Economy lift tech. (not a good thing)

[hutch1973]

Spent the day working on my 89 F150 daily driver and took some shots of the cobbled lifts. This is the second truck I've bought out of Iowa, and they were both just complete hack jobs. This particular truck has excellent records up until last year, when the p.o. bought it, and he did the bodywork and suspension hacks.

First shot is the leveling kit. My guess is the plow on the front wrecked the front suspension. Second shot is the body lift. Looks like he made it out of some spare piping, and welded ends on it. It works, but the all metal assebly is noisey. Creaks like mad anytime the truck is in motion. I put a better stereo in it to fix this temporarily, until I get around to putting a real body lift in it.

Today I put some new pads up front and wanted to take the hubs off to check the front end out. I developed a new squeek the last couple days that wasn't the body mounts. The hubs didn't come off very well, short version of the story, big hammer and grinder to remove the warn hubs. Put on new ones but neither is engaging. Never checked the 4x4 out in the first place, so who knows. That's next weekend...

[hutch1973]

hmm, pics didn't take...

[460 crew]

That lift is a little on the scary side, pretty unique coil spacer. I've seen the little ones you put in there between the coils and the upper or lower spacers but thats the 1st time I've circles and squares together. Looks like quick fixes though to get it back to normal

[hutch1973]

Yeah, he made the body about 3.5", so I should be able to buy a kit and change a mount at a time without to much hassle. I'm not sure if I'm going to just put new front springs in it or just go with the shortest suspension lift I can get. If I had motivation I would swap the dual shock front end out of my 87, but that seems a lot like work at this point.

[460 crew]

I have a 3in body lift for the 67-79's if it might work on your rig let me know.

[hutch1973]

It's way on the back burner at this point. On the way home from purchase it sputtered a bit, but then went away and ran great the rest of the way home (400 miles). I've only had it a couple weeks and now that sputtering is back and pretty regularly. I haven't ever messed with a truck like this with fuel rejection and I'm going to spend the near future figuring out what's wrong with it. Picked up a code scanner but haven't really played around with it much. Put a new fuel filter in it hoping that would fix it, but no dice. Definately a sensor issue of some sort.

If it is to much of a pain in the rear end I'll seriosly look into selling it and going back to something with a carb. If I'm going to drive something a bit older and need to wrench on it, it's so much easier to troubleshoot and work on the older stuff.

The 87 I had swapped my bump for has this weird little bog to it when it's cold, but the second it's warmed up it runs great. I tried hooking up the code reader to it and can't get it to read anything. (hooked it up on the 89 and at least got it to read codes). On an older truck you'd tweak or get a manual choke and forget about it. Technology can blow...

[ToughOldFord]

It's frightening what people will do, isn't it? About a half a million years or so ago a friend and I stopped to look at an old 4x4 Wagoneer that was up for sale. The guy made his own lift also, he torched the leaf spring mounts off the frame, goober welded some scrap blocks of steel to the frame, then goober welded the mounts to the blocks. The welds looked terrible, a lot of slag run off with holes burned through the metal. The blocks of steel were different sizes. Nothing looked like it was lined up properly. I wouldn't dare drive the thing anywhere. We laughed, shook our heads and got the Hades out of there.

[SmokeyBear]

The technical term for that is Booty Fab.

[71 LONG BED]

I wouldn't want to be behind that truck when the "spring spacer" let go!!!

[flyboy2610]

That is scary! There's a lot of stress on those parts!