7a. We wrapped the chrome bodies of our shocks with shop rags during the installation phase to keep them from getting scratched. | 
7b. After we had tack-welded the mounts in place, we removed the shocks and installed a spacer in the mounts to keep them from moving while we finished welding. | 
8a. Here is what the completed rear suspension looks like with all the parts in place. Note that this truck will be towed to an alignment shop before it sees the road, and that's why there aren't any jamb nuts installed on the rod ends at this time. The control arms will have to be unbolted several times during the alignment procedure, so there was no sense in installing the nuts just yet. |
8b. The upper control arm rod ends will be used to adjust the camber and, to a small degree, the caster setting of the rear suspension. We built the rear tie rods from 1-inch od by 0.250-inch wall chrome-moly tubing. The tubing was tapped with standard threads on one end and reverse threads on the other to make setting the toe-in and toe-out of the rear suspension a snap. Just rotate the bar in either direction, set the jamb nuts, and it's done. | 
9. Before we installed our Boyd Coddington wheel and Nitto tire package, we first reinstalled the stock 13-inch Ford Expedition rear brakes. You might notice that these are the original six-lug rotors that we welded and re-drilled with a 5x5-inch lugpattern. | 
10. Moving forward to the front suspension of the truck, you'll notice that we've replaced the upper control arms that were originally on our Scott's Hot Rods IFS. The reason for doing so is because we needed the suspension to have more travel than typically found with Scott's arms. The limiting factor isn't so much the arms as it is the ball joints. The upper ball joints that come with Scott's arms will pivot 17 degrees, which translated into 8 inches of travel with our chassis. We needed 12 inches of travel to give the truck enough lift to uncover the 22-inch wheel and tire package and make a U-turn. Replacing the upper ball joints with spherical bearings mounted at a different angle would help, but converting the stock arms would be more work than simply building new arms. Our new front arms were built exactly like the rears, and we widened the design to give us more room to mount the airbags. Again, we used spherical bearings with a high misalignment spacer to increase the amount of pivot offered by the bearings. We retained the Scott's Hot Rods lower arms because they worked just fine. |
11. The lower arms come with a lower shock mounting bung welded to the rear of the tubing. We wanted to mount our shocks in front of the arms to avoid any clearance issues with the steering linkage, so we made another set of bungs and welded them to the front of the arms. We also built our upper 'bag mounts at this time and welded them to the framerails. Scott's offers its own 'bag mounts that will work great in an application where extreme amount of travel is not needed. | 
12. Our upper shock mounts were bent from 1-1/2 od by 0.120-inch wall chrome-moly tubing that attached to the framerail behind the radiator core support and to a plate we welded at the top of the upper 'bag mounts. The Fox dampers look right at home, and the tubular mounts offered a great mounting location for the reservoirs. | 
13. We are really starting to make progress now. As you can see, we've installed our power steering rack onto the front crossmember. We got the rack from Scott's Hot Rods as part of the IFS package, and it's a rack that is commonly found on older Ford Thunderbirds. |