Posted by Keith in Washington on Monday, May 20, 2002 at 11:00AM :
In Reply to: can the springs be re arched to lift posted by Junkyard dog on Saturday, May 18, 2002 at 7:11PM :
You will not get a good lift by arching the springs that much. My Carryall had 2 1/2" lift by rearching when I got it. I had to replace all the springs. Why? With the 2 1/2" of rearching the springs become shorter from eye to eye. To make up for this shortening the shackles must swing in towards the spring. The end rsult on my truck was that the shackles were almost perfectly parallel with the spring. The result was that every spring had at least 1 broken eye. This was caused by the shackle not being able to swing and take up the spring motion. Since the shackle and spring were in line with each other there was no way to take up the spring motion except jambing the shackle into the spring eye which finally broke. The shackle should hang vertically so it can take up spring movement in both directions.
When you do a 2 to 3 " lift you will have to replace the pitman arm with one that is 2 to 3" longer otherwise you mess up the steering geometry. Without replacing the pitman arm, everytime you go over a good bump the truck will steer sharply to the right or left. I know my Carryall had a bad case of bump steer until I corrected the spring height and put a new pitman and draglink on. As far as I know no one make a longer pitman for the FF PW.