My Bronco has a severe uneven ride heigh from rear to front.
Hi Rob. Quite a few things you got going on here.
First off, there’s no such thing as “ride height” because ride height can’t be achieved when the vehicle isn’t even assembled yet.
You can’t check anything, verify anything, finalize anything, or fully finish setting up anything, until the vehicle is fully assembled.
So whether you have a problem or not, we don’t know yet. So you shouldn’t worry about it yet.
It is even worse now that I put a 900 pound motor in it.
Probably not actually 900 pounds. But of course it’s not gonna sit anywhere near what you expect when you overweight the front end and underweight the rear end.
So like I said above, there’s nothing that you can check or worry about yet.
I have a 5.5" lift kit (Rancho I believe?)
No such thing. The tallest lift Rancho ever made for an early Bronco was 3 inches.
At least that’s the case since the 80s. Before that, they did have 6 inch lifts for Chevy trucks, and there may have been tall lifts like that for Ford trucks. But it’s been over 40 years since anything like that has come across their product line.
So a 5 1/2 would have to come from one of the other companies. Are there any markings on the springs? Can you show us a better picture of the overall spring? How many leaves are in the pack total?
I don’t actually see a double wrap eye. But I can’t view them well from my phone. Can you take a better picture of the spring eye as it sits in the front hanger and rear shackle?
and I want to make sure the rear leaf springs are installed properly from back to front.
If they have a Military double wrap, then, as was said, the double wrap always goes to the hard mount to the frame.
The factory spring was oriented just as yours are, with the “Berlin Eye” to the front spring hanger.
The part of the spring going towards the front has a downward curve in it before it curves back up into the mount.
That’s the Berlin eye I was referring to. If it’s a single wrap at the other end, then your springs are installed correctly. If it’s a double wrap, however, you should reverse them.
A double wrap is where the eye of the second leaf wraps around the eye of the top leaf.
I've also removed the thick extra spring from the pack in order to lower it a little, but it's still pretty bad.
Having an extra thick leaf makes it sound like a standard pair of springs. Was that thick lower leaf in full contact with the upper leaves throughout its curve? Or were there gaps at the end?
EDIT: I have a 6 degree shim which doesn't help.
No, normally wouldn’t. Shimming can change the angle and effective length of the driveshaft. But not radically affect the height that the springs hold the frame.
Those are for correcting driveshaft angle anyway. Which of course you can’t check and won’t know until the full way to the vehicle is on the body frame and springs.
