3/4 Ton Long to Short & Static Drop Square One

[kitsbeach]

BUT...I also knew that the chance of me getting the zigzag cuts perfect would be near impossible.

The zigzag cuts are the most popular on this site and all over the internet, but that means 6 different cuts ON EACH SIDE. Getting them to match up perfectly would be difficult.

So I settled on nice big strong fishplates, with a good design, along with straight cut frame cuts.



Basically wrong on the frame cuts and best on the fish plates.

[kitsbeach]

For the frame cuts I picked somewhere that would leave room for the fish plate to extend past the cut a lot without running into a spring hanger.

My location was a bit close to the cab, which made it a little hard to work in there later, but it was okay. I re-drilled the cab crossmember holes through the fishplate (trying to find a picture of that).

Anyway here are the cuts:





I removed 14" from the middle and later will remove 5 3/4' from the rear (more on that later).

[kitsbeach]

And here she is cut:

[kitsbeach]

By the way these jack stands are actually RV jacks, which made it easy to adjust the height precisely.

[kitsbeach]

Here's my fish plate mock up, all done with a grinder:











That metal is from the 14" piece of the frame that I removed.

[kitsbeach]

Bolted the fish plate in place using cab crossmember bolts and some more bolts later (no pics tho):

[kitsbeach]

Just realized I have no pictures of the actual frame welding and grinding but here are a couple of the left side fish plate skip welded in place: