Great idea? Safe? Death on wheels? Ghetto coilovers.

[donkeychomp]

Not sure if anyone here has done this idea but I bet it HAS been done...

Use a Vitara chassis and running gear and plonk your SJ body on it.

[Anton]

For starters unless you use oil shocks it's kinda asking for trouble welding to a pressurized gas shock body, it could go boom even if nitrogen is inert.

True, I didn't even think about that part! My thinking was more along the lines of - make a set of spring mounts that sit *around* the shocks, and don't actually weld to them at all. Then I thought - coilovers are nice, but are they even necessary? Can't a traditional separate coil/shock setup be done more easily?

At this point, it's all theoreticals. I have an idea in my head for a design where the shock sits inside a spring perch that isn't welded to the shock *at all* - it literally just sits inside. But then again, I have so many conflicting ideas, at the moment I'm just trying to sort out in my head what is and isn't viable.

For example, one idea is to make trailing arm mounts on the axle that rotate, so that when the axle articulates, there's almost no bush compression - allowing for more articulation and better tyre load on the ground (and theoretically more traction). Viable? Dunno. I have a theoretical design in my head. Doesn't mean it's gonna work.

Would be a cool project but it's going to take a shit load of time and effort to design and fabricate it with good geometry.

Yeah, that I agree with completely! I've been looking at a fortrak conversion on hpoc.co.uk, and monstertruckman's hilux conversion, and frankly they're easy to do at first glance. The issue is not fabrication, but getting geometry right so that pinion angles are maintained, rear steer is avoided and so on.

Hopefully parrot, monstertruckman and fingers can help work out the details, as they've all done coil conversions - but I wanna work as much of this out as I can myself. Because I'm a geek like that! So right now I'm in the process of researching...

[dan_2k_uk]

Not sure if anyone here has done this idea but I bet it HAS been done...

Use a Vitara chassis and running gear and plonk your SJ body on it.

Yeah there's a fella just down the road from me with a KJA body on a LWB 16v Vit chassis.

[ektoz]

Bump!!, I have seen a guy putting a threaded sleeve on the rancho shock and a sliding cup on top.
I cannot find it anymore, was very good idea