Part 3 - Tuff Country Long Travel Suspension

Going back to 2009 I remember seeing an article in

4Wheel & Offroad magazine on Tuff Country's new Long Travel Suspension. This kit provides a wider track stands and gives you over 13 inches of wheel travel. At that time I was pumped about that kit in how wicked that would look on our 04 F150. Here we are 4 years later and we're now going for it. So we called our good friends up at  

TUFF COUNTRY Suspensions and before we could even finish our conversation they were on board and wanted to be apart of the Cap-it Prerunner F150 project. Days later the L/T kit is at our Cap-it Warehouse. 

 

First off all the fiberglass fenders that we mocked up earlier had to be removed to give us more working room on the front of the truck. We also removed the front suspension earlier so we can mount this kit right up. 

As you can see there's a huge difference between the stock upper and lower control arms. The overall track width from the new setup will give us about 4 inches per side. That's a total of 8 inches in just changing out the suspension.

First things first, we have to cut a 5" hole in the stock strut tower bucket. The reason for this is so that our coil-over shock can be mounted through it. 

The kit provides a steel template that needs to be centered on the top of the strut bucket. 

Clamp it in place and drill 6 - 3/8" holes. These holes are for the coilover shock bracket that'll be installed shortly. 

 

 To cut the hole in the strut bucket it says to use a 5" holesaw and after 2 attempts at that there was no way that was going to happen unless you want a couple of broken fingers. So it's time to break out the plasma cutter. I used my $30 holesaw as a template instead, clamped it in place and started cutting. 

Here's what it looks like after the cut and how much was was removed.

 

Afterwords we took the die grinder to smooth out the hole.  

Since I was having so much fun with the plasma I wanted to cut more stuff up. So off comes the front bumper brackets.

 Yah gotta like having the right tools for the right job.

Nice clean cuts. The sparks are cool also.

Next comes installing the lower control arms with a new ball joint pressed (now's the time to do this since we have it all apart) and the upper a-arms to make sure everything fits.

 

Now for stock steering knuckle. We have to drill the upper tapper hole out to 1". This will allow us to install the massive heavy-duty heim joint that's needed.

I'll throw up a new post here within a few days as we're going to paint and mount everything up.