The first step was to bench assemble the shock absorbers. This was fun and easy. They are nice ones, an upgrade from the standard package that Hurricane threw in for me. They are fully adjustable with a little knob at the bottom to control how soft you want the handling. Here is a picture of the kit and the finished product:
Next, I moved the rear end roughly into position in the frame, jacked it up and connected the two trailing arms and 3rd link which hold the rear end to the frame. The trailing arms control how far back the rear end sits, the 3rd link controls how high or low it sits, and a panhard bar controls how far left and right it sits. The Hurricane uses "heim joints" which are very strong. They also let you finely adjust these by short twists on the brass bars between the heim joints. Here are a couple of pictures: the first is of the heim joint holding the trailing arm, the second the panhard bar.
These are some very thick bolts. They have to be tightened to 120 foot-pounds of torque. Basically, this means you pull as hard as you can until you fart. Or you use a big torque wrench to measure this accurately. Along the way, I found that the spacers put in the mount needed to be ground down a little bit and de-burred. For this I got to use my die grinder to take off about 1/20th of an inch or so. In hindsight, it may not have been too great an idea to mount my vise in the laundry room work area since most of the sparks created by the grinding either shot towards my laundry or my gas water heater. Oh well, no fire this time.
Next I installed the shock absorbers. That went okay too, but did not fix my misalignment problem. In fact it pretty well sealed my fate, that I was going to have to undo all of this work and fix it. The shocks were at about 13 degrees difference in angle and were easily a noticeable flaw even to a naked eye. So off to Harbor Freight to buy a breaker bar, which is a huge wrench used to loosen bolts that are tightened as much as these suspension pieces were.
That chore went fairly well. I loosened one bolt on each of the links and the panhard bar, and the rear end dropped enough to move it by hand to the appropriate spot. In the end, I am within about 1/16th of an inch from the same height and distance from the frame. In other words, the rear end is now spot on. Here are some pictures of it finished.
The next step is to work on the front suspension. Two more shocks to build, and this time I had a little motherly help.
