My .02 from when I was racing my Toyota - I literally use red loctite on absolutely EVERYTHING with the exception of anything with aluminum threads. Tcase bolts or intake bolts, for example, get Lanocote and never had an issue with that. Maybe a dot of blue loctite would be ok. Dissassembling things that have been loctited just means you've got to wire wheel the old loctite off and get the threads nice and clean before reinstall with fresh loctite. Make sure you're torquing all your bolts to spec - sometimes what feels 'tight as fuck' is shy of the actual torque spec and will come loose, where if it was torqued to spec it would have been good.
I thought you did this, but every bolt touching leaf spring, shackle, traction bar or shock was drilled and cotter pinned after I lost a shock bolt one year. Never had that issue again after that.
I would advise against moving the shock that far back behind centerline of the front axle. For me, I didn't quite realize it as much when I was racing, but long term it causes a TON of axle wrap on the front springs - to the point that the springs start getting that S shape and eventually break. If I could do over, I would have gone with a 12" shock and put the axle-side shock mount as close to the axle centerline as I could. In my old build thread there was a bunch of effort I put into building a front traction bar to combat that - but there just isn't enough room to build something that's not binding everything up in the front. In the rear you can get away with it a little more, but there's still no way to build a traction bar on leaf springs and not have it bind at least a little bit.
And for those that haven't tried to maintain speed over lap 1 of the KOH course on a leaf sprung truck (or any rig for that matter) - you'd probably find it eye opening to do so. It's pretty harsh, and really hard on everything. I think the harshness and potential for damage to gears and tcase outputs is possibly far worse than it is in the rocks. I picture the axles/gears rotating under power from the drivetrain, while the axles are taking turns crashing into whoops or sometimes the equivalent of running into multiple curbs at speed
That said, the conundrum I was in, and still am in, is having all the best upgraded parts for 8" stuff, but multiple ring gears broken, and it doesn't seem to make sense to stick with 8" stuff if you want it to hold up. There's the 8.4 stuff that just has more girdling, but if you're upgrading full thirds/gears/lockers and modifying or upgrading to 8.4, it doesn't really seem cost effective for just a minor improvement. At that point, may as well just go full 9" - but then you add up the full cost to upgrade everything f&r to 9" stuff and you're starting to look at a chunk of change.
Anyway, there was something else that I was going to mention, but I'll post later if I remember. How did the desert loop feel this year compared to last year - did it seem more torn up?
