Rear axle swap questions.

[eric67m]

Sorry, this is a little long but I will sum up my questions at the end.

This weekend I ground off the cast spring perches on the 14 bolt that I am swapping under my 1972 3/4 stock height chassis with a 1967 body.

Grinding off cast perches sucked. I cut off the shock mounts first with a cutting torch. For the spring mount, I found that grinding the weld off as best I could with a 4" electric grinder and then dug in a little more with a air powered part off wheel. Hit it with a hammer, part off, hammer until they came off. If they were not cast I could have used the cutting torch.

I purchased my axle mounting spring perches, u bolts, spring top plates from ruffstuffspecialties.com. Everything seems pretty beefy and mostly well thought out, more on that later.

I centered my axle between the springs (5 9/16") from spring perch to the backside of the brake mounting flange.

My first problem is that the nut that holds the spring pack together is too large to fit thru the spring top plate. I would assume that I can drill this out to fit the plate down on top of the spring and not floating up on top of the nut. (this is not visible in the angle of the picture. )

The second problem is where the wheel is located in the wheel well. The tire sits 4" from the front of the wheel opening and 5" from the back. There are three holes in the perches and spring top plate so I can adjust the axle forward/rearward 1". I figure I could move the axle back 1" which would also help if I ever added a shackle flip (which would be the way I would lift if I do it in the future). Because a shackle flip usually moves the axle forward 1" to 1.5" from what I have heard. This should leave my tire with a 1" larger gap in front of the tire instead of a 1" larger gap behind the tire.

Now before I weld up my perches I need to do some research on driveline angles. I saw someone saying to point the pinion at the transfer case and run a driveline with a cv joint. This seems like you would be starving your pinion bearings for lubrication.

My questions are..

1. Drill out the spring top plate?

2. Move the axle back 1"?

3. Suggestions on pinion angle?

[eric67m]

I moved the axle back to the rear position. The wheel sits 1/2" back of center on one side and 1" back of center of the other.

Pics of both sides. Passengers side then drivers side.