The gong show continues.
Tig on the arms was a bit too spicy, so threads farther in the bung got warped. Local machine shop had right-hand tap to clean up one side but had to order left-hand tap for the other. Should be here next Tuesday. The next paragraph is going to be the Pirate4x4 version of a monkey fucking a football. If you want to see actual progress, skip that one. If you want to see what happens when stupidity gets multiplied by more stupidity then read on.
Warped threads was not the only exciting thing to happen to my new links. The buddy who welded them in also made the mistake of threading one of my left-hand threaded heims into a still-hot bung and by the time it got me, it was seized pretty far in there. Whatever, I pull out the pipe wrench and a cresent wrench and will have this thing out in... hnggggh.. hngeeergh... in.. hngggugh.. fawk, that's really in there.
Fine, lets add some leverage:
This is going grea... uh oh.
Ok, fine.. Lets throw some penetrating oil in there, come back in an hour and... no? Sonofa... So one thing lead to another and I ended up here(see if you can find all the methods of fuckery I employed in one pic, it's like where's waldo only not OSHA approved):
That still didn't work and the heim isn't budging. Last ditch effort was to flip it upside down, dump a ton of penetrating oil down the tube and let it sit that way for a day. We'll see what happens tonight.
Back on track, I did end up with an upper and a lower link that I could adjust, so I figured I'd mock them up, get my axle where I wanted it and start taking some measurements for my shock tower. I started by seeing where full bump would be if I didn't cut a hole in the tub to clear my truss:
Not great, not terrible.
After that I brought it up to where ride height would be based on that:
Rear is definitely sitting higher than I wanted.
To continue the exercise, I then jacked it up to full droop:
All in all everything is about 2" higher than I would like. I sent some pics to my cousin who had the best advice ever: "Just cut it, that thing sitting stinkbug is always going to bother you." I'm going to wait until I can get all my links chased next Tuesday, properly line up the axle and then cut the tub to clear my upper link mounts. Bonus for you guys, is down the road you get to have another gong show post where I attempt to make sheet metal do what I want it to do.