Oh boy, after almost a year here we are. I'm thinking about making a whole thread on the absolute process and things that go unspoken when doing this project. It's the home made OSR kit with 7.5 wraps because no other coil spring is long enough. Here are my key takeaways.
1.) it's "easy". Took me and my buddy like 3 hours to bend, cut, weld, and install the hoops. We used the existing circular cross beam as the front point to weld to, then the square opening on the back. Very simple.
2.) it's hard. Cycling the suspension from full droop to full compression and flexing it out both ways brought us nothing but heartache. We were in this position for about 6 hours trying to clear everything, which leads me to the last takeaway.
3.) it sucks. The ugly truth that nobody talks about is that YOU WILL LOSE UP TRAVEL. This is probably the main reason for me doing this. Here are the issues I ran into:
a. I have the pck, and without a bumpstop extension, you WILL smash the top of the axle mounted panhard bar into the frame cross member.
b. with it flexed out, I was hitting the tire into the shock body with over 3" stroke left in the shock and 2" till I contact the stock bump. I could not move the lower mounts even lower, because the 4 link would bind (and yes, i have adjustable control arms). I also couldn't move the relocation kit or the lower mounts anymore inward because the shock body would smash into the frame itself. All of this was done on a 3.5" bs wheel with a 255/85 pizza cutter tire (so not a large tire and proper bs)!
c. You can't even make either side of the kit even. What I mean by this is that if it's flexed out, full droop on the driver and full stuff on passenger, the geometry of the panhard bar will actually pull the axle into the frame more. When it's flexed the opposite way, the panhard makes it to where it pushes the axle away from the frame. This led to me essentially having the shock body contact the frame on passenger when passenger was at full droop and driver did not have 1/4 panel clearance because it was being pushed out of the wheel well. Likewise, when driver was drooped and and passenger at stuff the tire was too tucked and therefore contacting the shock body.
Okay, technical rant over. My conclusion is this. 12" shocks are too much on a stock link platform. 3 link it and I know it will do well. That's way too much time and effort for me though, so I would definetely recommend a 10" shock to retain good uptravel numbers, and not have to deal with the 4 link actually sucking balls. Anyways there ya have it.