ByTheSea

1/4" wall steel. Yikes. Thats gonna be massive. I don't know whether it's to late to add design ideas but heres a thought. The Hassey style lift uses 14 tall blocks aligned with the open sides facing the side of the vehicle. This is bound to have some tendency to act like an accordian front to rear unless you go back and plate all those blocks to make em rigid in three dimensions. If you do that then that lift is forever Also thats a minimum of 28 welded joints in the subframe. If your'e only going 4" maybe run two main rails of 2x2 instead. That would have five or so welds per rail and would allow you to easilly plate the joints where you go up and down. Then you add a block of 2x2 at each bolt point. Of course accuracy would be harder to achieve and you'd need to replace all the stock bolts with ones 4" longer. But it would be seriously rigid. This is not a knock to Hassey. Obviously his lift works. I just get a little scared that those blocks might want to fold under severe loading. The way they are aligned the weld, not the steels cross section is taking almost all the load If you look at the BYB front engine crossmember lift block for ea82s you see that it is 2x3 heavy wall(I think 3/16 but never miked it) which is through bolted and additionally has 1" internal reinforcing towers for each bolt hole. Anyway those are my thoughts. Iv'e never built a lift myself. But I have had to crush a few cardboard boxes in my day and they crush really well with the ends opened up.

You might want to take a look at the water pump and idler pulley as possible noise sources. If the bearings are gone in the idler pully it won't effect belt tension but it will surely make lots of sound. Also the water pump bearing can fail and allow the impeller inside to touch the housing as it spins. This is usually a grating squeal.

Now thats some good "Tongue in Cheek" self deprecating humor allrighty! That guys onto something. I bet he gets chicks,,,not for the car but because he's got a sense of humor. But he should move up to street racing Ferraris in NYC like me! They are easy pickins on rainy nights.LOL

I put the rear wheels on ramps, Front end on stands,,,all over plywood and dirt. The critical piece for me is the $50 2.5 ton wide base floor jack from Autozone. And the crossmember is the last thing I unbolt and the last thing I bolt up not counting the exhaust. I also find it easier to take the exhaust hanger off the back of the tranny before trying to drag the tranny around.

If you didn't mangle the threads and can get the tranny into place the nut should still run okay on the stud although it might bind a bit at the bend.. If not then use another stud or a different bellhousing. EA-82 bellhousings are the same for MT and AT for what thats worth.

Many Thanks Craig! That looks like a fun job. Looks like I'll need to take off my shoes to get into some serious math. Lets see "Nought times Nought is Nought! Nought times one is Nought,,,Aw hell,,,All this math makes me hungry,,,Granny!!!!"

I need to do the bearing preload on a rear differential. I can't use the original shims as they got mysteriously damaged(that means melted) when I was torching off the stub shaft with a stripped torx bolt*. Does anybody have the FSM describing this for the R160 diff? The actual unit is from an 89 but I doubt that is overly significant. Thanks, Brad * the acetylene torch is not a good tool for this task. Next time I'll stick to the trusty sawzall.

Convoy. "A military formation aimed at getting the highest number of vehicles to the same point in the slowest possible fashion" I think we should aim for something a little more unique. Maybe for the return we can stage something like the evacuation of Dunkirk? All the broken Subes being towed home by their brethren. Wounded Doughboys hanging out of the back of a Brat for dramatic effect. Something stoicly British playing in the background...like the Sex Pistols I will of course be the tail end Charlie as my rig spits noxious crap under heavy loads. :wave:

I didn't realize you had first hand experience with these Adam. I'm pretty sure the guy who posted the negative was using his in a rally style application which would definetly not describe your standard tall tired pickemup. Again this is from memory which is sieve like on the best of days but I think he had em front and rear with custom R&P sets from Phantom. Again, he wasn't thrilled was the general tone. If they do work well in crawling that would be great. I assume your friend with the Nissan does a lot of crawling. Personally I'll sit back and take my usual stance which is to let someone better funded do the real world test for me. I'ts so much nicer to spend someone elses money,,,makes me feel like the POTUS > LOL

I might very remotely be able to make it. I have to be back by noon Sunday for my sons football game. My car is currently in what could best be described as "sadly neglected" shape. RF Axle is toast. Rear driveshaft. Bad tie rod end. Runs crappy. Ugliest fender cutting job on planet. mismatched panels,,,etc, etc. Oh yea,,, tires getting very bald. Just a few problems. Hey,,,this could be fun Nobody is allowed to laugh. This car gets 20K + a year along with offroading and rallx, tsd rally playtime.

I don't recall who it was but the guy with the turbo Justy gave these a very negative review a while back. He called em all but useless if memory serves me correctly.

I measured a ea-82 strut tube at just over 2.0". You might be able to just cut off the botton section of tube with the bracket and use an insert type cartridge, designed for coilover applications, inserted into the resulting "cup".

Expanding on Zaps fine work. If you run bigger tires on a Loyale body the biggest single clearance issue in front is the body seam at the back of the wheel opening(front corner of the fire wall). You will find that even on a lifted wagon you'll have issues here. If you add offsett(tires sticking out more) to the wheels the tire will hit there even sooner(Zaps triangle). My tires are 26.3" according to the Dunlop and on 14" Pugs they rub that seam even though Iv'e beaten it down. It's especially common when reversing as the suspension allows the stearing knuckle a small degree of movement front to back(play in all those rubber bushing). Not that it's a bolt up but Iv'e though we should really be moving the crossmember forward a bit with the lifts to allow for some more room in this spot.

