocks that came with the suspension system and the Foxes, and determined the Foxes were simply too long. Fast forward to last night, and I pulled the Foxes back out of the box for another round of ciphering.
As it turns out, one of the habits I have gotten into throughout my years of building rigs is taking pictures. Lots of pictures. These pictures allow me to not only regale the glory of my prior steeds
, but also look at potential issues and develop possible ways to correct them from the comfort of my office when work is slow.
I went into the house, grabbed the laptop, and opened up the photo album from the first test run of the new suspension under the LJ.
Here it is, at full stuff:
You can see it’s hard into the bump stop, and the coil is almost fully compressed, which means its setup nicely for compression travel:
But wait… what is that in the background? Could that possibly be unused compression travel in my shock, meaning a
longer shock could be used? Do I have another angle to verify? Of course I do!!
Yeah baby, ~3â€