DAY 3
EXTREME BUILDUP 2000 Project 1
RickRock's 1976 Scout II

First we cut the old perches off the driver side of the housing. With die-grinder in hand we cut the old perch off, but as shown in the pictures, this left two large ruts in the axle tubes. Since these cuts could weaken the axle tube itself, we needed to fill these ruts. To do this we used our trusty welder and filled the cuts. Then we sanded them down with a 7” grinder with 26 grit paper. The result is a clean looking housing. So clean, in fact, that you can't even tell anything was there to begin with.

Next the focus turned to the passenger side perch. This is perhaps one of the hardest parts of the SOA. The stock perch is molded into the actual pumpkin housing, since we wanted to locate the spring on the opposite side of the original, we had to grind in a new perch. Here are some photos of what the housing looks like after being ground down. Be extremely careful, if you take off to much you can actually puncture through the housing and ruin your hole axle.

The next step is the second hardest part of the conversion - cut and twisted the knuckles. Scouts came with 0 degrees of caster (except for the 1980 SII) and when you lift your rig higher than 3” it naturally becomes harder to keep it on the road. The caster measurement is what keeps your wheel tracking straight. Negative caster is your friend here, the more you give - the more stable you are on the road. The less you give (or if you have positive caster) your rig will become horribly unpredictable on the road and almost impossible to drive. The goal for us is to achieve about 3 degrees of negative caster. Since we are going to rotate the housing so that the output shaft will point more toward the transfer case, we actually had to rotate our knuckles about 10 degrees or so. Here are a few pictures to illustrate what we mean, there are two yellow dots added to illustrate how much twist we actually gave to the axle.

Now we are ready to rebuild the axles themselves. After the old gears, bearings, seals, etc are removed we pressure washed the housing itself and cleaned all the ‘gunk’ out of the tubes. The axles originally had 3.73 gears to begin with, those with the 27” tires gave us about 2900 rpm’s at 60 mph. RickRock liked that rpm/speed ratio so we set out to keep the high rpm’s, but this time we are running new 33x12.50 tires BGF Mud Terrains. This meant we had to go to Dana splicer 4.56 gears. Here are some pictures of the installation.

Well, the front axle is about done. All we need now is reassemble the knuckles, reinstall the brakes, create the new shock mounts and install it under the springs.

PLANS | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7 | Day 8 | Day 9 | Day 10