spring hangers

Starting making spring hangers for a Wrangler spring conversion. Welded up some 1/4" thick angle for starters. Gonna shape it and box as much as poss without intereferring with spring travel. Gonna use a goofy leaf set up in the back. Question is, if I do the shackle reveresal up front, where do I want that spring eye to be versus where the current stock, front shackled spring eye is? Roughly the same distance down from the frame rail ? Or can I narrow that distance, putting the new spring eye say, where the top of the existing shackle is, without fowling up the front pinion angle too much. Def. don't want to go farther down from the frame and have a snaggle toothe frame. She'll be off road only so I'm not real concerned with handling, etc. Follow me or is am I muddin up the water.

 

You can raise it up and gain some caster which would be good for handling, but it would hurt your pinion angle. To keep things as they are you would need to mimic the current spring mounts. If you ditch the goofy leafs and mount the shackle through the frame you can tuck the front up higher without compromising the pinion. If you use a frontend out of vehicle that all ready had a shackle reversal and springover then you could tuck the front mounts up against the frame. Thats what I did, used a chevy front end.

Otherwise you'll gain a lot of lift by having the front mounts down so far and the shackle under the frame.

You could mock up your suspension ideas and use a yard stick or something to get an idea of the change in angle on your springs from old to new setup. Then add the change in degrees to your pinion angle and see how bad it could possibly be.

Hope some of that helped.

Kevo

 

Sounds simple enough. Goofy leaf is going on the rear springs, not the rear end of the front spring so, yea, the shackle at the back of the front spring will go thru the frame. Which leads to another q, where should I drill that hole. I figure I should keep it as close to the bottom of the rail as possible. This area will be boxed and a sleeve welded in for the shackle bolt to go thru.
Just hope she sits pretty level when I'm done. Neat thing about metal is, if it don't werk, you can always cut 'er apart and start over.