Axle pt 3

 I took the plasma cutter to the ford axle as well. I see a lot of grinding in my future...

More wheel swapping

We finally got around to swapping the wider aluminum rims on ole blue. My full size truck had a load of brush in the back so had to use the Nissan. We also swapped out the beat lug nuts for new hardened ones. Seeing as the new rims are drilled out for 5/8" lugs and the truck has 1/2" lugs we went with bulge lugs because of their wider contact profile. While the truck was in the air we also greased and cleaned everything that had a zurg fitting. Since aluminum rims are more prone than steel to coming loose we used plenty of lock-tight when installing the lug nuts.   

Axle pt2

Since the grinder was not successful, I borrowed a plasma cutter from a friend of mine.  Upon getting home I discovered the pug on the plasma cutter is not compatible with the 220 dryer outlet. I run to home depot in to buy an adapter, I do not find any.....so I bought a new outlet  that will work with the plasma cutter. You have to cut the back of the coil buckets to remove them from the axle. There was a half inch of weld I could not get to. After a half an hour of prying the weld gave and the bucket broke free. 

Axle pt 1

I dragged the dodge axle outside and attempted to cut off the coil buckets. This proved to be far more complicated than I anticipated. Its quite hard to get the grinder in to the tight spaced required to cut the welds. After a half an hour of unsuccessful grinding I admitted defeat for tonight and dragged the axle back inside. Unfortunately I am going to have to remove these in pieces..

canvas

this is the removable canvas slant back that goes with the truck style permanent rear window.

Kingpin pt2

Here are a couple more pics of the axle. Here is a shot of the glorious serviceable selectable hubs, it also shows those massive lugs. There is also a close up on one of the king pin knuckles...no ball joints here. You may also notice that there is no central axle disconnect system. As you can probably tell I am pumped on this axle. I also picked up another Dana 60 front, out of a 2001 dodge (missing hubs and calipers) for the coil spring buckets. I will post pics up soon. The last pic has both axles in it as well as a lathe I am restoring... I have way to many in-depth projects running at the same time, but I digress. I know buying another dodge axle seems a bit overkill but having the coil spring buckets will allow my truck to be drivable the entire time I am am building the new axle. I want to take my time and do everything correct, when you rush things it always turns out bad. After the swap is complete I will sell the complete and partial dodge axles.

Ford king pin

The more I learned about the 1994+ dodge axles the more  realized they are complete garbage. From the poorly thought out  vacuum actuated CAD (central axle disconnect) system to the faulty unit bearings the front axles on these trucks are a joke. I would like to meet the engineers that approved these changes and ask them what the hell they were thinking. Unfortunately Ford, Dodge and GM use unit bearing in all of their full size trucks now. After a lot of looking  I and a couple friends drove for a few hours to meet up with a fellow selling a 1989 Ford high pinion king pin Dana 60 out of an F-350 dually with 4.10 gears. I had been talking with guy over the internet for a while and he knew exactly what he had. But $1100 and couple hundred miles later I had a new axle in front of my house. And we fit some BMX in to this journey as well. Now I have an axle that need to stripped of its mounts, coil buckets added and full rebuild.