So I was trying to map out how I was going to move the frame in to avoid the pinion at passenger side high and then I thought, "hey, I have a nice prebent piece of tubing..."
Cut the old front wishbone in half and trimmed down one of the bends until it fit nicely. I'll do some final cleaning up of the end and cap off that tube later. Also, I don't like that I had to butt joint the chassis together and due to it being bent I couldn't sleeve it with anything so I plan to put gussets on each end of the added piece to tie it all together better. Bottom left picture shows ride height, the bottom center and right picture show clearance at driver full droop and passenger full stuff. Muy better. To save a few bucks, i'll be going with a home brewed rotten broom handle two piece driveshaft...
So earlier I thought I'd try to just use the old lower leading arms, even though I wasn't totally happy with them because I really want to get this thing out and go wheeling. But after staring at it and thinking about it I couldn't leave it alone. The old leading arms was 40" long from the chassis side heim to the center of the axle tube; the coilover was mounted 17.5" from the chassis side heim so that's a ratio of like 56/44 giving the axle side a huge amount of leverage and is asking the coilover to do a lot of work. On top of that, at this ratio the wheel had the capability to travel 23" and that's not even accounting for the steep angle the coilovers were mounted at so it'd be even more! But I definitely couldn't use all that travel without hitting other things so it was strapped. So I decided to make new lowers and remount the coilovers.
Problem #1, I had to remount the steering reservoir/filter to get it out of the way for the coilover mount. It's so tight near the front of the engine that there's no great spot to mount the reservoir. So I remounted some of my electrical to make room to remount my reservoir in the cab near the pedals. The outlet of the reservoir is above the pump input which is good but the two are so far separated that I'm worried that on climbs this may screw up my steering if the pump can't pull fluid. Currently it's just tacked in place but right now this looks like my best option.
Problem #2, the alternator is in the way. Given that my link separation is so big on the axle side, the axle really swings left to right during articulation (just like on the rear). With where I want to mount the coilovers, at driver side high articulation the coilover would hit the alternator.
The way that the alternator was mounted it stuck out quite a lot, I was able to make a couple brackets to remount it and reduce the belt size by 3" in circumference pulling it in quite a bit (before and after below, hopefully it's enough). Also ordered some fittings/bends to reroute the radiator hose.
So finally I started on the leading arms. My plan is to keep the same leading arm length and target wheel travel of around 16" with the 10" coilovers; to do that I'll mount the coilovers 27" forward of the chassis side heim which is about 2/3 up the lever arm. This should give me ~15" of travel, but accounting for the coilover mounting angle should end up somewhere more around 16". I'm targeting 8" up travel 8" down. Moving the coilover forward should be easier on the coilover and also allow me to use the full stroke.
The important thing is to make sure that the coilover eylet is below the rotational axis of the two heims. I put together a simple model to get my dimensions and kind of map out in my mind what I wanted to do. I considered using 2" - 1/4" wall DOM but seemed a lot more difficult to build and I don't think it'd be that much stronger if any for this application. My old lowers were 2" - 1/4" wall square tubing and I've banged on them quite a bit without issue so I went that route again.
Last night I started cutting/tacking everything together. You can see it's a pretty substantial difference compared to the old leading arm.
Plan to get the other side leading arm tacked together, figure out coilover chassis side mounting, articulate everything checking clearances, then final weld it all. Have to remake a few steering hoses and reroute my radiator hose. Order a driveshaft. Remount the winch (a little worried about this). And.... probably 10 other things in between but I'm starting to see the finish line.