lets hear it! Always ready for the insight.
Ill be pulling the front sway bar. Took it off both my other rigs and never thought twice about it.
did you install the 5th gen. Fox kit on the 4th gen? Im understanding that the reservoir bracket will require some modding. Aside from that, should be the same for the fronts.
please- feel free to post up some pics of what you encountered.
Removing your sway bar eliminates one of the problems. The lower spring perches of those coilovers DO interfere with the front sway bar. Even with the sway bar mounting relocation brackets. Specifically the threaded stud of the end link which protrudes inward at each end of the bar. I opted to keep my sway bar and worked around it by doing the following. I bent the sway bar ends out by 5/8" from end to end for more clearance at each end. Added a split collar between the driver's side sway bar locating collar and the sway bar mount to keep the sway bar from sliding laterally in the mounts. Basically locking the position of the bar from left to right. And I ground the sway bar end link studs flush with the nuts.
My kit was ordered for the 4th Gen, however I believe the part numbers are identical for both 4th and 5th gen application of these coilovers. I can tell you that they look identical from the photo. Even the reservoir mounting brackets.
I had to enlarge one of the side holes on the driver's side reservoir bracket to get the bolt to pass through into the correct frame hole. Those bolts included for mounting the reservoir brackets will self-thread into the frame holes if you put them in with an impact gun.
I gather by looking at the pics that the previous owner may have encountered this next thing as well. Notice that there is finish damage at the adjustment holes on the pre-load collar and that one of them is adjusted further down than the other. It may be different in your case, but I'll tell you that spinning those collars to adjust the coilover height was an absolute *****. The tolerance between the threads on the shock body and the preload collar is extremely tight. In fact, I'd wager that the tolerances on the collar did not take into account surface build-up from the anodizing operation, and the resulting fit is much tighter than it should be.
One of the coilovers was MUCH more difficult to adjust than the other, and required that we put a set of spring compressors on to reduce friction in the threads. The spring compressor lugs also had to be ground down so that they'd fit between the relatively narrow coil spacing of the Fox spring. We used a LOT of anti-seize and a LOT of elbow grease to get mine adjusted. We backed the collar almost all the way up on the one side so that we could get good anti-seize coverage on the threads before really reefing on it to adjust back downward.
Mid way through, we learned a valuable lesson about which spanner hole to use when trying to adjust the pre-load collar. It's very important which spanner hole you engage on the collar, depending on which way you're trying to spin it. Depending on which side of the collar opening you're on, and which way you're trying to spin it, the action of the spanner pin will either be trying to "pry open" the collar, or "push closed" the collar around the shock body. You want to spin from the hole that will "open" the collar gap and reduce thread friction. This made a HUGE difference. It's a bit difficult to convey in words, and if you've adjusted coilovers like this before you may have discovered it on your own, but I can try to elaborate more if you want.
Placement/orientation of the reservoirs in those mounting brackets wasn't immediately obvious and I toyed around with it a bit before settling on clamping them where they're currently at on my rig. The hoses are also VERY stiff and manipulating the reservoir after mounting the coilover isn't the easiest thing, so that doesn't help. I can get a picture for you.
Other than that stuff it's pretty straight forward.