I started this post four years ago in the hope of a getting my Bronco back on the road in a reasonable time frame. Shall we say "life threw a few curves" and I still am not done. Now, I am moving and I may not be able to get a trailer to where the new garage is do to snow and crazy alley entry angles that is combined with sharp curved sloping driveway. So, now I am working on the Bronco as much as I can with the hope that I can drive it to the new location. With work, weather, and the holidays, time is in short supply. I have to be moved out by January 23rd. However, I have nothing to lose by trying. I will take the occasionally break and post updates. The big things left to do is finish the EFI conversion and serpentine setup.
First update is shocking the suspension. After calls to numerous places on the Bilstein shocks, most said that due to the weight of my Bronco combined with other factors was that I should still double shock the front end (with reservoir shocks). With the cost of that I decided to go with the Duff shocks instead of the Bilsteins. I have always run soft valve shocks, first the Rancho soft valve 5000s and then the last many years the Doetch Tech MV 12s. My Bronco rode and handled very well with this setup, but suspension travel was limited do to shock size. Fast forward to this past year.....I had already welded up the WH Extreme front shock hoops and had the Shock jock rear setup to weld in. I measured the front for suspension travel and discovered that if I swapped out the 4 1/2" bump stop I had with a 2 1/2" one on a metal spacer (still 4 1/2" tall, but less compression length), I could run the same size Duff shock up front in both mounts. The plus is that I gained several inches in drop and with only limiting the up travel less than an inch with built in safety margins. Even though the rear shock in the front looks like it may bottom out, it won't with the bump stop. This is because I run the stock radius arms, the shock length even out on up travel. For the rear shock mounts, I got the hole spacing on the upper mount that Duff uses on their rear shock mounts and modified my WH mounts to use the Duff shock lengths, thus the extra hole in the WH mounts. This allows both rear shocks to be the same length, all 8 shocks on my Bronco are the same length.