We can get Compomotives here to fit. They order the blanks from down under and machine whatever pattern you want,,,for a price. I think about US $ 240 each last time I looked.

This is the paint scheme though it's obviously a different car. but I think that particular car(the RX on Bens page) was for sale a year or two back and if it's the one I think then it had compomotives for wheels and custom struts that were failed.

Maybe I'm thinking something else here. I just swapped a cam in a 89 Ea-82 from a 3AT 4WD and the marking was a 7 I think. My turbo cams are 5(I may be getting that backwards). I'll look at the one on the shop bench today as I'm now curious. Did the specs change in the later years? Also are the carb motors lower HP than the spfi? Is that all from the compression or is part from that cam profile?

Road rallies are primarily a navigation/smoothness event but theres a type most definetly worth doing sometimes available. In upstate NY they have the Finger Lakes Region of SCCA and they run "Brisk" winter rallies. With three speed groups ranging as high as 45 MPH average speed for the event you can get plenty of Left Foot Knuckle Clenching wheel time as you navigate unlit frozen gravel roads at speeds as high as 60-70 MPH(this is only if you haven't figured out the first thing about navigating before the event (A La Moosens/ByTheSea school rally of craziness)). They are a blast! You can actually wreck your car in places(I think last years was the culprit in my two bent rear shocks issue) like when the instructions say "ruts ahead" and you hit em going 50 mph with a ditch down each side of the one lane goat path. Or even something as simple as going over a railroad crossing while making up lost time(wheres the chiropractor?) and dent the headliner,,,and the roof,,,with your noggin FLR would be a haul from VA but maybe one of the regions closer to you has something similar. A tip of experience is this. Don't get so enthusiastic that you destroy your car a long way from home like I did my first time. Motors ain't so cheap. But we finished!!!

For what it's worth that might be a really BAD idea. The main difference as I recall was in overlap with the turbo having more duration. If you are forcing in the charge you'd want the exhaust valve closed sooner else it would just blow a lot of the F/A charge straight into the downpipe. Turbo cams will work in a N/A motor but the low end is very anemic. I have a set in my N/A motor and while it romps at very high RPM it isn't what I'd call a positive result overall. I'm only still using them because I plan to supercharge.

Adam, I see your point on the straight axles but at the same time I'd tend to think that the FWD/4WD set up is probably more unique a concept than front/rear independant suspension. Am I missing something or did you figure a way to put the Nissan T-case in and not make it a primarilly RWD. Second question also. Where exactly do the rear stubs tend to break?

So when you guys are blowing rear stub shafts is it because the shaft is inherently weaker than the tranny stubs or are they just being twisted off when the axle binds? Has anybody compared the travel limits of front and rear ea-82 axles? One of my wackier thoughts lately has been to rip out the whole rear suspension and make a cradle to mount a front crossmember to. It looks to me like theres a potential 12" travel limit to the front axle (it will go like 13" + but gotta leave a little wiggle room. I"m not suggesting it will be very strong at full extension but that it will go that far. Hydraulic rear stearing in a Ru is an added benefit. On the front, I think the long double A-Arm is great but the stearing is certainly harder as mentioned already. If you move the anchor point of the arm in from the stock location without moving the attachment point of the tie rod to the rack you induce bump stear. Somehow we'd have to make a bracket that allows moving that critical pivot point inboard. A set of asymetric lower control arms that pivot at the center of the car and a stearing box from something that uses a pitman arm might solve it. And I personally would never try to weld something like that myself . LOL

or my wooden rack.

You could disconnect the linkage from the vacuum solenoid on the tranny and manually engage the shifter linkage on the tranny(right side). Perhaps the linkage isn't travelling far enough to engage the transfer case(last section of the tranny). The dash light is a poor indicator of engagement. My lifted 92 wagon has the 4wd light pop on during sudden acceleration(ie side stepping clutch)

Nice simple design on those gutter clamps. How heavy is it?

Andrew, I live in Belchertown. For any Ma residents interested in lifting the official formula for factory 4 wheel drive vehicles is (wheel trac X wheel base)/2200=max height increase. The factory height is determined by the original door bottom height on vehicles equipetd with doors with the largest tire offered as original equiptment. The lift is for all combinations of tire and lift kit/body lift These are supposed to be enforced by the inspection stations so it's a crap shoot on how tall you go. Since the issue is total height over stock I suppose one could get through inspection by running smaller than stock tires with a lift That said I'd have to guess that every single vehicle in this state running 33" tires is blatantly over height limits even without a lift. I'm going to say screw it and if they beef to much then the registry can have a talk with the National Parks Service, Mass Environmental Police and every other state and federal agency that has "illegal" modifications to their vehicles.

Actualy Brian, ByTheSea refers to Cape Cod and I live in Western Mass now. The ride is a 92 Wagon, D/Rd 225/70/14s on Pugs, 3" BYB and some other stuff.