Axle Swap

After I finished the axle swap, I made a depressing discovery.  The front axle is reverse rotation from a standard axle.  That means when I engaged my Atlas 2 transfer case and put the truck in 'drive', it would turn the tires backwards while the rear axle was wanting to go forward.  I think the problem is fairly obvious, and I needed to swap the front axle.  I really wanted to keep the Gwagen axles, but put them for sale to finance the swap.  The buyer really wanted to buy the rear as well, and I sold the set rather than miss a sale.  I am putting a Ford 9" in the rear, and a Dana 44 up front.  Both will be built up for heavy trail use.  The one good thing is that they are almost identical in width to the stock axles.

Here is the Ford 9".  You can see the new housing and the drum brakes we rebuilt.  I want to go to disc brakes down the road, but I'm saving the $600 for now.  This axle with have the 35 spine Detroit locker, 4.56 gears, and custom Mosser half shafts.

This is the Dana 44 for the front.  It has the matching 4.56 gears and Detroit as the rear.  It has Warn premium hubs and I will build it up with CTM Super U-Joints and Warn HD half shafts when I can afford them.

The Ford 9" is sitting in place for figuring out the brackets for springs, shocks and the track arm. (panhard bar) 

The front is getting there.  We originally planned to reuse the stock track arm, but it ended up not working with the new axle.  It is in the picture here.

Getting close!  Both axles are tacked in place and all the brackets are made.  You can see the stock track rod is no longer in the picture, we'll make up a new one using.  The G is sitting on the springs and the jack stands are at the right height for a set of 35" tires.  So that's the final ride height.  It's about 1.5" more than it was, or about 4.5 - 5" over stock (plus tires) so it should visually look much larger than the average G-Wagen.

The axles are pretty much done.  On the back we cut down a replacement upper mount.  This has the same effect of extending the bumpstops as well.

It's hard to see, but we also extended the bumpstops on the front.  Another interesting thing is that we bolted the front and rear lower spring plates in place instead of welding them.  This allows me to easily add spacers to level the ride or add more lift.

The new axles are standard and the old ones were metric.  No big deal, I just sent the brake lines to be converted on one end to work with the new axles.

Here's the new line with a banjo fitting.

And here is the finished product.  Most people would never be able to tell I had even changed anything!

Well, except for the fact that I might be the only Gwagen in the world with hubs...