Make it handle

[Rstone1]

This is my first post here. Question for Rob – I’m building an 84 Blazer. It used to be a 4 wheel drive and I’m converting it to 2 wheel drive. I am going to use a set of truck arms out off an older truck with a set of coilovers on rocker arms with a long panhard rod and a splined sway bar for the rear. Question is on the front – I have a stock cross member. Should I modify the stock suspension to work with better geometry or should I start from scratch? I want a good handling truck. It will be my daily driver and I will be running some autocrosses with it when it’s done.

I did a 76 blazer back in the 90’s. I kind of did everything you have said to do on these trucks purely by accident. I didn’t have a lot of money to I lowered it so using parts I had and parts I got from the wrecking yard. In the front I raised the cross member 2” on the frame, modified my pitman arm and moved my idler arm to move the steering up, swapped the outer tie rods so they were on the bottom of the spindle, modified my drag link to clear the harmonic balancer, moved the lower ball joint forward and back toward the center of the truck (to get rid of the stack of shims on the upper A arm) also to get more caster. I also moved the upper A arm mounting point up an 1’ to slow the camber gain and also take the bind out of the upper ball joint. It had ¾ ton suburban coils with 1 coil cut out for springs. I also ran a 1 ton sway bar mounted upside down and directly to the frame as the truck was too low to run the factory sway bar stands and it was mounted upside down because that’s the only way it would connect to the control arms. In the rear I had got a set of 4 wheel drive leaf springs (because they are pretty flat and have no real arch to them) flipped the rear end on top. This made the truck way lower that I expected. (This is what caused all the modification to front). Frame was notched almost all the way through to get 3” of travel, towers were built to reinforce the frame, bed was notched all the way across, and shocks mounts were moved to the towers, 1 ton sway bar was added the cross member in front of the rear end had to have the center removed and replaced with a driveshaft loop because the drive shaft was hitting it and was also rubbing on the bottom of the cab floor between the seats so that was also moved up. All cross members were moved up above the bottom of the frame. I didn’t have the money for good shocks so I just put dual shocks on all four corners. The only real money was spent on the shafts and u joint to get the steering shaft over the upper A arm. After all this I had about 4 1/2” from the frame to the ground. Had little to no body lean and it stuck like glue. The only limiting factor was my tires. I had factory pick up 15x8 rally on the front with 265 50 15 euro TA’s and in the rear had 15x12 rally with 305 50 15 euro TA’s. Really miss that Blazer.

Thank You in advance for any advice you can give.